Tomorrow, in her planned speech at the Newseum, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has the opportunity to explain what the Administration's previously stated commitments to Internet freedom mean in practice. Here are three immediate actions she could announce that would make clear that protecting freedom of expression on the Internet is a priority for the United States government:

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From the Restore Fairness blog.

A New York Times article has revealed scathing information about grave abuses of power by immigration officials desperate to conceal the deaths and mistreatment of immigrants in detention. This includes covering up evidence of gross mistreatment, undercounting the number of detention deaths, discharging patients right before they die, and major efforts to avoid scrutiny from the news media.

The article states,

Behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

In one case, it was found jail personnel had made a fake entry to show painkiller medication had been given to an inmate, when in actuality the log showed that the drug had been administered once the inmate had died, driven to suicide by unbearable pain. In another case, officials justified an inmates lengthy detention despite his poor medical condition by mischaracterizing his criminal record.

Perhaps the most shocking example is that of Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who suffered a head injury and was put into solitary confinement for 12 hours before an ambulance was called.The article says,

“In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, ‘Help they are killing me!’”

The video, shot by detention officials as a policy when force is used on a detainee, was obtained along with thousands of documents on the 107 deaths in immigration custody, through Freedom of Information Acts filed by the New York Times and the ACLU. These documents clearly show how Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have covered up examples of abuse and neglect, withheld important information regarding detainee abuse and deaths, and desperately tried to deflect media scrutiny.

Bah’s story was the basis for our End Homeland Guantamos campaign, where visitors assume the role of an undercover journalist doing an investigative series on what actually happened to Boubacar Bah.

Many, including the news media, advocacy groups and Members of Congress have been calling for reform in the immigration detention system. And while the Obama Administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, it seems somewhat meaningless unless there is a shift in the way the agency operates – away from an environment of secrecy to one government by enforceable standards and oversight. But the administration has rejected the idea of standards, arguing that “rule-making would be laborious, time-consuming and less flexible” than its own overhaul.

That’s why we need real public pressure. STOP THE SENSELESS DEATHS NOW by urging your Congressional members to support Rep. Luis Gutierrez’s Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Security and Prosperity Act of 2009 (CIR ASAP) which provides secure alternatives and the codification of standards to ensure humane detention conditions.

Along with the 1996 Telecom Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was one of the worst legacies of the Clinton years. Unlike the Defense of Marriage Act or the faux Welfare Reform Act, both the Telecom Act and the DMCA pretended to be forward looking bills that would usher us into a more prosperous 21st Century.

Rotten at the root, the DMCA continues to bear poison fruit. The latest is the ruling by the infotainment industrial complex' favorite judge Marylin Patel (the judge who killed Napster and inadvertantly the music industry in 2000) to ban Real DVD -- an innocuous technology that allows consumers to make personal copies of the DVDs they have purchased.

From PC World:

RealNetworks' RealDVD was handed a devastating blow yesterday as U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel realdvd copyright in a case pitting the two against each other regarding the right to copy films onto one's hard drive. She granted a preliminary injunction against sale of RealDVD, pending a trial over copyright infringement. A cluster of Hollywood honchos, including Paramount, Sony, Universal Studios, and Walt Disney filed suit against RealDVD back in September. Now RealDVD's site is a headstone: "RealDVD is Currently Unavailable."
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The argument stems from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998. Circumventing encryption technology on digital media was made illegal by the DMCA. According to Patel's decision, RealDVD broke through a DVD's Content Scramble System code in order to transfer movies onto hard drives.

But RealDVD was very stringent with its copying program. The basic package allowed for only a single digital copy to be placed on your hard drive. After paying extra licensing fees, you could transfer the digital copy onto as many as five other hard drives. Disc-based burning was never an option.

