I will finish with media and communications today with a look at more signs that the Clinton neo-liberals and Bush neo-cons are creating an autocratic system of media that allows only a corporate state message just as Iran does with its religious autocracy and China does with its corporate state autocracy.
Autocracy means a repressive,abusive control of government by a few wealthy people.
The examples of citizens around the world protesting the closing of their National Post Offices and growing telecom rates and consolidation shows what a society having strong labor and justice organization leadership does. The fact that Maryland is ground zero for all policy that leads to this consolidation and repression of media is why there is no education of public policy. Maryland's Post Office unions came out to protest but almost no citizens were there to support those protests----WHY IS THAT? In Baltimore it is fear-----fear of being placed on a list----fear of losing jobs----fear of losing access to schools and/or social services.
FEAR IN BALTIMORE GIVES BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT AND VERY NEO-CONSERVATIVE JOHNS HOPKINS CONTROL TO MOVE VERY AUTOCRATIC POLICY THROUGH WITH POLITICIANS RUNNING AS DEMOCRATS.
Americans are increasingly using social media rather than the US mail to communicate. The dependency of Americans on internet and cell phone technology is almost complete. Now, as these corporations become one massive corporation----these avenues disappear. Zuckerberg's Facebook can disappear in a minute as Zuckerberg has divested his billions and could care less if Facebook was around. There goes Cindy Walsh's blog! Johns Hopkins likes to claim that it is the source of Facebook with Zuckerberg having been a student at Hopkins for a while and I believe it is true---it is the greatest spying and surveillance method ever and Hopkins is NSA and spying and surveillance. (NOTE THAT SPYING AND SURVEILLANCE IS NOT IN THE DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM AND YET----ALL OF BALTIMORE'S POLS WORK FOR JOHNS HOPKINS AND RUN AS DEMOCRATS!) As soon as these global corporations have a grip on government they will be better served if you and I cannot communicate at all.
Social media technology is a good thing but as with all good science in the hands of sociopaths that live to lie, cheat, and steal to maximize wealth----it is being used for bad things. The immediate danger is the loss of Post Office communications for the public alternative. It still offers a method of privacy in communications and these global corporations and their pols hate that privacy and affordability.
How the NSA & FBI made Facebook the perfect mass surveillance tool
Image Credit: ansik May 15, 2014 6:48 AM
Harrison Weber Venture Beat
The National Security Agency and the FBI teamed up in October 2010 to develop techniques for turning Facebook into a surveillance tool.
Documents released alongside security journalist Glenn Greenwald’s new book, “No Place To Hide,” reveal the NSA and FBI partnership, in which the two agencies developed techniques for exploiting Facebook chats, capturing private photos, collecting IP addresses, and gathering private profile data.
According to the slides below, the agencies’ goal for such collection was to capture “a very rich source of information on targets,” including “personal details, ‘pattern of life,’ connections to associates, [and] media.”
NSA documents make painfully clear how the agencies collected information “by exploiting inherent weaknesses in Facebook’s security model” through its use of the popular Akamai content delivery network. The NSA describes its methods as “assumed authentication,” and “security through obscurity.”
The slide below shows how the NSA and U.K. spy agency GCHQ also worked together to “obtain profile and album images.”
Two months ago, following a series of Facebook-related NSA spying leaks, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg stated in a blog post that he’s “confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the U.S. government.”
According to a report by The Intercept, the above slides do not reveal the NSA’s Facebook surveillance program in full. The report states that the NSA also “disguises itself as a fake Facebook server” to perform “man-in-the-middle” and “man-on-the-side” attacks and spread malware [below].
As we wrote at the time, the “NSA’s Facebook targeting is reportedly a response to the declining success of other malware injection techniques. Previous techniques included the use of “spam emails that trick targets into clicking a malicious link.”
Following the report, released in March, Zuckerberg said, “When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government.”
Zuckerberg claimed he disapproved of the NSA’s actions and said that he’s spoken to president Barack Obama by phone to “express [his] frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future.”
