www.projectxfreedomofspeech.tk
WE NOW HAVE AN OFFICIAL HOMEPAGE ON TOP OF A BLOG FOR THE DOCUMENTARY!
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
SiCko!
Hey I felt it was time to check in on my blog due to the fact I haven't blog in almost 2 weeks!!! I have some things that I feel I should update people on. 1st, my favorite author/documentarian Michael More is coming out with a new movie on Friday called SiCkO. It's a documentary on Health Care in the United States and how crappy it is! I just recently started following the basis for this movie due to the fact I'm not interest in the health care situation as of this moment.
I realized though this is a great example of Freedom Of Speech and I plan on downloading illegally on the net tonight due to the fact that everything is online now a days.
Anyways i'm still working on my notes because I have to update them alittle more. While I was riding the bus home this afternoon from school I decided that I will begin sorting my documents like my webliography, notes, information on my interviewees and stuff of that nature because i'm so fucking unorganized. I plan on picking up a portfolio tomorrow and I want to get these notes done because I want to start my paper.
Anyways, i'm going to the library with Kory tomorrow to get some books and I plan on taking my laptop to work on some stuff due to the fact it's so much easier to work on stuff when i'm not in that Clark Building. Right now i'm thinking about checking in with some of my classmates like Aaron Gibson because he is doing his graduation project on the history of hip hop music and I want to get his input on freedom of speech in it. I got to start putting together my documentary though in Adobe Premier because I see those tapes ending up going lost and then i'm screwed!!!
That's what's new with my project.... I plan on being alot more active as this trimester comes to a close. I've just been going through alot of bullshit with Zinga (An Admin @ CCHS) due to the fact he is a huge bag of doosh. I'm also sick which doesn't help much!
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Plan Of Action
I have to pick what i'm going to put in my documentary and it's going to be a pain in the backside due to the fact that i'm somewhat on injured reserve due to Jam Out Genocide. Jam Out Genocide was a free speech show I sponsored under my production company, Deezie Productions. Right now I got to start my notes so I can get out early tomorrow to go to the ACLU on my half day. On a personal note, I don't know why but i'm starting to think that my want to do my graduation project is slowing going down the tubes. All my work is up to date but I just don't want to do it or anything anymore. Maybe it's just a stage i'm going through. Well my neck really hurts and im going to start doing these notes.... hopefully when I blog next I will be more positive!
Monday, June 11, 2007
Interview With Gery Steighner
Today I interviewed an editorial editor/writer at the Tribune Review by the name of Gery Steighner. It was a very informative interview as I got to get a view of then newsroom as well as got an editor's opinion on freedom of speech. I plan on putting his interview as well as Mr. Burkoff's interview raw off the production floor when I get a chance to go into the lab (Mr. Gordon Nelson's room). My next few days are going to be crazy as I gotta do notes for my grad project and taking a trip to the ACLU.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Well I Got My Interview!!
It only took a day to get one of my interviews and it's with a PITT Law Professor. Mr. John M. Burkoff... who is a LAW instructor @ the University Of Pittsburgh. I sent a email to him today to request my interview be tomorrow and i'm waiting for a word back. I've decided to put the video of my interview on YouTube.com so I can post it on my blog. Once I hear back from Mr. Burkoff I will blog it! Here is some information on Mr. Burkoff that I dug off the internet.
"In the '60's, many people went to law school to change the world. When they failed to have a massive, visible impact on the legal system, many were frustrated and disillusioned. They had the right idea, but the wrong scale of vision. What lawyers can accomplish is what might be called 'little justices.' In representing people day to day, lawyers can get justice for people and change lives for the better. If over the course of a career, a lawyer does a thousand little justices for people, that's big justice. That seems to me to be a prime reason to go to law school."
Degrees: AB, JD, University of Michigan; LLM, Harvard University.
Areas of Specialization: Criminal Law, Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Legal Ethics, Human Rights.
Currently Teaching: Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Legal Profession.
John M. Burkoff is a prolific author, teacher, public speaker, lawyer, and expert witness. He has published eleven books and more than 50 articles in the areas of criminal justice, human rights, and legal ethics. In addition, Dean Burkoff was awarded the University of Pittsburgh's
Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1987, and was the University's nominee for national Professor of the Year.
Professor Burkoff is also heavily involved with legal projects and legal education around the world. He has worked for U.S. Embassies in Burundi, Iceland, and Kenya on human rights projects, and on draft legislation or litigation for the governments of Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Ethiopia. He has been a member of the faculty of the Institute of Shipboard Education's Semester at Sea program three times, including serving as Academic Dean of its Fall 1996 Voyage and Director of the Law at Sea program in the Summer of 2001.
