Tobacco Regulation Is Expected to Face a Free-Speech Challenge

The New York Times – The marketing and advertising restrictions in the tobacco law that Congress passed last week are likely to be challenged in court on free-speech grounds. But supporters of the legislation say they drafted the law carefully to comply with the First Amendment.

The law’s ban on outdoor advertising within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds would effectively outlaw legal advertising in many cities, critics of the prohibition said. And restricting stores and many forms of print advertising to black-and-white text, as the law specifies, would interfere with legitimate communication to adults, tobacco companies and advertising groups said in letters to Congress and interviews over the last week.

The controversy, legal experts say, involves tension between the right of tobacco companies to communicate with adult smokers and the public interest in preventing young people from smoking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/business/16tobacco.html

Opponents of the new strictures, including the Association of National Advertisers and the American Civil Liberties Union, predict that federal courts will throw out the new marketing restrictions. They say, for example, a 2001 Supreme Court decision struck down a Massachusetts rule that had imposed a similar ban on advertising within 1,000 feet of schools.

Amazon Error Removes Gay, Health Books From Search

The Wall Street Journal – Amazon.com Inc. said an internal cataloging glitch inadvertently removed more than 57,000 books from its sales rankings and main search page.

The Seattle company was hit by criticism in recent days from the authors of affected books, mainly those focusing on gay themes. But Amazon said the problem was global, and affected other categories such as health, mind and body, reproductive and sexual medicine and erotica.

“This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection,” wrote Drew Herdener, Amazon’s director of communications, in an email.

Amazon declined to explain its cataloging process or what had gone wrong with it.

“Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future,” added Mr. Herdener.

Books by E.M. Forster and Gore Vidal were among those with gay themes whose rankings had been missing but were later restored. Books whose rankings were still missing included a lesbian love story by Sylvia Brownrigg and a biography of Ellen DeGeneres by Lisa Iannucci.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123964842562214381.html

A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors

Songs about a mythical alpaca-like creature have taken hold online in China.

The New York Times – BEIJING — Since its first unheralded appearance in January on a Chinese Web page, the grass-mud horse has become nothing less than a phenomenon.

A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4 million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter million more views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more. Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese intellectuals are writing treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social importance. The story of the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the evil river crab has spread far and wide across the Chinese online community.

Not bad for a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, sounds very much like an especially vile obscenity. Which is precisely the point.

The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.

It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.

Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, hunting for words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory or seditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can be blocked within minutes.

Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors Chinese Web sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud horse “has become an icon of resistance to censorship.”

“The expression and cartoon videos may seem like a juvenile response to an unreasonable rule,” he wrote. “But the fact that the vast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars to usually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows how strongly this expression resonates.”

Wang Xiaofeng, a journalist and blogger based in Beijing, said in an interview that the little animal neatly illustrates the futility of censorship. “When people have emotions or feelings they want to express, they need a space or channel,” he said. “It is like a water flow — if you block one direction, it flows to other directions, or overflows. There’s got to be an outlet.”

China’s online population has always endured censorship, but the oversight increased markedly in December, after a pro-democracy movement led by highly regarded intellectuals, Charter 08, released an online petition calling for an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

Shortly afterward, government censors began a campaign, ostensibly against Internet pornography and other forms of deviance. By mid-February, the government effort had shut down more than 1,900 Web sites and 250 blogs — not only overtly pornographic sites, but also online discussion forums, instant-message groups and even cellphone text messages in which political and other sensitive issues were broached.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html

Student newspaper in Faribault (MN) goes to Web to avoid censorship

FARIBAULT — About a month after the Faribault High School student newspaper was shut down by the district’s superintendent, student journalists are taking their stories to the Internet.

The owner of a company that creates websites for student publications is offering student editors of the Echo a free site.

“We wanted to make sure they had a chance to keep publishing,” said Jason Wallestad, owner of School Newspapers Online. “Our goal is to help student journalism as much as we can.”

Superintendent Bob Stepaniak stopped the paper from being printed Dec. 14 after student editors refused to let him see an article before publication about the investigation into a middle-school teacher.

The website, truthwithecho.com, is under development and will likely have its name changed, Echo editor Christen Hildebrandt said. It will cover school news and events, but won’t have any association with the district or use any of its resources, he said.

Hildebrandt said the website will be updated more frequently than the newspaper — the Echo was published monthly. In addition, it will include creative writing, columns and photography.

Because the website isn’t funded by the district, administrators have no control over content.

Stepaniak said he wasn’t surprised a website was created.

“It’s well within their right,” he said. “Any group of students could put together a website like that. That’s the way life is in this electronic age.”

Kelly Zwagerman, a teacher at the high school and adviser for the Echo, will help the students outside of her school duties. The site, she said, will be run by the students and her role will be minimal — she’ll attend meetings and edit stories or offer guidelines for ethics.http://www.startribune.com/local/37393754.html

China Criticizes Google and Others on Pornography

HONG KONG — The Chinese government broadened its recent effort to limit pornography on the Internet by criticizing 19 Internet companies by name on Monday, including the two market leaders in China, Google and Baidu.

