Mayor Bloomberg's First Amendment Problem

Since the beginning of his crackdown against the Occupy Wall Street movement, Mayor Mike Bloomberg has gone to great lengths to present himself as a champion of the First Amendment. But the free speech rhetoric coming from City Hall hasn't matched the brutal reality experienced by journalists at the front lines of the protest.

In the two months since the movement began 25 journalists have been arrested covering events across the country. More than half of these arrests have occurred in New York City, including 13 journalist arrests in the last week.

My colleague Josh Stearns, who maintains a running tally of media arrests and harassment, said that the NYPD's early morning raids on Zuccotti Park on November 15 resulted in the "single worst day for journalist attacks and arrests to date."

"From the beginning, I have said that the City had two principal goals," Mayor Bloomberg said in a statement following the raids, "guaranteeing public health and safety, and guaranteeing the protestors' First Amendment rights."

Regarding the rights of reporters covering the Occupy protests, the Mayor is less clear.

AFP reporter Jennifer Weiss films her own arrest

His police department has worked in coordination with other departments around the country to prevent journalists from covering Occupy evictions. News crews, reporters and photographers have been herded away during police actions in Portland, Oakland and New York City.

Police have kettled others into "Free Speech Zones" -- barricaded and controlled areas where journalists are kept far from the action.

Mayor Bloomberg said the police kept the media at a distance "to prevent a situation from getting worse and to protect members of the press." But according to the New York Times, one journalist told a police officer "I'm press!" and the officer just responded "Not tonight."

Many journalists who remained on the front lines were arrested, roughed up, tear-gassed or pepper sprayed. New York police put one New York Post journalist in a choke hold; Daily Caller reporter Michelle Fields was hit and forced to the ground; Lucy Kafanov of RT was struck with a baton; and countless others have been shoved and harassed. In October, Kafanov reported that police were using high-powered strobe lights to blind news and cellphone cameras and block people from recording their actions.

On Friday the mayor's office disputed our account of these violent arrests and harassment. His spokesman Stu Loeser tried to dismiss the notion that the police arrested so many or acted inappropriately saying that only five of the journalists arrested actually had NYPD-issued press credentials.

But a great number of journalists working in New York City, including myself, don't bother to submit ourselves to the NYPD's "Kafkaesque" credentialing process. Others don't recognize the NYPD's authority to determine who qualifies as a working journalist and who does not. It's likely the credentialing process itself would not survive a First Amendment challenge.

In any event, one NYPD detective admitted to Wired's Ryan Singel that the department doesn't intend to provide any press passes to journalists wishing to cover the Occupy movement.

All of this point to profound problems with the ways City Hall regards the media. As the former head of a press organization, you'd think Mayor Bloomberg would know better.

Before he again wraps himself in the First Amendment, New York's mayor needs to fully account for the trampling of these rights by his police.

Saving the Democratic Internet

Opponents of the open Internet like to portray its guiding rule, Net Neutrality, as "a government takeover of the Internet."

They argue that from the day of its inception the Internet has existed free of regulation — a perfect expression of the marketplace at work.

What they don’t understand is that the Internet is a far better expression of democracy, and as such needs rules like Net Neutrality to ensure all users have equal access to online content.

And in reality the Internet as we now know it would never have existed were it not for rules and regulation, beginning with the openness standards created by the Internet’s founders some 40 years ago, codified in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and updated in recent orders by the Federal Communications Commission.

Internet users often take these rules for granted. We expect to access all websites without interference. We can visit our nephew’s blog as easily as we can CNN.com.

But our ability to connect doesn’t happen in a vacuum; Net Neutrality protections are responsible for making these freedoms common to everyone.

This could change, however, if corporate Republicans get their way in the Senate this week. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas is planning a Thursday vote on a "resolution of disapproval" that would void the FCC’s 2010 Open Internet order and strip the agency of any authority to stop corporations from taking control of the Internet from users.

Washington Doublespeak

Sen. Hutchison, who has AT&T’s corporate headquarters in her back yard, has long carried water in Washington for the phone and cable lobby. Her resolution couldn’t come at a worse time for Internet users. These companies are pushing plans to prioritize certain kinds of online and mobile traffic while downgrading the sites, applications and services that the rest of us may want to use.

But when speaking last week about the resolution, Sen. Hutchison got it backwards. The Internet “has created new products, new services, because it is open, because there hasn’t been a gatekeeper," she said, adding that she introduced the Senate resolution because it’s good for Internet users like you and me.