_______________________________________
In BAltimore there is a huge scandal in Baltimore City Hall over Mayor Rawlings-Blake and this VOIP messager phone system that was installed at great cost in all phones in City Hall . Why would a city teetering on bankruptcy choose to spend public revenue on the most expensive phone system around?
Well, because Johns Hopkins told Mayor Rawlings-Blake to do that. No Maryland media outlet tells the tale of Hopkins/Facebook/surveillance even though it is in our own back yard. Let's state the obvious-----placing government administrative communications on FACEBOOK VOIP allows both easy surveillance of everything talked about in government offices and it ties all of government communications to a global communications network as Facebook is building. Mind you, Zuckerberg created Facebook not as a social media outlet but as the fastest way to move global communications onto one giant global corporation.
REMEMBER, FACEBOOK ALLOWED ONLY A FEW OF THE RICHEST PEOPLE TO INVEST IN THIS CORPORATION AS IT WAS GROWING---THEY ARE THE MAJOR SHAREHOLDERS.
So, Baltimore's Mayor Rawlings-Blake along with other city mayors around the country are tying government phones to this global corporate and heavily surveilled media outlet. They don't want our elected officials able to talk about anything happening outside these very corrupt city halls!
THIS IS WHAT TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT AND GLOBAL CORPORATE TRIBUNAL RULE LOOKS LIKE-----AND THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF YOUR LOCAL POLITICIANS INSTALLING TPP STRUCTURES IN YOUR GOVERNMENT OFFICES----
VOIP calls with Messenger and WhatsApp, call quality will improve
Image Credit: Daniel Terdiman/VentureBeat April 22, 2015 2:56 PM
Daniel Terdiman
Successful CMOs achieve growth by leveraging technology. Join us for GrowthBeat Summit on June 1-2 in Boston, where we'll discuss how to merge creativity with technology to drive growth. Space is limited. Request your personal invitation here! Facebook’s Messenger app accounts for more than 10 percent of global Internet phone calls, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today. And as the company’s WhatsApp messaging service begins offering VOIP calling to iOS and Android users, that number will only go up, in particular because more users means better and better quality calls.
In response to a question during its quarterly earnings conference call today, Zuckerberg said the company has no plans to charge for any of its VOIP or messaging services. He also said that as the global community of users of services like Messenger and WhatsApp grows towards 2 billion people, the quality of calls made using those tools will increase. And that will lead to more people making calls.
Zuckerberg argued that call quality is a function of a critical mass of users. But because Messenger and WhatsApp now each have at least 700 million users — Messenger just hit 800 million — voice calling is catching on among users.
“We’re pretty confident that because of the higher quality calling you can get,” Zuckerberg said, “this will continue growing quickly.”
Today, Facebook reported quarterly earnings of $3.54 billion, up 42 percent year-over-year. It also reported that it now has 1.44 billion monthly active users. All told, 73 percent of its $3.32 billion in advertising revenue came from mobile ads.
____________________________________________
Clinton neo-liberals Feinstein and Durbin are trying as hard as they can to limit free speech and journalism with law that tries to define journalism as a salaried employee of an entity like a corporation or corporate foundation. These are people running as Democrats working to reign in who is protected by Freedom of Press and speech. Republican voters are just as protective as progressive Democrats of Freedom of Press so this language traveling through a Congress full of Clinton neo-liberals and Bush neo-cons has a good chance of moving forward. Below this article you see this language failed in the first rounds of Federal court cases but we have a very global corporate Supreme Court waiting to receive this argument.
The tying of this legislation to Wikileaks is important in that many Americans did not like the Wikileaks release of classified information. So, many Americans will look at this as simply protecting national security. It is far more than that. Defining who is a journalist protected by Constitutional rights and using broad language sets the stage for a very narrow protection of journalists working for corporate media our foundations. These journalists are not holding power accountable-----the journalists it targets are the huge number of investigative journalists downsized from newsrooms and academics like myself who can no longer speak out through corporate university venues. In other words----corporate media hires journalists that WILL NOT hold power accountable or ask the real questions.
