Rash of anti-protest laws and effort to dismiss demonstrators as ‘paid agitators’ are ‘standard operating procedure for movement opponents,’ says expert
Approximately 50 protesters gather outside of the Pentagon City Mall in Arlington, Virginia on Saturday, November 29th, 2014 to show solidarity with Ferguson, Missouri protests. (Photo: Joseph Gruber/cc/flickr)
An Arizona bill that sought to prosecute protest organizers like racketeers is officially dead after widespread outcry forced state lawmakers to put that effort to rest, marking a victory for the national resistance movement currently facing a rash of legislation aimed at stifling dissent.
Arizona House Speaker J.D. Mesnard announced late Monday that the bill, SB 1142, would not move forward in the legislature.
“I haven’t studied the issue or the bill itself, but the simple reality is that it created a lot of consternation about what the bill was trying to do,” Mesnard, a Republican, told the Phoenix New Times. “People believed it was going to infringe on really fundamental rights. The best way to deal with that was to put it to bed.” Continue reading →
The president’s comments signal that his administration will continue its war against the media, which Trump declared on his first full day in office. (Photo: Lorie Shaull/flickr/cc)
In an interview Friday with a Christian radio show, President Donald Trump backed his chief strategist Steve Bannon in calling the media “the opposition party.”
“I think the media is the opposition party in many ways,” the president said on “The Brody File,” a program on the Christian Radio Network. “I’m not talking about everybody, but a big portion of the media, the dishonesty, total deceit, and deception. It makes them certainly partially the opposition party, absolutely.” Continue reading →
“It owns all these not-at-all-important laws are smuggled into NDAAs that are signed on Christmas Eve with basically no public debate,” wrote media critic Adam Johnson
Buried within the $619 billion military budget is a controversial provision that establishes a national anti-propaganda center that critics warn could be dangerous for press freedoms. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
In the final hours before the Christmas holiday weekend, U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday quietly signed the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law—and buried within the $619 billion military budget (pdf) is a controversial provision that establishes a national anti-propaganda center that critics warn could be dangerous for press freedoms.
The Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, introduced by Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, establishes the Global Engagement Center under the State Department which coordinates efforts to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United Sates national security interests.” Continue reading →
As Facebook comes under fire for its alleged censorship and tracking of activists and protesters, a coalition of more than 70 groups and individuals has demanded the social media behemoth “clarify its policy on removing video and other content, especially human rights documentation, at the request of government actors.”
A letter (pdf)—whose signatories include the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 350.org, Color of Change, and the Indigenous Environmental Network—sent Monday cites recent incidents including:
While writing this article, currently without access to the world, I can’t help but wonder how you will read it.
By Nurcan Baysal. Published 11-1-2016 by openDemocracy
Protests throughout Diyarbakir erupted on October 26, 2016 following the arrests of the city’s co-mayors. Image via Twitter.
Diyarbakır, the unofficial capital of the Kurdish people, has been one of the main locations of armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state. Since August 2015, numerous curfews have been declared in the city and its villages, hundreds of civilians have been killed, the centre of the 5000 year old city Suriçi was bombed, and half of the old city was totally destroyed. The curfew still continues in the old city Suriçi. Today is the 333rd day of the curfew.
Right now, the city is undergoing another trauma. Two days ago, the co-mayors of Diyarbakır, Gültan Kışanak and Fırat Anlı, were detained by the Turkish police with the allegation that they are “supporting the PKK terror organization”. Kışanak was detained in Diyarbakir Airport, on her way back from Ankara, while Anlı was detained at his home in the center of Diyarbakir. According to the press release of the Diyarbakır Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, Kışanak and Anlı were detained due to statements they had made, under laws governing their rights to freedom of speech.
Following their detention, all internet connection was cut across the Kurdish region. 6 million people have been cut off from the world for the past 3 days.
Why did the Turkish government cut off internet in the Kurdish region?
The government is trying to prevent the mobilization of Kurdish people through social media. Kurdish people are very angry because of the detention of their co-mayors. They want to protest. The government has prohibited all kinds of protests, gatherings and marches under the Emergency Law.
This blackout also aims to silence the voices of the Kurdish people, to prevent them from informing the national and international public about developments in the region.
What has happened in these two “dark” days?
The municipality building has been completely closed by police barriers, panzers and thousands of police officers. Even municipal staff have been forbidden to enter the building.
On the first day, hundreds of people tried to gather in front of the municipality building. The police tried to prevent the people from gathering and protesting. It was a hard day, full of tear gas and water cannon. The police did not only use tear gas and water, but guns were turned against protestors as well. Many people were injured by police violence. At the end of the day, 37 protestors, some of them Kurdish politicians, were also detained.
Thousands of Kurdish people gathered in front of the municipality building on the second day. The co-president of HDP, Selahattin Demirtaş gave a speech to the crowd of people. He said that the Kurdish people will not accept the detention of their co-mayors and encouraged people to continue their peaceful protests until the release of the co-mayors.
Message to Kurds
Kurdish cities have witnessed outrage, killings and bombings all year. Just a month ago, on 11 September, 27 elected mayors were replaced by appointed state officers, 11,285 Kurdish teachers were fired from their jobs. Hundreds of Kurdish politicians and activists have been detained. Almost all Kurdish media, even the Kurdish childrens’ channel have been closed down. As of today, 27 elected Kurdish co-mayors are in prison in Turkey, while 43 of them were dismissed.
The detention of Diyarbakır’s co-mayors is an important phase in a year-long process.
The government has blocked all political access to Kurdish people in Turkey. With these policies, the government is sending a message to all Kurdish people: “There is no legal way to gain rights for Kurdish people. There is no place for Kurds in this country.”
While looking at my municipality, which has been under police blockade for 3 days, I wonder if the Kurdish people will accept these humiliating policies.
As a member of the Kurdish society, I can easily say NO. Kurds are part of a very organized society, a resilient society, struggling for their rights for more than a century. They will continue their struggle, though I believe these policies risk the future of Turkey as a country.
While writing this article, currently without access to the world, I can’t help but wonder how you will read it.
About the author
Nurcan Baysal is a Kurdish author who has published numerous books and articles about Turkey’s Kurdish issue.
The findings reveal ‘how policies and laws against terrorism and other criminal activity risk unnecessarily undermining the media, critical voices, and activists’
“Censorship in all its forms reflects official fear of ideas and information,” said U.N. Special Rapporteur on the freedom of opinion and expression, David Kaye. (Photo: Rachel Hinman/flickr/cc)
“Governments are treating words as weapons,” a United Nations expert has warned, previewing a report on the global attack on the freedom of expression.
The report, based on communications with governments stemming from allegations of human rights law violations—reveal “sobering” trends of threats worldwide and “how policies and laws against terrorism and other criminal activity risk unnecessarily undermining the media, critical voices, and activists.” Continue reading →
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan. (Photo: public domain)
In a letter denouncing the “the increasing climate of fear and censorship and the stifling of critical voices in Turkey,” over 100 noted international writers including Nobel laureates urge Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu to free two journalists facing potential life sentences.
Signatories to the PEN International letter, dated Thursday, include Margaret Atwood, J.M. Coetzee, Monica Ali, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Yann Martel.
“In recent years,” the letter states, “the Turkish authorities have made extraordinary efforts to silence critics and dissent, as documented in PEN’s recent report on free expression in the country. This has had an impact on all areas of Turkish society, from the harsh repression of peaceful protesters in Gezi Park; to the increasing crackdown on freedom of expression online; to the arrest and detention of dozens of writers, journalists and academics.” Continue reading →
Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan has unleashed what Human Rights Watch dubs “a harsh campaign vilifying the academics…terming them vile, equal to terrorists, base and dark.” (Photo: Agencia de Noticias ANDES/flickr/cc)
Representing a further crackdown on free expression in Turkey, President Tayyip Erdoğan said this week he wants the Turkish parliament to redefine the country’s anti-extremism law to include journalists, politicians, and academics.
“It is not only the person who pulls the trigger, but those who made that possible who should also be defined as terrorists, regardless of their title,” Erdoğan said on Monday, one day after a suicide bomb attack in the country’s capital of Ankara killed at least 34 people and wounded 125 others. Continue reading →
Every four years, we vote for who we feel would be the best person to lead our country. Two months after the election, the new (or returning, if re-elected) president takes the oath of office:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Photo: Facebook
Donald Trump is the leading candidate for one of the two major parties, so we wondered how Donald would “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution. We didn’t have to look to far to find troubling inconsistencies.
Trump started his campaign off with a bang, calling Mexicans “thugs” and “rapists,” and said he was going to end birthright citizenship. When Bill O’Reilly pointed out to him that such a move violated the 14th Amendment, which states ” All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside…”, Trump’s response was that the 14th Amendment itself is unconstitutional. He also says he wants to deport all the eleven million undocumented people in the US. How he plans on possibly doing this without violating the 4th Amendment is confusing to us. But, we digress…
Then, we have his statements about Muslims. He wants to ban all Muslims entering the United States. While this is on shaky legal ground, it could be legal, provided he doesn’t include Muslims who live in the US re-entering the country. However, his other proposals definitely aren’t. He proposed requiring all Muslims in the country to register with the government, and creating a database from that information. By singling out a specific religion being required to register, this is definitely against the 1st Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause. He also proposes putting mosques under surveillance; a violation of both the 1st and 4th Amendments.
Last week, he said that if he was elected president, he’d toughen the libel laws. This would be another direct assault on the 1st Amendment and freedom of the press, as the way the law sits now, public figures must prove that any defamatory statements were made with “actual malice,” Under Trump’s proposal, basically any negative statement about him could be challenged in the courts by his administration.
There’s also pesky details that he overlooks. When he says that he’s unilaterally going to renegotiate the Iran deal or NAFTA, he overlooks the fact that while he can renegotiate or threaten to break agreements all he wants, he’ll still need congressional approval to do so. In fact, with most of Trump’s proposals, he fails to recognize that he’s only one of the three branches of government, and that what he says he’s going to do can’t be done without at least one of the other branches’ approval. And, make no mistake about it, a President Trump would face stiff opposition in both Congress and the Supreme Court.
