Many people have been arrested for recording public arrests, and many others have had their cameras confiscated, and that's here in American where we have the First Amendment. At Gigaom, Matthew Ingram takes a look at this problem and concludes that the freedom of the press applies to everyone, even bloggers:
University of Pennsylvania law professor Seth Kreimer, who has written a research paper about the right of citizens to record public events under the First Amendment, told Reason magazine that rulings by three separate federal appeals courts have upheld that right. And one recent appeals court decision specifically referred to the fact that the ability to take photos, video and audio recordings with mobile devices has effectively made everyone a journalist — in practice, if not in name — and therefore deserving of protection.
Ingram's article cites to another well-written article, this one by Rodney Balko, titled, "The War on Cameras." Balko's article discusses the right to privacy of police. Here's an excerpt:
University of Pennsylvania law professor Seth Kreimer, author of a 2010 paper in the Pennsylvania Law Review about the right to record, says such legal vagueness is a problem. Citing decisions by three federal appeals courts, Kreimer says the First Amendment includes the right to record public events. “The First Amendment doesn’t allow for unbridled discretion” by police, he says, “and it’s particularly concerned with clear rules when free speech rights are at stake. Even if there is a privacy interest here, people have to know when they’re going to be subject to prosecution.”
Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks today started to publish more than five million confidential emails from the global intelligence company Stratfor. . . . Among the allegations to emerge is that Stratfor's claim to be a media organisation providing a subscription intelligence newsletter is a front for 'running paid informants networks' and 'laundering those payments through the Bahamas, through Switzerland, through private credit cards'.
Stratfor 'is monitoring Bhopal activists for Dow Chemicals, Peta activities for Coca-Cola', WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed at a press conference in London today. However, what could cause the greatest embarrassment for the U.S. government is his suggestion that information is also being gathered by paying contacts from agencies including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.
It appears, then, that a for-profit enterprise engaged secret shady dealing is being exposed by the non-profit Wikileaks, whose mission is to make harmful information public. Many more stories are expected to emerge based on the release of five million emails from the private intelligence firm, Stratfor. Until today, I had never heard about Stratfor. That's about to change, big time, based on the Wikileaks releases. The suggestions that Stratfor has numerous ties to paid U.S. government sources is extremely troubling. We'll see what happens to those profiteers. As I recall, Bradley Manning never made a penny when he released U.S. cables, but he has been imprisoned ever since, and often tortured by the U.S. government.
Electronic Frontier Foundation has a detailed article advising you of your (lack of) rights when you enter and leave the United States (this applies to citizens and non-citizens). Here is some basic advice, but check out the article for lots of good advice regarding encryption, use of clouds, backups and other advice, much of it useful even when you are not traveling:
Border agents have a great deal of discretion to perform searches and make determinations of admissibility at the border. Keep in mind that any traveler, regardless of citizenship status or behavior, can be temporarily detained by border agents for more detailed questioning, a physical search of possessions, or a more extensive physical search. Refusal to cooperate with searches, answer questions, or turn over passwords to let agents access or decrypt data may cause lengthy questioning, seizure of devices for further examination, or, in extreme circumstance, prevent admission to the country. For this reason, it may be best to protect your data in ways that don’t require you to have awkward confrontations with border agents at all.
It seems to me that, by a wide margin, most statements uttered by most people are inaccurate or downright untrue. Most of these problems result from sloppy fact-finding and sloppy reasoning; they are not the result of people intentionally misleading each other. This problem with inaccurate and false statements is even more common in the political arena, and they are also more dangerous because political lies and coverups damage our democracy. They cause us to waste time and resources on many small things and some huge things like needless wars. Falsehoods pour out of politicians mouths like water gushing out of fire hydrants. It has gotten so bad that many of us fear that our democracy is at risk. What else could one reasonably conclude when less than 10% of Americans approve of the work of Congress. But these untruths, the falsehoods, the lies and the coverups continue unabated. I'd like to discuss two of reasons for this sad situation (I'm sure there are other reasons too):
1. The confirmation bias. When political or financial motivation exists (and it almost always exists), human animals notice, say and believe the things they are motivated to notice, say and believe. The confirmation is invisible to us; we are aghast when others call us "biased" (See Jonathan Haidt's discussion of the invisibility of the confirmation bias here). We only see bias and selective perception in other people. We constantly deny that our own perception of the "facts" is warped by our motivations, including our financial motivations. We are convinced that the lies we want to believe are truths and that our coverups are not coverups. Actually, we don't see the coverups that benefit us as coverups. Rather, we see accusations that we are covering-up the facts as annoyances. We deny these requests for purposes of expediency and we declare inconvenient things to be "irrelevant."