Feinstein was told to do this because she already had decided to leave the politics. The fact that the two Senators wanting the Democratic Senate leadership are sponsoring these bills that have nothing to do with protecting journalists no matter the spin----Clinton neo-liberals limit Equal Protection and free speech and are not Democrats----progressive liberals protect equal protection and free speech.
Sen. Feinstein During 'Shield' Law Debate: 'Real' Journalists Draw Salaries
from the protection-based-on-exclusivity...-what-a-wonderful-idea dept Legislators are still trying to put together a national "shield" law for journalists (this is the third such effort at a national level) and, as usual, are bogged down in a semantic debate about who should qualify for these protections. Despite "freedom of the press" being hardwired into the system and the fact that a government effort to protect journalists from its own actions (seeking to identify whistleblowers and sources in order to punish them or shut them up) lies somewhere between "ironic" and "disingenuous," the pursuit of a credible "shield" law continues.
The bill's definition of "journalist" seems straightforward enough.
The bill defines a journalist as a person who has a "primary intent to investigate events and procure material" in order to inform the public by regularly gathering information through interviews and observations. It also adds this stipulation, which is a bit more troublesome. The person also must intend to report on the news at the start of obtaining any protected information and must plan to publish that news. I can see this stipulation working against whoever the government feels is worthy of the title "journalist." News develops. It seldom has a distinct starting point. Of course, if someone is a journalist, it stands to reason that they're always "planning" to publish their findings. But that might be a lot harder to prove when the government starts slinging subpoenas.
If someone sends a tip to a journalist, it may not be immediately evident that it is newsworthy. It might be some time before it's determined to be important, newsworthy and its source in need of protection. It's a strange stipulation and one that seems to poke some compromising holes in the "shield."
But onto the "who's really a journalist" argument. Some elected officials feel the language in the bill isn't specific enough. One in particular, Dianne Feinstein, repeated the stupid but inevitable phrase that always accompanies discussions related to shield laws: Feinstein suggested that the definition comprise only journalists who make salaries, saying it should be applied just to "real reporters." This is nothing new for Feinstein, who's (along with Sen. Dick Durbin) previously made the argument that acts of journalism can only be performed by major news agencies, cutting everyone else out of the protective loop. This is a protective move based partially on ignorance and partially on the reality that major news networks are easier to control, seeing as most aren't willing to give up access to the Beltway by pissing off its residents.
Sadly, this sort of reactionary ignorance isn't limited solely to government representatives. This same sort of statement has been made by published authors to demean the self-published and by old school journalists to demean bloggers, serial Tweeters and pretty much everyone not associated with a sinking masthead. Whenever someone assumes they're capable of determining who is or isn't a real whatever, they're usually speaking from a position of privilege, one that can only be maintained as long as the status remains quo.
The same goes for government officials arguing over the definition of "journalist." It's someone who performs the act of journalism. It's as simple as that. But if you accept this definition, then you put the government at a greater "risk" of not being able to pursue and punish those who expose its wrongdoing. Feinstein makes this governmental fear explicit in another comment. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., wondered whether it could be used to provide protections to employees of WikiLeaks, an organization that allows anonymous sources to leak information to the public.
"I’m concerned this would provide special privilege to those who are not reporters at all," she said. Two things to note: One, the government would hate to see people like Snowden or Manning go unpunished because someone at Wikileaks was able to deflect subpoenas and court orders with these protections. Second, this isn't just a government push -- the news industry itself has expressed a willingness to sacrifice Wikileaks in order to expedite passage of a shield law.
