If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Even as a staunch free press advocate, I admit that the government has an obligation to protect certain state secrets. But once information reaches the press and the public, the resulting investigative witch hunts raise questions about how free our press really is.
Critics of the Justice Dept.'s subpoena of AP telephone records have shamelessly mischaracterized the Dept.'s actions and the purposes for them. Any interference with the free press merits close scrutiny, but that scrutiny needs to consider just what the Dept. actually has done and why.
Is the much-criticized Patriot Act now too shameful to be mentioned? Its effects unfortunately persist. They flout the First Amendment. They endanger the information of public interest that journalists have a duty to reveal and citizens have every right to expect.
As Director of the Checks & Balances Project, I was one of the eight people featured on the "ALEC Most Wanted" document alongside other reporters and public interest advocates who have criticized ALEC's efforts to influence state legislators on behalf of special interests.
The U.S. Justice Department's secret seizure of two months of phone records for reporters and editors of the Associated Press is a reckless violation of the First Amendment. There is nothing more sacred in the American democracy than freedom of the press.
The Associated Press says the U.S. Department of Justice has secretly obtained a trove of journalists' phone records in what its chief executive calle...
In hindsight, the severity of what Mr. Zelaya actually did to merit a coup has a tendency to grow less and less convincing, particularly when you measure it by the severity of what the National Congress has done to destroy Honduran democracy since December 12, 2012.
If you have identifiable people who are threatening to fight, you suspend them. If you don't have identifiable people who are threatening to fight, then you're making it up and you don't have a legitimate, let alone substantial, risk.
Congress has just spent an agonizing several weeks debating background checks for gun purchasers and whether such checks would violate the second amendment. Yet at the moment there is no law to stop foreigners from electronically sending bomb-making instructions into the United States.
While progress is being made on the press freedom front, we've also seen that the percentage of people worldwide who enjoy a free media environment has fallen to its lowest point in more than a decade.
Every year on this day, May 3, the international community comes together for World Press Freedom Day. For those of us here in the United States, it's...
Dear President Obama, Your official visit to Mexico on May 3 coincides with World Press Freedom Day. As the General Director of Reporters Without Bor...
Regulating speech is much more delicate and problematic because it's such a potentially dangerous, slippery slope. How far do you go in restricting freedom of speech, and who determines those restrictions?
Years of overt censorship have also left a lasting impression on the literary culture of Burma. Fearing that the government will backslide on reforms, many authors self-censor their material.
Corporations, and governments too, have an incentive to limit the freedom of the press. These are powerful entities, often in cahoots, that can and will ignore the First Amendment when they can get away with it.
Reporters Without Borders has been investigating countries that operate some of the most restrictive and oppressive areas of cyberspace. Syria and Iran join China, Bahrain and Vietnam on top of the list of five spy state. But how do they manage it?