A nationally recognized expert on legal ethics, Professor Burkoff often serves as an expert witness or consultant, and was the Reporter for the American Bar Association's third edition revisions of the national Prosecution and Defense Function Standards, the ethical standards for the criminal bar. He was the chair of the American Bar Association Task Force that revised the professional standards for criminal trial judges. He was also the first chair of the City of Pittsburgh's Citizen's Police Review Board. A Fulbright Scholar and Ford Foundation Fellow, he is a past chairperson of the Criminal Justice Section of the Association of American Law Schools.
Professor Burkoff is also heavily involved with legal projects and legal education around the world. He has worked for U.S. Embassies in Burundi, Iceland, and Kenya on human rights projects, and on draft legislation or litigation for the governments of Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Ethiopia. He has been a member of the faculty of the Institute of Shipboard Education's Semester at Sea program three times, including serving as Academic Dean of its Fall 1996 Voyage and Director of the Law at Sea program in the Summer of 2001.
A nationally recognized expert on legal ethics, Professor Burkoff often serves as an expert witness or consultant, and was the Reporter for the American Bar Association's third edition revisions of the national Prosecution and Defense Function Standards, the ethical standards for the criminal bar. He was the chair of the American Bar Association Task Force that revised the professional standards for criminal trial judges. He was also the first chair of the City of Pittsburgh's Citizen's Police Review Board. A Fulbright Scholar and Ford Foundation Fellow, he is a past chairperson of the Criminal Justice Section of the Association of American Law Schools.
Monday, June 4, 2007
Essential & Foundation Questions
My Essential Question...
How do Americans use Freedom of Speech?
My Foundation Questions are...
1) What is freedom of speech?
2) What are examples of freedom of speech?
3) Is America the only country that honors the idea of Freedom Of Speech?
4) How is free speech censored in the classroom?
5) Is censorship a good idea?
6) Should certain opinions be censored due to unpatriotic views? (Flag burning; etc)
7) What would the world be like today if there was no freedom of speech?
8) When you think of Freedom Of Speech what do you think of?
9) Can racism be considered Freedom Of Speech?
10) What is a rally?
Can Technology Beat Internet Censors?
I found this interesting article on BBC; That discusses how people that use the internet are trying to find ways to beat the blocks that keep them from viewing certain material on the net. ENJOY!
Can technology beat the internet censors?
Paul Mason
27 Oct 06, 09:31 PM
Its predecessor is 2000 years old but the Great Firewall of China is the wonder of the online world - so powerful that it can control net access for a fifth of humanity - it represents China's determination to control what's supposed to be uncontrollable - and it works. Watch my report here. In 2004 Shi Tao, a journalist in contact with democracy websites, took notes of a government briefing concerning how he should report the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and sent it using his Yahoo email account. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison....
At his trial the prosecution presented
"Account holder information furnished by Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd which confirms that for IP address 218,76.8.20 at 11.32.17pm,,,the corresponding user information was as follows...."
You can read the full trial proceedings here: his 10 year sentence was classed as "lenient".
Yahoo had handed over crucial information linking Shi's anonymous Yahoo email account to the Chinese police.
Today Amnesty International launched a campaign to highlight the plight of bloggers, chatroom members and online journalists on the receiving end of net censorship. Amnesty's Kate Allen told us: "We want Yahoo, Google and Microsoft to stand up to values they say they espouse. Access to information, freedom on the internet. We want people who use those companies to make their views clear so we don't end up with a two-tier internet."
Yahoo told us:
"We condemn punishment of any activity internationally recognized as free expression. The case of Shi Tao is distressing to us. However, law enforcement agencies worldwide are not required to explain businesses why they demand specific information regarding certain individuals. The case is a real example of why this issue is bigger than any one company and any one industry."
But I've been finding out that techie web users themselves are inventing ways to monitor and, increasingly, get around web censorship. the Open Net Initiative now publishes regular metrics on how, when and what is banned in countries as diverse as Saudi Arabia, Iran and China.
Meanwhile I've noticed that there's a little known tool on the Google Labs website, called the Google Web Accelerator, that - as well as speeding up access to Google - just happens to encrypt your searches. I don't know whether it's available in China, but it's the kind of thing savvy web users in repressive countries are quietly using to keep their sessions away from the attention of the authorities. So three cheers for the 80:20 principle, where Google's engineers get a day a week to work on hobbies like this.
For a real heavy duty two-fingers job to regimes like Beijing, Tehran and Riyadh, users are turning to a programme called Freenet. It's a peer to peer programme that scrambles the data, spreads it around the hard disk of every user, and sends queries for data around a path so convoluted that only a London cabbie with a taxi-full of hapless tourists could match it. See it here - but beware you have no way of knowing whether you are helping host a Chinese democracy website or porn - and there is no case law in Britain yet that says scrambling the data is a defence.
Theodore Hong, one of the pioneers of Freenet, tells me there's a Chinese version that's being distributed on floppies and CDs. One of the downsides though, is that if we are all forced to start using tools like Freenet, the internet could just become a series of closed user-communities where only the trusted talk to each other and outsiders are viewed with suspicion.