It seems rather unlikely the government would extend this protection to entities like Wikileaks (especially not with major news agencies on board with selling out Wikileaks, etc.), but at least Sen. Schumer pointed out that Feinstein's belief that "real" equals "drawing a salary" was a very ignorant take on the current reality. "The world has changed. We’re very careful in this bill to distinguish journalists from those who shouldn’t be protected, WikiLeaks and all those, and we’ve ensured that," Schumer said. "But there are people who write and do real journalism, in different ways than we’re used to. They should not be excluded from this bill." If this bill is ever going to provide real protection for journalists, it will first have to recognize that journalism isn't defined by the journalist's employer, paycheck or association with a large media company. It's an act and it can be performed by nearly anyone. More importantly, the bill should be equally as concerned with building in strong consequences for government actions that undermine this protection. Without these, entities like the DOJ will hardly be dissuaded from using "unofficial channels" to seize phone records or trace email conversations in order to hunt down protected sources.
_________________________________________
The Federal Courts may protect from such laws now but we know the Supreme Court has been loaded with global corporate justices that will rule towards this elimination of equal protection and free speech. Her job as she leaves politics was to send this proposed law through the legal channels that bring it to reality down the road. It is the same as Bill Clinton as Governor of Arkansas taking to court public media's right to exclude political candidates from debates----that initial court case sparked all of the court rulings that states like Maryland want to use to completely deregulate the election requirements of media.
It matters who you support and elect in primaries. We will need pols in office that will enforce anti-trust and monopoly laws that keep media and communications open and free. In Baltimore we have politicians that move all of this deregulation and consolidation forward at the local level and openly allow the most captured of media environments in the country.
YOUR POLITICIANS----YOUR LABOR AND JUSTICE ORGANIZATION LEADERS ARE THE PEOPLE WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN SHOUTING FOR THESE SEVERAL YEARS AGAINST THIS MEDIA CAPTURE. GET RID OF THESE GLOBAL CORPORATE NEO-LIBERALS AND BUSH NEO-CONS!
Autocracy means a repressive,abusive control of government by a few wealthy people.
The examples of citizens around the world protesting the closing of their National Post Offices and growing telecom rates and consolidation shows what a society having strong labor and justice organization leadership does. The fact that Maryland is ground zero for all policy that leads to this consolidation and repression of media is why there is no education of public policy. Maryland's Post Office unions came out to protest but almost no citizens were there to support those protests----WHY IS THAT? In Baltimore it is fear-----fear of being placed on a list----fear of losing jobs----fear of losing access to schools and/or social services.
FEAR IN BALTIMORE GIVES BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT AND VERY NEO-CONSERVATIVE JOHNS HOPKINS CONTROL TO MOVE VERY AUTOCRATIC POLICY THROUGH WITH POLITICIANS RUNNING AS DEMOCRATS.
Americans are increasingly using social media rather than the US mail to communicate. The dependency of Americans on internet and cell phone technology is almost complete. Now, as these corporations become one massive corporation----these avenues disappear. Zuckerberg's Facebook can disappear in a minute as Zuckerberg has divested his billions and could care less if Facebook was around. There goes Cindy Walsh's blog! Johns Hopkins likes to claim that it is the source of Facebook with Zuckerberg having been a student at Hopkins for a while and I believe it is true---it is the greatest spying and surveillance method ever and Hopkins is NSA and spying and surveillance. (NOTE THAT SPYING AND SURVEILLANCE IS NOT IN THE DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM AND YET----ALL OF BALTIMORE'S POLS WORK FOR JOHNS HOPKINS AND RUN AS DEMOCRATS!) As soon as these global corporations have a grip on government they will be better served if you and I cannot communicate at all.
Social media technology is a good thing but as with all good science in the hands of sociopaths that live to lie, cheat, and steal to maximize wealth----it is being used for bad things. The immediate danger is the loss of Post Office communications for the public alternative. It still offers a method of privacy in communications and these global corporations and their pols hate that privacy and affordability.
How the NSA & FBI made Facebook the perfect mass surveillance tool
Image Credit: ansik May 15, 2014 6:48 AM
Harrison Weber Venture Beat
The National Security Agency and the FBI teamed up in October 2010 to develop techniques for turning Facebook into a surveillance tool.