Meanwhile, programs such as the VLC Media Player flaunt the law and provide software that allows for real-time copying. So why is the MPAA hard up for RealDVD and not these other products? It seems to me that the MPAA has chosen a battle against RealDVD to set an example but is perhaps ignorant of the proliferation of DVD-ripping programs available.
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It's sad that RealDVD, with its sophisticated and lawful approach to DVD-copying, had to swallow the wrath of the MPAA. It's also clear that the DMCA needs to be updated to reflect the changes in media distribution 11 years later. It's perfectly legal to rip music from a CD and upload it onto an iPod for personal use; why can't a person do the same with their own copies of movies? The assumption is that everyone using a program such as RealDVD is a criminal bent on ripping as many Netflix movies as possible, rather than a law-abiding citizen who simply wants to watch flicks on the go. For an organization that supposedly has its finger on the pulse of moviegoers, the MPAA strikes me as horribly distrustful and curmudgeonly in its approach to modern times.

You're probably going, so what? Let's talk about health care. Not so fast.

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Wikileaks just notified people that they are releasing over $1 billion dollars' worth of reports gathered by the Congressional Research Services (CRS).  These reports are provided to members of the US Congress and are legally in the public domain.  However, they are only released to the public with the permission of Congress in a complex system of permissions and protocols and ass-covering politicians.  Needless to say, attempts to free this information from the 'red tape' that keeps it from actually being released to the public have been met with resistance.Well, leave it to Wikileaks to strike a blow for transparency.

Cross-posted at The National Gadfly

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"Nowadays it's not so easy to find a full throated defender of the press" - from Lowell Bergman's "Media Wars"/ a PBS Frontline series on how the press is changing.

The reason that I am posting this diary is that,  I am hoping we can give voice to (of course, since mydd is now officially being spammed by the presidential elections and their "story" even though its realistically almost two years away)  - and possibly vent, the situation with the press in the united states.

In particular, this diary simply focusses on one t hought, related to the above quote. The gentleman was discussing, quite interestingly enough - the then-deputy chief of staff of the Ford Administration, Dick Cheney, and his undersecretary Donald Rumsfeld. They were in particular discussing a memo that Dick Cheney Wrote. The Frontline series only flashes it on the screen - but what had essentially happened way back in the early seventies - was that a reporter had written a story about a Navy Sub Patrol spying on the then-soviet union.  Dick Cheney writes a memo of the "possible alternatives" to attack the reporter for writing the story including (if memory serves) taking legal action against him. It is in essence, an outline of a smear job - not dissimiliar to the smear job he discussed with his staff regarding ambassador Joseph Wilson and the treasonous destruction of a CIA Operative that ensued as a result - and also I might add, the soon to be known decision about +his+ chief of staff regarding his felony criminal trial as the fall guy.

Alright - so the person above was saying that the environment is fundamentally different - and also repeatedly, we find the administration saying "how can the press be a check and balance against the government?" after all "which source is right".

Here is the single thought that ran through my mind.  There is a huge media entertainment company that is mascquerading in AMerica as a news company - they actually broadcast republican party talking points memorandum as news. They are and have been factually shown to report the president and especially Dick Cheney - whenever the administration wants to manipulate the public, in a format that includes only pre-chewed questions.

And more interestingly, The white house now spends billions on media campaigns. This is why Karl Rove is so popular - the washington circle seems to be unable to talk about this; people who buy media are somehow in an unwritten rule, excluded from scrutiny despite their role.

The question is -

Do you think that the news media entertainment channels are in fact there, (one of which comes to mind, was started by Roger Aisles - the chief of media operations for the nixon administration, with the express purpose of being a right wing organization that sends out right wing talking points as news).

And this is not about advertising - why? Because the destruction of a country can sell advertising. We stopped running ads during the destruction of the world trade towers, didn't we? Maybe we can at this point realize that intense viewership here that we are talking about is really the election of 2000 - a partisan battle where the networks LOADED their coverage with ads.. placement ads too.. a process that - as we all know - destroyed the public trust and ensconced into public office a man who did not win the vote. Its always warm to light the constitution on fire , but the warmth only lasts as long as the paper burns

Do you think that they are there, just so that people in the administration, who are bent upon the destruction of constitutional civil liberties - and in particular, people like Cheney and Rumsfeld, who have always wanted to increase the power of the president - do you think that former presidential advisors started these media entertainment channels so that they  can claim that ultimately all of the press is biased and unfair?

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