ARTS & FARCES internet

President Barak Obama’s Department of Justice is proposing to allow federal agencies to lie to people requesting information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The proposal would allow federal agencies to tell inquirers that certain documents don’t exist when, in fact, they do.

This little gem, slipped in as part of a long rule revision proposed by the Department of Justice, represents a drastic change from current practice. Currently, any federal agency can withhold requested information by issuing a Glomar response, neither confirming nor denying the existence of the requested information. The proposed change would allow agencies to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.”

The Glomar response is named for attempts by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to suppress stories about its Glomar Explorer and activities to recover a sunken Soviet submarine.

Mike German, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), tells Jennifer LaFleur, writing for ProPublica, “We don’t believe the statute allows the government to lie to FOIA requesters.”

The ACLU, Citizens for Responsibility in Ethics in Washington (CREW), and openthegovernment.org published a coordinated response (.pdf; 319KB), stating that the proposed rule change “will impede the judicial review that ensures government agencies are properly interpreting exemptions in the FOIA statute, and it will dramatically undermine government integrity by allowing a law designed to provide public access to government information to be twisted to permit federal law enforcement agencies to actively lie to the American people.”

US federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies are known for jumping ahead of the legal curve. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), for example recently denied documents requested under a FOIA request existed. The ACLU of Southern California suied and the court discovered that the documents did, in fact, exist. LaFleur cites US District Judge Cormac Carney’s amended order (.pdf; 94KB): “Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court.”

But it continues. A few weeks ago, another US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein declined to hold the CIA in contempt of court for destroying video recordings of the use of torture in detainee interrogations in response to a FOIA request from the ACLU.

Update: Saturday, 5 November 2011 2:21PM CDT: The US Department of Justice has dropped its proposed FOIA revisions. David Kravets, writing for Wired, attributes the move to “political pressure.”

Once again demonstrating that it knows exactly on which side its bread is buttered, the New York Times has attempted to alter its coverage of history to make its benefactors look oh, so much better. But this is the age of instant media and the whole world is watching and easily catches the Times with its pants down around its ankles.

Corporate media—including the Times; especially the Times—has been reluctant to cover the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations that have now spread across the country. This weekend the New York City police entrapped more than 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge who were then arrested.

Shortly before 7PM on Saturday 1 October, the Times’ lede began, “After allowing them onto the bridge, the police cut off and arrested dozens of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.” Not entirely accurate, but orders of magnitude more accurate than the change made about 20 minutes later: “In a tense showdown over the East River, police arrested hundreds of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators after they marched onto the bridge’s Brooklyn-bound roadway.”

The two versions were juxtaposed at the speed of internet. Nick Greene, writing for the Village Voice, asked Andy Newman, the Times’ city room bureau chief why the change was made and got the following response:

“At every point yesterday as the story unfolded, we offered the most complete account we could of a large and chaotic scene that could not be grasped by any one person. The earlier version had almost no input from the police. The later version reflected the accounts of the police, protesters, and of course our reporters at the scene. The later version, read in its entirety (not just the one highlighted sentence in that photo), reflected the various perspectives much more thoroughly. The final version of the piece was more thorough still.”

Oh yes, thoroughness, of course. Never mind what video from the scene showed, the Times had to get input from the police. In the name of, cough, thoroughness. Never mind that the Times’ own freelancer, Natasha Lennard, one of those arrested, reported that police allowed the protestors onto the Brooklyn Bridge.

As Newman reports, Lennard’s on-the-scene published account initially included this graf:

“After allowing marchers from the Occupy Wall Street protests to claim the Brooklyn-bound car lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge and get partway across, the police cut the marchers off and plunged into the crowd and began making arrests around 4:15PM Saturday.”

Lennard’s graf was excised from subsequent versions of what the Times published.

Last week the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in San Francisco shut down cellular phone service at all four of its downtown stations to preemptively subvert a planned protest of a shooting by a BART police officer. BART officials “switched off the transit system’s base stations,” writes Natalie Wolchover for Scientific American. WiFi Rail provides the underground fiber service that connects to a network of wireless access points, routers, and switches. Because the system is privately owned and operated by BART, its officials have the ability to shut it down.

Whether BART has the right to shut down its privately owned network providing cellular phone service to the transit system is another question entirely. BART, after all, is a government agency.