Documents released alongside security journalist Glenn Greenwald’s new book, “No Place To Hide,” reveal the NSA and FBI partnership, in which the two agencies developed techniques for exploiting Facebook chats, capturing private photos, collecting IP addresses, and gathering private profile data.
According to the slides below, the agencies’ goal for such collection was to capture “a very rich source of information on targets,” including “personal details, ‘pattern of life,’ connections to associates, [and] media.”
NSA documents make painfully clear how the agencies collected information “by exploiting inherent weaknesses in Facebook’s security model” through its use of the popular Akamai content delivery network. The NSA describes its methods as “assumed authentication,” and “security through obscurity.”
The slide below shows how the NSA and U.K. spy agency GCHQ also worked together to “obtain profile and album images.”
Two months ago, following a series of Facebook-related NSA spying leaks, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg stated in a blog post that he’s “confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the U.S. government.”
According to a report by The Intercept, the above slides do not reveal the NSA’s Facebook surveillance program in full. The report states that the NSA also “disguises itself as a fake Facebook server” to perform “man-in-the-middle” and “man-on-the-side” attacks and spread malware [below].
As we wrote at the time, the “NSA’s Facebook targeting is reportedly a response to the declining success of other malware injection techniques. Previous techniques included the use of “spam emails that trick targets into clicking a malicious link.”
Following the report, released in March, Zuckerberg said, “When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government.”
Zuckerberg claimed he disapproved of the NSA’s actions and said that he’s spoken to president Barack Obama by phone to “express [his] frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future.”
_______________________________________
In BAltimore there is a huge scandal in Baltimore City Hall over Mayor Rawlings-Blake and this VOIP messager phone system that was installed at great cost in all phones in City Hall . Why would a city teetering on bankruptcy choose to spend public revenue on the most expensive phone system around?
Well, because Johns Hopkins told Mayor Rawlings-Blake to do that. No Maryland media outlet tells the tale of Hopkins/Facebook/surveillance even though it is in our own back yard. Let's state the obvious-----placing government administrative communications on FACEBOOK VOIP allows both easy surveillance of everything talked about in government offices and it ties all of government communications to a global communications network as Facebook is building. Mind you, Zuckerberg created Facebook not as a social media outlet but as the fastest way to move global communications onto one giant global corporation.
REMEMBER, FACEBOOK ALLOWED ONLY A FEW OF THE RICHEST PEOPLE TO INVEST IN THIS CORPORATION AS IT WAS GROWING---THEY ARE THE MAJOR SHAREHOLDERS.
So, Baltimore's Mayor Rawlings-Blake along with other city mayors around the country are tying government phones to this global corporate and heavily surveilled media outlet. They don't want our elected officials able to talk about anything happening outside these very corrupt city halls!
THIS IS WHAT TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT AND GLOBAL CORPORATE TRIBUNAL RULE LOOKS LIKE-----AND THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF YOUR LOCAL POLITICIANS INSTALLING TPP STRUCTURES IN YOUR GOVERNMENT OFFICES----
VOIP calls with Messenger and WhatsApp, call quality will improve
Image Credit: Daniel Terdiman/VentureBeat April 22, 2015 2:56 PM
Daniel Terdiman
Successful CMOs achieve growth by leveraging technology. Join us for GrowthBeat Summit on June 1-2 in Boston, where we'll discuss how to merge creativity with technology to drive growth. Space is limited. Request your personal invitation here! Facebook’s Messenger app accounts for more than 10 percent of global Internet phone calls, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today. And as the company’s WhatsApp messaging service begins offering VOIP calling to iOS and Android users, that number will only go up, in particular because more users means better and better quality calls.
In response to a question during its quarterly earnings conference call today, Zuckerberg said the company has no plans to charge for any of its VOIP or messaging services. He also said that as the global community of users of services like Messenger and WhatsApp grows towards 2 billion people, the quality of calls made using those tools will increase. And that will lead to more people making calls.