2. It is much easier to lie (or to palter) than to take the time to determine the truth. I don't know how to quantify the extent of this problem, but I'll take a wild guess: On average, it takes 500 times more work to expose a lie or coverup than to tell a lie and cause a coverup. It's a lot like the physical world. It takes a lot longer to build a house than to destroy a house. Whatever the exact number, we ought to give this lopsided Ratio a name, because it is a phenomenally important factor to consider in our need to fight for policies to encourage open government. Perhaps it could be called the Lie-Truth-Cost-Ratio. This lopsided Ratio gives untruthful people (liars, obfuscators and those who are reckless with the truth) huge advantages, given that time and money are such precious resources. In the time it takes to write one accurate and detailed report regarding a serious policy issue, untruthful people can issue hundreds or thousands of untruthful statements on the same topic.
In the political realm, is the solution investigative journalism? Probably not, because investigative journalism is dying; to do it right costs lots of money. Further modern media outlets often resist free-wheeling investigative journalism because the corporate media is in the position to foot the bill for investigative journalism, yet the results of such journalism too often embarrass advertisers and business relationships connected to media enterprises (only six corporations own and control most of the media in America).
Citizens can also function as journalists too. Can we depend on private citizens to fill the void? Unlikely. Who is willing to give up significant time with their family or time to take a walk or time to watch a movie in order to do the painstaking research to expose liars, even when those lies cause massive waste of desperately needed public funds? Because we are human animals, we live in a distracting world where fatigue is a reality--we crave eating, exercising, sleeping and entertainment, and none of these enjoyable activities is long-term compatible with hunching over a computer keyboard or analyzing big piles of abstruse documents in order to expose corporate or political lies. Who do you know who is willing to do any of these things in his or her spare time? Do you even know anyone who has an adequate skill-set for doing this type of work? Who do you know who would be willing to spend even $100 of his or her money to obtain records, even where there is a good chance that those records would expose government or corporate wrong-doing? We are sometimes fortunate that public interest groups gather a critical mass of people, money and energy to investigate complex political issues, but their funding is often no match for the funds spent (and the number of untruths told) by corporate and government players, who are highly motivated to make issues complex in order to make them impenetrable. It is important to keep in mind that making a political or corporate system needlessly complex (2,000 page bills, anyone?) are a highly effective way of hiding the truth.
Further, there are so many lies out there that they cannot all be investigated. I'll make another highly speculative guess: Only 5% of important political claims are investigated by any journalist or public interest group to any meaningful degree. That is largely due to the power of the Lie-Truth-Cost-Ratio.
Here's a real-life example: the current controversy regarding proposed Keystone XL pipeline. I'll set aside, for now, the environmental concerns that are often dismissed or underplayed by the corporate players and the alleged news media. Instead, I'll look simply at the alleged quid pro quo regarding those who have been pushing for the project. The Koch brothers have indicated that they have no financial stake in the XL pipeline.
In the real world, these sorts of claims appear in newspaper headlines, and they are declared be the "news." In a perfect world, these claims would be meaningfully investigated before being reported. But investigating each of these sorts of claims would require highly motivated people (including journalists at the U.K. Guardian) countless hours, because the truth regarding complex matters like this can only be determined by reviewing hundreds of convoluted documents. Robert Greenwald has produced the following 2-minute video announcing his own suspicions:
[More . . . ]
At Salon, Justin Elliot documents the evidence demonstrating that the secrecy system of the United States is out of control. His article describes unfulfilled Freedom of Information requests that are more than a decade old.
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