On Thursday, settlements were reached for two civil rights lawsuits between Muslim Americans and the New York Police Department. The cases were brought against the NYPD by after officers secretly infiltrated mosques and Muslim organizations to gather information. What they NYPD will now have to do.
Powerful words on Net Neutrality from Civil Rights icon Rep. John Lewis.
Congress is rushing toward a vote on CISA, the worst spying bill yet. CISA would grant sweeping legal immunity to giant companies like Facebook and Google, allowing them to do almost anything they want with your data. In exchange, they’ll share even more of your personal information with the government, all in the name of “cybersecurity.” CISA won’t stop hackers — Congress is stuck in 1984 and doesn’t understand modern technology. So this week we’re sending them thousands of faxes — technology that is hopefully old enough for them to understand.
This is the one video everyone needs to see about NSA spying.
The flashpoints for activism are the many failures of the existing media system. Whether itโs the silencing of dissenting views, the attacks on online privacy, the throttling of Internet access or the monopolization of choice, the problems are often rooted in bad public policy.
This is the text of a letter that was filed with the FCC yesterday. Check out the amazing list of organizations at the bottom.
November 20, 2012
Chairman Julius Genachowski
Commissioner Robert McDowell
Commissioner Mignon Clyburn
Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel
Commissioner Ajit Pai
...
Syrian Media Activists Fill News Hole
Via AFP:
Journalists in Syria have been killed by snipers, accused of spying, and kidnapped by gunmen, and with the threats growing, many say the conflict is now too dangerous to cover.
The risks have increased the challenge of reporting from the country, which was already difficult because of violence, regime visa restrictions and propaganda on both sides.
Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says at least 25 professional journalists and 70 citizen journalists have been killed in the conflict.
But for many reporters, the bigger fear comes from abductions, which have been on the rise in the Syria conflict.
RSF says at least 16 foreign journalists are missing in Syria, although many cases have not been made public at the request of their families.
Filling the information vacuum, in part, are Syria’s media activists.
Via The New Republic:
On a mild morning in August, one of those journalists, a 26-year-old named Wassim, was dozing on the couch of the Syrian Media Center (SMC), an amateur operation headquartered above the local barbershop. Wassim—he asked that only his first name be used—grew up in Homs and has amber eyes and the lacquered hair of a pop singer.
For the past six months, Wassim had been sleeping in SMC’s offices, alongside Lulu, a long-haired white kitten. He typically awoke at noon, ate flatbread and cheese, smoked cigarettes, and waited for videos and photographs to come in from the SMC’s 100-odd informants scattered across Syria. Most of the clips, sent by an unpaid coalition of young male activists, depicted destruction: the bloody aftermath of regime artillery attacks on schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings. Occasionally, there were shaky Handycam shots of running battles between opposition and regime forces.
From evening to dawn, Wassim edited the videos down to two or three minutes and posted them to the SMC page or its Arabic-language Twitter and Facebook feeds. If he was lucky, the BBC, Al Arabiya (a Saudi-based network), or Al Jazeera picked up the footage. But he was content to reach the many ordinary Syrians who visited the SMC page every day…
Verification of the media coming out of the country falls on newsrooms unable to get their own correspondents in. Some of it’s done through video and photo forensics. Other times it’s triangulating among trusted in-country sources to see if they can confirm an event actually happened (Andy Carvin’s excellent book, Distant Witness, about his Arab Spring coverage via social networks is a fascinating study on this).
And then there are startups like Storyful that are in the business of verifying media and information that comes across the social Web. It’s case study on validating Syria footage can be seen here.
Image: AFP reporter Sammy Ketz, taking cover from sniper in Maalula, Syria, by Anwar Amro/AFP.
The Church of England has sold all of its shares in News Corp. because it fears Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has failed to learn lessons from the phone-hacking scandal.
Tell Congress: Keep the Internet WEIRD — and SAVE NET NEUTRALITY
phonejustice