Zuckerberg argued that call quality is a function of a critical mass of users. But because Messenger and WhatsApp now each have at least 700 million users — Messenger just hit 800 million — voice calling is catching on among users.
“We’re pretty confident that because of the higher quality calling you can get,” Zuckerberg said, “this will continue growing quickly.”
Today, Facebook reported quarterly earnings of $3.54 billion, up 42 percent year-over-year. It also reported that it now has 1.44 billion monthly active users. All told, 73 percent of its $3.32 billion in advertising revenue came from mobile ads.
____________________________________________
Clinton neo-liberals Feinstein and Durbin are trying as hard as they can to limit free speech and journalism with law that tries to define journalism as a salaried employee of an entity like a corporation or corporate foundation. These are people running as Democrats working to reign in who is protected by Freedom of Press and speech. Republican voters are just as protective as progressive Democrats of Freedom of Press so this language traveling through a Congress full of Clinton neo-liberals and Bush neo-cons has a good chance of moving forward. Below this article you see this language failed in the first rounds of Federal court cases but we have a very global corporate Supreme Court waiting to receive this argument.
The tying of this legislation to Wikileaks is important in that many Americans did not like the Wikileaks release of classified information. So, many Americans will look at this as simply protecting national security. It is far more than that. Defining who is a journalist protected by Constitutional rights and using broad language sets the stage for a very narrow protection of journalists working for corporate media our foundations. These journalists are not holding power accountable-----the journalists it targets are the huge number of investigative journalists downsized from newsrooms and academics like myself who can no longer speak out through corporate university venues. In other words----corporate media hires journalists that WILL NOT hold power accountable or ask the real questions.
Feinstein was told to do this because she already had decided to leave the politics. The fact that the two Senators wanting the Democratic Senate leadership are sponsoring these bills that have nothing to do with protecting journalists no matter the spin----Clinton neo-liberals limit Equal Protection and free speech and are not Democrats----progressive liberals protect equal protection and free speech.
Sen. Feinstein During 'Shield' Law Debate: 'Real' Journalists Draw Salaries
from the protection-based-on-exclusivity...-what-a-wonderful-idea dept Legislators are still trying to put together a national "shield" law for journalists (this is the third such effort at a national level) and, as usual, are bogged down in a semantic debate about who should qualify for these protections. Despite "freedom of the press" being hardwired into the system and the fact that a government effort to protect journalists from its own actions (seeking to identify whistleblowers and sources in order to punish them or shut them up) lies somewhere between "ironic" and "disingenuous," the pursuit of a credible "shield" law continues.
The bill's definition of "journalist" seems straightforward enough.
The bill defines a journalist as a person who has a "primary intent to investigate events and procure material" in order to inform the public by regularly gathering information through interviews and observations. It also adds this stipulation, which is a bit more troublesome. The person also must intend to report on the news at the start of obtaining any protected information and must plan to publish that news. I can see this stipulation working against whoever the government feels is worthy of the title "journalist." News develops. It seldom has a distinct starting point. Of course, if someone is a journalist, it stands to reason that they're always "planning" to publish their findings. But that might be a lot harder to prove when the government starts slinging subpoenas.
If someone sends a tip to a journalist, it may not be immediately evident that it is newsworthy. It might be some time before it's determined to be important, newsworthy and its source in need of protection. It's a strange stipulation and one that seems to poke some compromising holes in the "shield."
But onto the "who's really a journalist" argument. Some elected officials feel the language in the bill isn't specific enough. One in particular, Dianne Feinstein, repeated the stupid but inevitable phrase that always accompanies discussions related to shield laws: Feinstein suggested that the definition comprise only journalists who make salaries, saying it should be applied just to "real reporters." This is nothing new for Feinstein, who's (along with Sen. Dick Durbin) previously made the argument that acts of journalism can only be performed by major news agencies, cutting everyone else out of the protective loop. This is a protective move based partially on ignorance and partially on the reality that major news networks are easier to control, seeing as most aren't willing to give up access to the Beltway by pissing off its residents.
