With Power of Social Media Growing, Police Now Monitoring and Criminalizing Online Speech - The Intercept- [This eagerness to criminalize political speech becomes more compelling as social media vests ordinary individuals with greater autonomy to disseminate news as well as their views. No longer dependent on corporate media institutions acting as Responsible Gatekeepers of Tolerable Opinions, individuals all over the world are now able to curate their own news and create their own powerful opinion platforms. The democratizing effects on political discourse have long been heralded as a future potential of the internet, but it is now a promise finally being fulfilled, and it is scaring entrenched political and media institutions all over the world. Many westerners received news about daily developments in the “Arab Spring” from previously unknown Arab citizens using Twitter and Facebook rather than from large establishment media outlets. That significantly increased sympathy for the protesters, now more humanized than ever before, at the expense of the U.S.-supported tyrannies (long protected by the west’s media outlets) which they were attempting to uproot. Perhaps the most potent example yet was the most recent Israeli attack on Gaza, where, for the first time, the full brutality and savagery of Israeli aggression was publicly conveyed. That’s because, despite their poverty, many ordinary Gazans now have video cameras on their cellphones and a Twitter account, which meant they were regularly uploading horrific video of Israeli bombs and tanks destroying hospitals, schools and apartment buildings, which in turn prevented Western journalists from ignoring or diluting the civilian carnage. Transferring information control from large media outlets to individual Gazans radically altered how that attack was covered and, thereafter, how Israel was perceived around the world. That is a genuinely fundamental change. Like all technologies that threaten to subvert prevailing authority, social media–along with the Internet generally–is being increasingly targeted with police measures of control, repression and punishment. Just like mass surveillance does to the Internet, this is all part of an effort to convert these new technologies from a potential tool of subversion into one that further bolsters governing power factions. It is thus unsurprising that the national police of Scotland posted the above-displayed warning last week. That warning tweet is starker and more honest than the tone typically used to convey such messages, but it perfectly captures the mindset of states throughout the west about the “dangers” of social media and the repressive steps they are now taking to combat them. As Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation documented this week, legal suppression of online speech is spreading throughout the west and democracies worldwide. Despite frequent national boasting of free speech protections, the U.S. has joined, and sometimes led, the trend to monitor and criminalize online political speech. The DOJ in 2011 prosecuted a 24-year-old Pakistani resident of the United States, Jubair Ahmad, on terrorism charges for uploading a 5-minute video to YouTube featuring photographs of Abu Ghraib abuses, video of American armored trucks exploding, and prayer messages about “jihad” from the leader of a designated terror group; he was convicted and sent to prison for 12 years. The same year, the DOJ indicted a 22-year-old Penn State student for, among other things, posting justifications of attacks on the U.S. to a “jihadi forum”; the speech offender, Emerson Winfield Begolly, was sentenced to 8 1/2 years in prison. Countless post-9/11 prosecutions for “material support of terrorism” are centrally based on political views expressed by the (almost always young and Muslim) defendants, who are often “anticipatorily prosecuted” for expression of ideas political officials find threatening. There is no doubt that the U.S. government has even used political speech as a significant factor in placing individuals on its “kill list” and then ending their life, including the U.S.-born preacher Anwar Awlaki (targeted with death before the attempted Christmas Day bombing over Detroit which was later used to justify Awlaki’s killing). Anti-American views by Muslims–meaning opposition to U.S. aggression and violence–are officially viewed as evidence of terrorist propensity, which is why this passage, flagged by the ACLU-Massachusetts’ Kade Crockford, appeared in a CNN article yesterday about the trial of Boston Marathon bombing defendant Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: As is true for all War on Terror abuses, this American version of criminalizing speech is spreading far beyond its original application, and is increasingly applied domestically. Anti-police messages are now being subjected to the same criminalizing treatment as anti-military and anti-U.S.-foreign-policy ideas. Last month in western Massachusetts, police issued a criminal summons to 27-year-old Charles DiRosa for posting an “anti-police Facebook post.” His “crime” was the posting of a very simple message on his Facebook account, which simply quoted the phrase posted on Facebook by Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley on the day he killed two NYPD officers.]
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 15:00:19 +0000
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