A statement posted on a government-run news site said the Ministry of Public Security and six other government agencies would work together “to purify the Internet’s cultural environment and protect the healthy development of minors.” A similar statement had been issued on Dec. 5, but attracted little attention.

Monday’s statement went a step further in saying that 19 companies had failed to do enough to stop the spread of pornography. Early Monday evening, the names of the companies were also posted on the same official Web site, along with a terse statement of why each company was on the list.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/world/asia/06pornography.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Skype spies on users for Chinese government

The Wall Street Journal – The revelation that a Skype joint venture in China has been monitoring its users’ communications is adding impetus to an industrywide effort to establish an international human-rights code of conduct for Internet companies.
China Journal

Canadian researchers reported Wednesday on an investigation of TOM-Skype — a China-based version of the Internet-based phone-and-messaging service — which is run by a joint venture of the Skype unit of eBay Inc. and TOM Online, a unit of Hong Kong-based TOM Group Ltd. Probing unsecured servers run by the joint venture, researchers said they found evidence of a system that monitored users’ text chats, kept track of who participated in voice calls and stored messages that contain politically sensitive content.

Jennifer Caukin, a spokeswoman for Skype, said practices related to a text filter that blocked certain words in chat messages had been changed “without our knowledge or consent and we are extremely concerned. We deeply apologize for the breach of privacy on TOM’s servers in China and we are urgently addressing this situation with TOM.”

The report was published by the Information Warfare Monitor and by the OpenNet Initiative-Asia, groups that promote Internet freedom. The groups said Chinese authorities may use the system to track users but offered no evidence of government involvement.

Foreign researchers, rights activists and others say China operates one of the world’s most extensive efforts to censor and monitor information on the Internet.
[Skype's China Practices Draw Ire]

Some Chinese users believe Skype, which advertises itself as having encryption to “protect users from unauthorized eavesdropping,” is safe from government monitoring, and it has been widely used by dissidents. TOM-Skype has 69 million registered users.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122291621892397279.html

White House Finds New Way to Censor Bad News – Just Don’t Open Your Mail

The New York Times – The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/washington/25epa.html?ex=1372132800&en=b1495bebcccefc51&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

4,000 U.S. Soldiers Dead, But Only A Handful of Images

The New York Times – BAGHDAD — The case of a freelance photographer in Iraq who was barred from covering the Marines after he posted photos on the Internet of several of them dead has underscored what some journalists say is a growing effort by the American military to control graphic images from the war.If the conflict in Vietnam was notable for open access given to journalists — too much, many critics said, as the war played out nightly in bloody newscasts — the Iraq war may mark an opposite extreme: after five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiershttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/world/middleeast/26censor.html?ex=1374811200&en=9903da4b22e064a4&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Chinese Bloggers Score a Victory Against the Government

WSJ – July 5,6 – HONG KONG — Chinese authorities announced that four Communist Party, local government and security officials in Guizhou province’s Weng’an county were sacked for “severe malfeasance” over the alleged coverup of a murder, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

Initially, police said high-school student Li Shufen drowned, angering people who believe she was raped and murdered, perhaps by children of local officials. Even on Wednesday, the provincial party chief, Shi Zongyuan, had brushed off protests over the incident — protests that Xinhua said involved some 30,000 people — as being “used and incited by very few people with ulterior motives.” But with the announcement of the firings on Friday, he said the local officials’ “rude and rough-handed solutions” in dealing with local issues had caused the riot, according to Xinhua.

That change in stance appears to be a direct result of pressure brought by journalists and Chinese bloggers such as Zhou Shuguang, a self-styled “personal news station,” who didn’t allow the issue to drop, posting to the Internet unofficial reports along with photos and pleas from the family of the dead youth. When mainstream Chinese Web sites began deleting posts on the issue, some bloggers turned to technical workarounds, including writing their posts backwards and reposting material that had been taken down elsewhere.

Friday’s apparent change of heart is the latest sign authorities are aware that old approaches to controlling information aren’t working. Even earlier, authorities tried to get out in front of the story: In Weng’an, local officials held a news conference less than two days after the riot to give their version of events. And Xinhua also covered the riot almost immediately, in contrast to past practices of waiting days before reporting such events.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121521562007829595.html?mod=hps_us_whats_news

Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech

The New York Times – VANCOUVER, British Columbia — A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine, Maclean’s, Canada’s leading newsweekly, violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up hatred against Muslims. They say the magazine should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their “dignity, feelings and self-respect.”

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions here last week, will soon rule on whether Maclean’s violated the law. As spectators lined up for the afternoon session last week, an argument broke out.

“It’s hate speech!” yelled one man.

“It’s free speech!” yelled another.

In the United States, that debate has been settled. Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minorities and religions — even false, provocative or hateful things — without legal consequence.

The Maclean’s article, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” was an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn called “America Alone” (Regnery, 2006). The title was fitting: The United States, in its treatment of hate speech, as in so many other areas of the law, takes a distinctive legal path.

“In much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at one’s legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk, and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment,” Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called “The Exceptional First Amendment.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/us/12hate.html?ex=1371009600&en=1abb7d5a5edd92b0&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink