Given these , I have to wonder whether our local bloggers are also applauding the White House attempt to impose its own restrictions on the press pool for network news : Thursday, CNN, NBC/MSNBC, ABC and CBS all refused to go along with an attempt to toss Fox from a media pool that was supposed to conduct interviews with White House pay czar Kenneth Feinberg, who was unveiling restrictions on pay for executives of companies that accepted bailout money from the government. Under an arrangement designed to save the networks money, a crew from one network shoots some White House events for all five outlets. The pool camera was supposed to shoot each network’s separate interview with Feinberg, but the networks were notified that Fox, which has been part of the pool arrangement since 1997, would not be allowed to question him. The Obama administration relented after the other networks, in a gesture of solidarity, said they would take a pass on interviewing Feinberg if Fox was kept out of th...

From AP : Court papers filed Thursday show that prison officials twice rejected requests by inmate Ahmed Omar Abu Ali to read "Dreams from my Father" and "The Audacity of Hope." The books contained material "potentially detrimental to national security," prison officials said in two separate rejections from August and September. On Friday, bureau spokeswoman Traci Billingsley said the bureau reversed course in November and let him read the books. Damn. All you people rooting around for the birth certificate and the secret Muslim decoder ring were missing it: Virginia's Bureau of Prisons already knew the real top-secret Obama shit was in the books. Which may only go to prove that nobody actually ever read them.

... and tell China what to do with its pending new orders for castrated PCs. From WSJ : BEIJING -- China plans to require that all personal computers sold in the country as of July 1 be shipped with software that blocks access to certain Web sites, a move that could give government censors unprecedented control over how Chinese users access the Internet. The government, which has told global PC makers of the requirement but has yet to announce it to the public, says the effort is aimed at protecting young people from "harmful" content. The primary target is pornography, says the main developer of the software, a company that has ties to China's security ministry and military. So here's the question: will the Federal government and/or American businesses decide to go right ahead and take the profits available from censorship or not? As a libertarian, I know it's their free choice, and I expect the argument that somebody in France or Germany or Korea will sell neut...

... which is what , which is what Congressmen Gus Bilirakus (R-FL) and Joseph Crowley (D-NY) apparently have in mind with proposed legislation that would make it illegal for satellite carriers in the US to allow the broadcast of Al-Manar, Al-Aqsa, and other radical Muslim channels. In fact, the bill would legally define those satellite carriers as terrorist organizations if they broadcast these channels. Don't get me wrong: I am not a lover of programming inciting people to kill Americans or Jews, or soliciting money for Hamas, but.... 1) In this broadband world you are nuts to believe that this action will do anything to prevent their message spread, since you can see their programming on the web virtually any time. 2) This legislation, if passed, would then allow the government to move in the direction of making satellite carriers legally liable for the content of every single channel they carry. If experience is any guide, this will eventually lead to them becoming more and mo...

From Thoughts on Freedom ( where they aren't allowed to tell you which websites you can get fined $11,000/day for linking to, because the list is--no shit--secret ), here's the story of Wikileaks fighting back. Wikileaks published the original list of now- verboten sites , and Wiksters are not about to knuckle under to the jackbooted thugs of censorship. Their strategy? We'll extradite the bastards to Sweden: WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) Thu Mar 19 23:07:20 EDT 2009 “Wikileaks to Conroy: Go after our source and we will go after you.” The Stockholm based publisher of Wikileaks today issued a warning to the Australian Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Steven Conroy, who is responsible for Australian internet censorship. Senator Conroy issued an official media release yesterday in response to Wikileaks’ release of last year’s confidential Australian internet censorship blacklist. The Senator said that his department, ...

... and in that sense Andy Worthington's complete list of the 774 Gitmo detainees may (hopefully) prove sulphuric indeed. You can access the itemized listing here ; and check out Worthington's final comment: I also hope that it provides a compelling explanation of how that same government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, established a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held – at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total – were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, or international terrorism. Put that together with recent admissions --from both military officials and Congressman Jack Murtha--that success in Afghanistan won't involve the 17,0...

Before the CIA realized anybody was looking at the Shamsi air base (notice the three drones on the airstrip): After Senator Diane Feinstein slipped up (notice the strip today is suddenly sanitized): Thank The Times for this one. Information is power, which is why the State--however constituted--generally seeks to restrict it.

Thanks to Senator Diane Feinstein's slip about CIA Predator drones flying out of Pakistani bases to hit both Al Qaeda targets and civilians in Pakistan's FATA region, word is now coming out that the operation is being staged out of the Shamsi airbase in southern Pakistan. The Times has the story, and my favorite government denial of the week: A source at NCS, which is based in Denmark, confirmed that the company had been awarded the contract and had supplied the fuel to Shamsi, but declined to give further details. A spokesman for the US embassy in Pakistan told The Times: “Shamsi is not the final destination.” However, he declined to elaborate and denied that the US was using it as a base. “No. No. No. No. No. We unequivocally and emphatically can tell you that there is no basing of US troops in Pakistan,” he said. “There is no basing of US Air Force, Navy, Marines, Army, none, on the record and emphatically. I want that to be very clear. And that is the answer any way you w...

... I'm going to run the photo of the old Scorpions album Virgin Killer [h/t From the Barrel of a G un] that got Wikipedia censored by the European Union's Internet Watch Foundation. Here's JD at Disloyal Opposition : If you're British and having a bit of trouble accessing Wikipedia today, you can thank the censors for your research roadblocks. The Internet Watch Foundation, a regulatory organization that calls itself "an independent self-regulatory body, funded by the EU and the wider online industry," added a Wikipedia page to its almost universally used (in the UK) "notice and take-down" service, essentially putting the page on the forbidden list for British Internet users. That's all the more reason to get acquainted with technologies specifically designed to defeat censorship. The forbidden Wikipedia article is devoted to the Virgin Killer album by the German heavy metal band, The Scorpions. The naked prepubescent girl on the cover was cont...

I present this and dedicate it to Martin Luther King as long as You Tube allows it to stay online.....for they like other corporate outlets have censored it repeatedly and censored and suppressed the voice of some of the people, and by doing so, suppress the voice of all the people. For even if a person says something you do not like you should use reason, education, discussion to debate and judge your own moral conscience with them; to discuss these issues. They deserve freedom of expression just as you do. You must not censor the people if you hope to protect the First Amendment of the Constitution, and if you believe in it, as an American company, you want like Larry Page and Google, free expression and information. This film been removed from online forums more times then the controversial movie about Islam called Fitna. If you choose to censor this people, be sure we have read Henry David Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience , repeatedly. And we can use it against the "corpo...

Two potentially unrelated items: (1) Remember the TV commercial where the guy is surfing the Web and he gets the message, "You have reached the end of the Internet. Please go back."?? (2) My twins (who are twelve) are not allowed to use our computers anywhere except a common area of the house where anybody can walk up and see what they're doing (Just like I watch at least a portion of virtually ever TV show they watch). I don't need the government to censor the internet to protect my children. That's my job. But it's coming. At first the big news was how Google had reached an agreement with the People's Republic of China to provide services that would be filtered by government censors. A Harvard Law School study as far back as 2002 found over 19,000 web sites blocked to Chinese surfers. [Using a different standard, the number of blocked sites rose to 50,000.] One of the strategies that the government uses is to encourage internet surfing through mon...

From Thoughts on Freedom --the Australian Libertarian blog--comes the report that the BBC has made another of its NewSpeak coverage decisions. Henceforth, all acts of terrorism committed by people who happen to be Muslims shall be specifically categorized as "un-Islamic . I think this means that BBC writers now qualify as crime reporters for the Snooze Journal. But Great Britain's pathetic attempts at censorship pale beside the opinion of Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagenstated, that “Freedom of expression doesn’t mean the right to offend."