Sadly, this sort of reactionary ignorance isn't limited solely to government representatives. This same sort of statement has been made by published authors to demean the self-published and by old school journalists to demean bloggers, serial Tweeters and pretty much everyone not associated with a sinking masthead. Whenever someone assumes they're capable of determining who is or isn't a real whatever, they're usually speaking from a position of privilege, one that can only be maintained as long as the status remains quo.
The same goes for government officials arguing over the definition of "journalist." It's someone who performs the act of journalism. It's as simple as that. But if you accept this definition, then you put the government at a greater "risk" of not being able to pursue and punish those who expose its wrongdoing. Feinstein makes this governmental fear explicit in another comment. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., wondered whether it could be used to provide protections to employees of WikiLeaks, an organization that allows anonymous sources to leak information to the public.
"I’m concerned this would provide special privilege to those who are not reporters at all," she said. Two things to note: One, the government would hate to see people like Snowden or Manning go unpunished because someone at Wikileaks was able to deflect subpoenas and court orders with these protections. Second, this isn't just a government push -- the news industry itself has expressed a willingness to sacrifice Wikileaks in order to expedite passage of a shield law.
It seems rather unlikely the government would extend this protection to entities like Wikileaks (especially not with major news agencies on board with selling out Wikileaks, etc.), but at least Sen. Schumer pointed out that Feinstein's belief that "real" equals "drawing a salary" was a very ignorant take on the current reality. "The world has changed. We’re very careful in this bill to distinguish journalists from those who shouldn’t be protected, WikiLeaks and all those, and we’ve ensured that," Schumer said. "But there are people who write and do real journalism, in different ways than we’re used to. They should not be excluded from this bill." If this bill is ever going to provide real protection for journalists, it will first have to recognize that journalism isn't defined by the journalist's employer, paycheck or association with a large media company. It's an act and it can be performed by nearly anyone. More importantly, the bill should be equally as concerned with building in strong consequences for government actions that undermine this protection. Without these, entities like the DOJ will hardly be dissuaded from using "unofficial channels" to seize phone records or trace email conversations in order to hunt down protected sources.
_________________________________________
The Federal Courts may protect from such laws now but we know the Supreme Court has been loaded with global corporate justices that will rule towards this elimination of equal protection and free speech. Her job as she leaves politics was to send this proposed law through the legal channels that bring it to reality down the road. It is the same as Bill Clinton as Governor of Arkansas taking to court public media's right to exclude political candidates from debates----that initial court case sparked all of the court rulings that states like Maryland want to use to completely deregulate the election requirements of media.
It matters who you support and elect in primaries. We will need pols in office that will enforce anti-trust and monopoly laws that keep media and communications open and free. In Baltimore we have politicians that move all of this deregulation and consolidation forward at the local level and openly allow the most captured of media environments in the country.
YOUR POLITICIANS----YOUR LABOR AND JUSTICE ORGANIZATION LEADERS ARE THE PEOPLE WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN SHOUTING FOR THESE SEVERAL YEARS AGAINST THIS MEDIA CAPTURE. GET RID OF THESE GLOBAL CORPORATE NEO-LIBERALS AND BUSH NEO-CONS!
- HQ » Politics » Federal Judge: Bloggers Same As Journalists
Federal Judge: Bloggers Same As Journalists - by Whoopie • 18 January, 2014 •
That squeaking sound you hear is Dianne Feinstein grinding her teeth… [AP] A federal appeals court in Oregon ruled Friday that bloggers, citizen journalists, and the public have the same First Amendment protections as journalists when sued for defamation, if the issue is of public concern; plaintiffs have to prove negligence to win damages.
This means that Standards set by a 1974 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Gertz v. Robert Welch Inc., apply to everyone, not just journalists.
“It makes clear that bloggers have the same First Amendment rights as professional journalists,” he said.
