Censorship

Wikileaks.org, a Web site that specializes in posting leaked documents often provided by whistleblowers, had its domain name yanked by a federal judge in California earlier this month.

Now Wikileaks is receiving some independent legal support from free speech groups, including Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They--and some media organizations also expected to file a brief--are asking to intervene on Wikileaks' behalf.

These folks are the .50 caliber rifles (or, perhaps the .818 caliber Solothurns) of the modern free speech movement. If … Read more

A federal judge in California has pulled the plug on Wikileaks.org, a Web site that specializes in posting leaked documents often provided by whistleblowers.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White on Friday ordered that the domain name be disabled at the behest of a group of Swiss bankers who filed a lawsuit alleging that confidential information appeared on Wikileaks.org.

White's order to Dynadot, the registrar with which Wikileaks appears to have been associated, says:

Dynadot shall immediately lock the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar, and shall … Read more

A recent incident in which a Finnish free speech activist was censored by his government highlights the dangers of secret blacklists of supposedly illegal Web sites.

The spat started when programmer Matti Nikki began to research which Web sites were secretly blocked by Finnish Internet providers based on a list compiled by the government. Although the secret blacklist was supposed to be reserved for overseas child pornography, Nikki discovered that, at least in his view, the majority of Web sites blocked were perfectly legal.

And what happened when Nikki published his findings on its Lapsiporno.info site? You guessed it: … Read more

Rep. Tom Lantos, a Democratic politician who relentlessly assailed Yahoo and other Internet companies for doing business in China, died of esophageal cancer on Monday. He was 80 years old.

Lantos--who was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee--represented one of the most liberal congressional districts in the nation, including portions of San Francisco and the cities on the peninsula immediately to the south. A secular Jew born in Hungary, he was the only Holocaust survivor to be elected to the U.S. Congress.

In technology circles, Lantos was best-known in recent years for lambasting executives from Yahoo, Google, Cisco … Read more

Most presidential hopefuls who show up at the so-called Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., praise their hosts and marvel at the company's search technology.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Democrat and presidential long shot, took a different approach this week, saying during his visit Monday that the company should pull the plug on its China search engine at Google.cn. I'm sure it went over about as well as Barack Obama's enthusiastic endorsement of more aggressive antitrust enforcement during his visit to the 'plex--not exactly an applause line for employees of a company undergoing serious antitrust scrutiny in … Read more

The Democratic sponsor of a bill forcing anyone with an open Wi-Fi connection to report illegal images--or pay fines of up to $300,000--says a recent Internet outcry over the legislation misses the point.

Rep. Nick Lampson of Texas, who drafted the bill that the House of Representatives approved this week, said through a spokesman on Thursday that he didn't actually mean to target Americans who happen to have Wi-Fi access points at home. The legislation also covers social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail.

Lampson's spokesman, Trevor … Read more

[Update as of Thurs. 8:30pm: See this article for a response to criticisms from Rep. Nick Lampson, the bill's author.]

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including "obscene" cartoons and drawings--or face fines of up to $300,000.

That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail … Read more

Henry Hyde, the former Illinois congressman who led attempts to impeach President Bill Clinton and was a longtime foe of abortion, died on Thursday. He was 83.

The Associated Press has already published an extensive obituary of Hyde, a Republican who retired from Congress at the end of the last session. What the AP doesn't mention is Hyde's authorship of a federal law--still on the books today--making it a felony to distribute information over the Internet that relates to obtaining an abortion.

Hyde's successful amendment to an unrelated telecommunications bill in 1996 extended the Comstock Law to &… Read more

Congress is about to approve the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007. This is not necessarily a good thing for Internet users.

I say that because VRAHTPA establishes a new federal commission tasked with investigating Americans with "extremist belief systems" and those who may engage in "ideologically based violence." This effort is expected to cost $22 million.

It's possible, of course, that nothing will come of VRAHTPA. Technically no new laws are being proposed except those creating the so-called National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism.

But creating … Read more