Come again? Sen. Hutchinson seeks to keep the Internet’s gatekeepers at bay by forcing through a measure that would allow companies like AT&T and Comcast to block traffic without consequences.

The hypocrisy is as thick in the House, where resolution proponent Rep. Marsha Blackburn recently said the Open Internet rules are akin to the FCC “building an Internet Iron Curtain that will restrict more of our freedom."

Did you get that? According to Rep. Blackburn supporters of the open Internet are Soviet-styled Communists, hell-bent on walling off the Web and silencing your voice.

Such is the doublespeak that emanates from Washington these days. If senators pass this week’s resolution, their digital ignorance will become a problem for the rest of us, which is why Internet users need to protest the resolution with full force.

The Internet Wrecking Ball

The phone and cable companies behind this scheme have long sought to take a wrecking ball to the Web’s democratic foundation. In their thinking they need to destroy the Internet to rebuild it to better serve their bottom lines. The needs of the rest of us are just an afterthought.

And concerns about blocking are not limited to access to websites, and they are not hypothetical. In 2007 Comcast was caught red-handed blocking people seeking to share files using the popular BitTorrent platform. That same year, Verizon Wireless rejected NARAL Pro-Choice America’s request to send text messages over its network, claiming them to be “unsavory” and “controversial.” While Verizon soon reversed this decision, its attorneys still assert the company’s right to block text messages at will.

Today, mobile carrier MetroPCS is touting a plan that bans all other video services on mobile devices in favor of YouTube. Other carriers are lining up payment schemes that will conceal whole sections of the Internet behind paywalls.

As more people use the Internet for all things media, Internet providers have massive financial incentives to make sites and services pay a premium to reach their users, and to make their users pay extra to experience the entire Internet. And with most Americans having two or fewer options for broadband in their respective markets, there's not enough competition to hold these companies in check.

Congress should not pass a resolution that lets a few wealthy corporations get away with hijacking our online rights. The open Internet is far too important to the rest of us.

Why Is Justin Bieber So Hackin Mad?

Justin Bieber is pissed off and you should be, too.

What's made Bieber so angry? A bill in Congress that could rip apart the open fabric of the internet and let corporations censor free speech.

The "Stop Online Piracy Act" or SOPA gives private entities the power to blacklist websites at will. And it violates the due process rights of the thousands of users who could see their sites disappear from the Internet for doing something as innocent as posting a video of them singing along to their favorite song.

Learning from China?

These are the sort of heavy-handed Web control you'd expect to see in China, not in the United States.

SOPA (HR 3261) not only lets companies silence websites, it also allows for banks to freeze financial deposits to the accounts of website owners, potentially forcing falsely accused Internet enterprises out of business.

The bill was intended to discourage illegal copyright violations, but it addresses this problem by giving corporations way too much authority over the way the Internet works. It deputizes the private sector with the power to disconnect the URLs of website that they believe to be behaving improperly.

It gives private entities unprecedented power to rewrite the Internet's domain name system (DNS), which translates your website request into an IP address in order to connect you to the correct location. After receiving a complaint from a company like Viacom or Sony Music, the government would force Internet providers and search engines to redirect users' attempts to reach the website that they chose.

The idea that SOPA would protect against online piracy and other web crimes is a pipe dream. As a technical solution, DNS re-directing is virtually useless in stopping sophisticated online piracy, but it will have a strong deterrent effect on casual producers and consumers of Internet content.

As such the consequences for free speech are grave. Imagine if your kid sister creates a "fansite" featuring videos of her singing Taylor Swift songs into a hair brush. Not only does the bill give Swift's record label the authority to "disappear" your sister's site from the Web, it also could land her in jail facing severe penalties and a long prison term.

Bieber: Throw Congress in Cuffs

In a radio interview last week Bieber called SOPA "ridiculous." He added that "people need to have the freedom... to sing songs," and that any member of Congress who supports this bill "needs to be locked up -- put away in cuffs."

At the very least Congress should wise up and kill this bill.

A Senate version of SOPA, called the Protect IP Act, passed committee approval in the spring following a massive push by brazen film and music industry lobbyists. These lobbyists are back, but now Silicon Valley companies and venture capitalists have joined forces with civil liberties groups, independent musicians and free speech advocates to stop the bill.

We can't let corporations become the Internet's judge, jury and executioner. If SOPA is allowed to stand, we could see the private sector's police powers expand to a point that undermines the fundamental openness of the Internet. And that's bad news for Justin Bieber, your kid sister, and the rest of us.