So, would a President Trump remain true to his oath of office? From what we’ve seen so far, we’d have to say no; he’d break his oath numerous times within his first month.
In January 2014, Reid Sagehorn, a student at Rogers High School in Minnesota, jokingly tweeted “actually yeah” in response to a question about whether he had made out with one of his high school teachers.
The public school, acting on the tweet, suspended him for seven weeks. Sagehorn, a member of the National Honor Society, fought the suspension in a federal court, claiming the actions of school officials violated his First Amendment right to free speech.
Did the school have the right to punish him for his off-campus expression? It turns out – no.
In August 2015, a federal judgerejected the school officials’ motion to have the case dismissed. After all, the court found that Sagehorn made the post while away from campus, during nonschool hours, without using the school’s computers. And last month Sagehorn collected a settlement of more than US$400,000.
Sadly, Reid Sagehorn’s case is not unique. For at least the past 15 years, schools across the nation have engaged in Orwellian overreaches into the homes and bedrooms of students to punish them for their off-campus, online expression regarding classmates, teachers and administrators.
Despite the bevy of cases, the issue of whether schools can punish students for off-campus, online speech remains unresolved.
Cases where school kids were suspended
For instance, in April 2015, a federal court in Oregon considered a case called Burge v Colton School District 53 in which an eighth grader was suspended from his public middle school based upon out-of-school comments he posted on his personal Facebook page.
And in September 2014, a federal court in New York considered a case called Bradford v Norwich City School District in which a public high school student was suspended “based on a text-message conversation he had with another student regarding a third student while outside of school.”
Judge Glenn Suddaby observed in Bradford that “the Supreme Court has yet to speak on the scope of a school’s authority to discipline a student for speech that does not occur on school grounds or at a school-sponsored event.”
Silence from the Supreme Court
Indeed, a key problem here is that the US Supreme Court has never ruled in a case involving the off-campus speech rights of students in the digital era.
Public school students do possess First Amendment speech rights, although those rights are not the same as those of adults in nonschool settings.
A case in point is the Supreme Court’s famous 1969 proclamation in Tinker v Des Moines Independent Community School District that students do not
“shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
A key problem has been the silence of the Supreme Court on free speech rights of students. Jeff Kubina, CC BY-SA
In this case, a divided court upheld the right of students to wear to school black armbands emblazoned with peace signs as a form of political protest against the war in Vietnam. The majority reasoned that such speech could be stopped only if school officials had actual facts to believe it would lead to a substantial and material disruption of the educational atmosphere.
But Tinker was an on-campus speech case. And although the Supreme Court has considered three more student speech cases since Tinker, none involved either off-campus or digital expression.
A chance to resolve the issue
Schools today are trying to exert their authority far beyond the schoolhouse gate. Some courts have allowed these efforts and others have rejected them, but now the Supreme Court has a prime opportunity to resolve the matter in a case called Bell v Itawamba County School Board.
In January 2011, a Mississippi high school student, Taylor Bell, was suspended from Itawamba Agricultural High School after he posted, while away from campus during nonschool hours, a homemade rap video to Facebook and YouTube.
In the video, Bell criticizes in no uncertain terms two male teachers for their alleged sexual harassment of minor female students. A version of rap that describes the resulting controversy is available online.
In August 2015, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit narrowly ruled that high school officials in Mississippi did not violate the First Amendment speech rights of Bell when they punished him for posting the video because it allegedly threatened two teachers.
In a ruling against Taylor Bell, the Fifth Circuit majority concluded that the rule from the Tinker case applies to off-campus speech:
when a student intentionally directs at the school community speech reasonably understood by school officials to threaten, harass, and intimidate a teacher, even when such speech originated, and was disseminated, off-campus without the use of school resources.
One of the judges in the case, James Dennis, writing in dissent, ripped into the majority for broadly proclaiming “that a public school board is constitutionally empowered to punish a student whistleblower for his purely off-campus Internet speech publicizing a matter of public concern.”
Judge Dennis stressed that the rule from Tinker, which requires school officials to reasonably predict a substantial and material disruption will be caused by speech before it can be stopped, does not apply to off-campus speech cases.
Why the Supreme Court should hear the Taylor Bell case
Some minors inevitably will post and upload – while away from campus and using their own digital communication devices – allegedly disparaging, offensive or threatening messages and images about fellow students, teachers and school officials on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat.
The key question, then, is whether and to what extent public schools, consistent with the First Amendment, may discipline students for their off-campus speech.
In November 2015, Bell filed a petition with the US Supreme Court asking it to hear his case.
As Bell’s attorneys argue, the court should take the case because whether or not Tinker applies to off-campus speech cases has “vexed school officials and courts across the country.”
Briefs from the attorneys for the school are due January 20, and the court will decide whether to hear Bell later this spring.
The bottom line is this: public school students deserve the right to know, pre-posting and pre-texting, what their First Amendment rights are when they are away from campus.
They must, in other words, be given fair notice. The court should hear Bell to let them know precisely what their rights are. It is an issue not likely to go away soon.