So next week's UN conference on Internet Governance in Athens (sadly Newsnight's budget does not stretch to Athens since Justin Rowlatt blew it all in Jamaica) will be important. Some repressive countries want there to be more national control of access to the web, weakening ICANN, the global regulator: they might get more support than you would think because ICANN, while nominally global, is based in the USA and there's a lot of suspicion of that.
I talked to a big internet company today who are worried about this trend - and they said: why doesn't the UK government push censorship up the trade agenda, moving it into the WTO negotiations. The UK government made sympathetic noises about that, but pointed out that trade is handled by Brussels. They said no more, but it is well known that France wants a strong national influence on global controls - so the EU is not united over solutions to the kind of censorship that put Shi Tao in jail. As always hit the comment button.
Paul Mason
27 Oct 06, 09:31 PM
Its predecessor is 2000 years old but the Great Firewall of China is the wonder of the online world - so powerful that it can control net access for a fifth of humanity - it represents China's determination to control what's supposed to be uncontrollable - and it works. Watch my report here. In 2004 Shi Tao, a journalist in contact with democracy websites, took notes of a government briefing concerning how he should report the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and sent it using his Yahoo email account. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison....
At his trial the prosecution presented
"Account holder information furnished by Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd which confirms that for IP address 218,76.8.20 at 11.32.17pm,,,the corresponding user information was as follows...."
You can read the full trial proceedings here: his 10 year sentence was classed as "lenient".
Yahoo had handed over crucial information linking Shi's anonymous Yahoo email account to the Chinese police.
Today Amnesty International launched a campaign to highlight the plight of bloggers, chatroom members and online journalists on the receiving end of net censorship. Amnesty's Kate Allen told us: "We want Yahoo, Google and Microsoft to stand up to values they say they espouse. Access to information, freedom on the internet. We want people who use those companies to make their views clear so we don't end up with a two-tier internet."
Yahoo told us:
"We condemn punishment of any activity internationally recognized as free expression. The case of Shi Tao is distressing to us. However, law enforcement agencies worldwide are not required to explain businesses why they demand specific information regarding certain individuals. The case is a real example of why this issue is bigger than any one company and any one industry."
But I've been finding out that techie web users themselves are inventing ways to monitor and, increasingly, get around web censorship. the Open Net Initiative now publishes regular metrics on how, when and what is banned in countries as diverse as Saudi Arabia, Iran and China.
Meanwhile I've noticed that there's a little known tool on the Google Labs website, called the Google Web Accelerator, that - as well as speeding up access to Google - just happens to encrypt your searches. I don't know whether it's available in China, but it's the kind of thing savvy web users in repressive countries are quietly using to keep their sessions away from the attention of the authorities. So three cheers for the 80:20 principle, where Google's engineers get a day a week to work on hobbies like this.
For a real heavy duty two-fingers job to regimes like Beijing, Tehran and Riyadh, users are turning to a programme called Freenet. It's a peer to peer programme that scrambles the data, spreads it around the hard disk of every user, and sends queries for data around a path so convoluted that only a London cabbie with a taxi-full of hapless tourists could match it. See it here - but beware you have no way of knowing whether you are helping host a Chinese democracy website or porn - and there is no case law in Britain yet that says scrambling the data is a defence.
Theodore Hong, one of the pioneers of Freenet, tells me there's a Chinese version that's being distributed on floppies and CDs. One of the downsides though, is that if we are all forced to start using tools like Freenet, the internet could just become a series of closed user-communities where only the trusted talk to each other and outsiders are viewed with suspicion.
So next week's UN conference on Internet Governance in Athens (sadly Newsnight's budget does not stretch to Athens since Justin Rowlatt blew it all in Jamaica) will be important. Some repressive countries want there to be more national control of access to the web, weakening ICANN, the global regulator: they might get more support than you would think because ICANN, while nominally global, is based in the USA and there's a lot of suspicion of that.
I talked to a big internet company today who are worried about this trend - and they said: why doesn't the UK government push censorship up the trade agenda, moving it into the WTO negotiations. The UK government made sympathetic noises about that, but pointed out that trade is handled by Brussels. They said no more, but it is well known that France wants a strong national influence on global controls - so the EU is not united over solutions to the kind of censorship that put Shi Tao in jail. As always hit the comment button.
Friday, June 1, 2007
Glossary For Project X
Bill Of Rights - law specifying human rights
Censorship - suppression of something debatable
Defamation of Character - to disrespect one’s reputation by stating something negative of them
Desecration – to damage something important
First Amendment – the act of forbidding congress from deciding one’s religion, speech, assembly
or petition
Freedom – right to do or say whatever you would like
Restrict – to create a boundary for something
Self Censorship – to censor something on one’s own choice
Spoken Word – stating of one’s opinion of something verbally
Symbolism – Art of using symbols such as photos to express something
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