Last September, Dianne Feinstein wrote an amendment aimed at eliminating certain free speech rights for bloggers. She wants to regulate free speech with an amendment to the Free Flow of Information Act. Don’t be fooled by the title. It means the exact opposite. They don’t want free flow of information.
The Amendment defines a “covered journalist” as someone who gathers and reports news for “an entity or service that disseminates news and information.” The definition includes freelancers, part-timers and student journalists, and it permits a judge to go further and extend the protections to any “legitimate news-gathering activities.”
She says bloggers and terrorists are not to be covered by the Shield laws.
Read the whole deal:
I don’t know what Feinstein’s problem is. If she isn’t trying to deny American citizens their 2nd Amendment rights, she’s trying to limit our 1st Amendment rights
_________________________________________
I want to end with one example of how US media is becoming Chinese autocratic media----and no one does this better than Baltimore.
The media coverage of the latest death by police in Baltimore is now national so Baltimore City Hall and Mayor Rawlings-Blake is now fending bad publicity at a national level that cannot be controlled by local media. The attempt at containment happened yesterday outside of Baltimore City Hall when what Baltimore calls the '15 black ministers' had a press conference that all of the media cameras fell on. The 15 black ministers are the establishment ministers who tell their congregations to vote for the worst of politicians connected to Baltimore Development and Johns Hopkins. Everybody knows they are captured to bad politics and they know the politicians these black ministers support are behind all of the policies adopted by the Baltimore City police and its Police Chief. Jamal Bryant and Mayor Rawlings-Blake sat silent as over 20 police killings of innocent citizens occurred over a few years and did not have a voice at all until the Ferguson event that received national attention. Then both were off to Ferguson pretending to be appalled at this one killing after being silent for over 20 killings in their own Baltimore. These 15 black ministers are the source of capture in political speech----in media events-----in public policy education and they receive much of Baltimore City public revenue for social services.
EVERYONE UNDERSTANDS THIS IS WHY BALTIMORE HAS NO PUBLIC VOICE IN MEDIA.
So, I listen to these black ministers and I am glad they are coming forward but at the same time they are having people testifying that the mayor's office is open for people with complaints and that they feel she is listing to them NONE OF WHICH IS TRUE. Jamal Bryant adds that Obama's pick of Loretta Lynch for US Attorney General was a good sign----as if Eric Holder is not the problem for suspended Rule of Law and Equal Protection that has led to all of these civil rights and liberty attacks against the American people. LYNCH IS SIMPLY A GLOBAL CORPORATE LAWYER JUST LIKE HOLDER AND WE WANT TO STOP ACTING LIKE THEY ARE ABOUT CIVIL RIGHTS!
ALL BALTIMORE MEDIA WERE STANDING THERE AT A PODIUM OF THESE MINISTERS FILMING THIS ONE STAGED EVENT WITH ALMOST NO BALTIMORE CITIZENS LISTENING TO THESE CAPTURED MINISTERS.
Meanwhile you see below two of Baltimore's leading police brutality activists who should be on the media being jailed for no reason and no voice in the media. The only way I know of their jailing is through social media ----no Baltimore media coverage of false jailing of real police brutality activists.
'I was just placed under arrest by Baltimore Police while taking pictures at the #FreddieGray demonstration. Yes, THAT Freddie Gray. The one they killed.
No one can tell us what we've been charged with.
This status being sent from inside the police station.
We are awaiting processing'.
Roland Martin, Pastor Jamal Bryant & Jeff Johnson On Delay Of Loretta Lynch Nomination- Apr 22, 2015 By Roland Martin Black American Web .
\Roland Martin, Jeff Johnson and Pastor Jamal Bryant discuss the delay of Loretta Lynch’s nomination as the first black, female Attorney General of the United States.
“After over a 165 days this is the longest time its taken. This is a qualified woman. This is a qualified legal professional. This senate needs to move to confirm her, not because she’s a woman,” Johnson said.
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