Early this week, the hacker group Anonymous staged another protest against the BART shutdown of cellular service. This time BART physically closed the four downtown stations and deployed officers in riot gear, but cellular service was not shut down.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that BART spokesperson Linton Johnson “said earlier Monday that the agency had the right to cut cell phone service Thursday [11 August] because transit riders ‘don’t have the right to free speech inside the fare gates.’” Oh, really? Someone needs to be sent for some sort of reorientation.

The Chronicle goes on to report, “The agency did not jam cell signals, which is illegal, but shut off the system—which Johnson said is allowable under an agreement with several major phone service providers that pay rent to BART.”

David Kravets, writing for Wired, reports Johnson, a former television reporter in San Jose, acknowledged in a conference call with reporters that the cellular phone system shut down was his idea. “It came to me in the middle of the morning,” Kravets reports Johnson as saying. “I sent it to the police department and they said they liked it. They started vetting it.”

At least one of BART’s directors, Lynette Sweet, opposes disruption of cellular service and will bring the issue for a vote. “This is one where we can almost say we’re stuck on stupid,” Sweet told the Chronicle. “We put ourselves on the radar screen for no good reason. This is a country that champions civil liberties all the time. So why would a transit agency take it upon themselves to trample on civil liberties?”

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is looking into the matter.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron is investigating the merits of stopping social media communication of individuals known to be planning criminal activity. As Cameron told the UK House of Commons earlier this week, “Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services, and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder, and criminality.”

After everything that’s happened in the mideast since spring, Cameron clearly hasn’t a clue, so let’s help him: The free flow of information is not just “good” in and of itself, it’s a necessity. Social media is part of that free flow of information. Get a warrant for messages related to specific investigations, but no monitoring and no censoring. It’s a fool’s bargin to sacrifice liberty for security.

Olivia Solon, writing for Wired, reports when Cameron was challenged to increase police presence, his response was that the question should be whether “to give the police the technology to trace people on Twitter or BBM or close it down.” Solon cites Liberal Democrat Julian Huppert as a sole voice of reason when he said that social media were being used to mobilize voluntary localized help and clean-up efforts.

Eric Pfanner, writing for the New York Times, reports that Theresa May, the Home secretary, would meet with social media and mobile phone vendors “to discuss possible measure that could be put in place.”

For its part, Twitter appears to be holding fast to its policy published by co-founder Biz Stone and Alex McGillivray, the company’s general counsel at the beginning of the Arab Spring uprisings:

“Some Tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users. We don’t always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.”

As Eva Galperin, writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), notes, this view was also held by Cameron until recently. In a February speech in Kuwait, Cameron “asserted that freedom of expression should be respected ‘in Tahrir Square as much as Trafalgar Square.’ The Prime Minister’s 180-degree shift on freedom of expression unfortunately places him one step closer to the growing, worldwide cohort of politicians and despots seeking solace in censorship.”

The US Air Force has blocked access on its computers to websites that have published the secret cables obtained and distributed by WikiLeaks. That would include websites of news organizations. According to Eric Schmitt, writing for the New York Times, an unnamed Air Force official provided the on-screen warning indicating that internet usage is logged and monitored and that violators face punishment. Schmitt reports that other branches of the US military are not blocking access to news organization websites.

Meanwhile filmmaker, author, and general all-good troublemaker Michael Moore has put up US$20,000 to help arrange bail for Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. Moore has also offered “my website, my servers, my domain names, and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, out on bail and writing “Don’t shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths” for the Australian, asserts that WikiLeaks represents scientific journalism, a new form of the craft. “We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true,” writes Assange. “Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?”

The Columbia Journalism School faculty have written President Obama and Attorney General Holder a letter arguing cogently about the dangers and (presumed) unintended consequences of prosecuting WikiLeaks. “But while we hold varying opinions of Wikileaks’ methods and decisions, we all believe that in publishing diplomatic cables Wikileaks is engaging in journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment,” writes the Columbia faculty members. “Any prosecution of Wikileaks’ staff for receiving, possessing or publishing classified materials will set a dangerous precedent for reporters in any publication or medium, potentially chilling investigative journalism and other First Amendment-protected activity. As a historical matter, government overreaction to publication of leaked material in the press has always been more damaging to American democracy than the leaks themselves.”