Censorship top to bottom

In today's newspaper, one story on top of the other (yes, an advantage of news in print is that you get information in a context someone has thought about):

First, a judge in New Mexico decided that a village can't keep residents from saying not nice things about the government at local council meetings.  So, score one for First Amendment 101, the law being  clear that those with the power to shut people up can't pick and choose among the messages they'll tolerate.

Second, in the story below that, a judge in Oregon started out strong, then whiffled on the TSA's No Fly list when she ruled that the procedures to challenge placement on the list -- or, rather, the lack of procedures, or anything else available to people who, inexplicably, find themselves there -- are unconstitutional. That's the good part. The other part is that she did nothing to create new procedures, just told Homeland Security, which oversees the Orwellian list, that they should find a way for people on that list to see the unclassified info that put them there.  Ya think maybe?

Then, on the facing page, we get the (not) news that no one in our great ally, Egypt, is going to do anything to reverse the outrageous prison sentences for 3 Al Jazeera journalists.  So, I think we can safely say that Egypt is in favor of censorship, no if's, and's or but's.

Know which way the wind blows

       A Marine meteorologist (that's Marine, as in branch of the military) has lost his security clearance, without which he can't do his job, because he refused to stop posting satire and criticism of the President on Facebook.  (Details from AP)  Sergeant Gary Stein did stuff like superimposing Obama's face on a poster for the movie "Jackass."  OMG!
       Stein's lawyer points out that he broke no law and the ACLU has trotted out that pesky First Amendment, but the Marines counter that he violated military policy, which severely limits a Marine or soldier's political speech while in uniform.  (Does this raise the question of what he was wearing when he went online?)  Apparently, the policy has been in place since the Civil War.
       Stein's postings may have been disrespectful of his commander-in-chief, but they also seem to be satire, which has been explicitly protected under the First Amendment since 1988 in Hustler v. Falwell.  Satire seeks to undermine authority, but it's doubtful that these parodies would make much difference in conducting military operations or, in this case, predicting the weather.
       More significant is that the Marines decided to go after Stein after he wrote on Facebook that he wouldn't follow unlawful orders from the prez.  That challenge -- Stein first wrote just that he wouldn't follow Obama's orders, adding "unlawful" later -- goes to the defense military resisters, such as Camilo Mejia and Ehren Watada, tried when they were prosecuted for refusing to fight in Iraq.  It relates to the "Nuremberg defense," which holds that subordinates are not liable for criminal acts they commit while following orders -- and by extension, sanctions soldiers refusal of unlawful orders.  Military and civilian judges very, very seldom allow such an argument to be introduced (and didn't in either Mejia's or Watada's trials).
       So here we have a case of slippery slopes all round.  For the Marines, the slip would be in allowing a weatherman to show which way he thinks the wind blows.  For civil libertarians, it's in continuing a restrictive policy which tramples the First Amendment rights of those whom we laud as heroes as soon as they put on the uniform -- and apparently relinquish their right to speak their minds.
  

how big is the First Amendment's tent?

       I'm interrupting my viewing of the live feed from Occupy Boston (which may or may not be in the process of dismantling itself or being dismantled by the Boston Police Department) while occasionally checking on how the stock market is doing (quite well today, thanks to Merkozay's latest deal to "save the euro") (embodying therein my, and much of the country's, internal contradictions) to consider the recent ruling by a Massachusetts judge who found that "The act of occupation...is not speech" and is therefore not protected from "prosecution for trespass or other crimes."  In other words, the city of Boston can kick the protesters out of Dewey Square, where they've set up a community, which seems to function as well as most, for the past 2 months -- no thanks to city officials, who have cited health and safety violations, while preventing the camp from improving its plumbing/sanitation and shelters/winterization.
       So are we in favor of free speech, but?
       The occupiers mean to be provocative; that's the point of protest, but it seems to me that, as a matter of strategy, it's smarter for officials just to let the encampments be.  Across the country, the movement has gotten the most attention when police attacked the protesters -- from the first videos of young women being pepper sprayed in NYC to the veteran in Oakland, eyes rolling back in his head as he's carried to  the hospital, to campus cops pepper spraying students at UC Davis.  In Boston, it was the night when 141 protesters were arrested, starting with the perfect photo-op of aging veterans getting knocked down & hauled away as they recited the oath of loyalty to the Constitution they had taken on enlistment.  And last night, as protesters awaited another police action, the news media were all over it.
       In contrast, ignoring protest, as the Bush administration did with the massive marches against the invasion of Iraq, proved to be quite effective.  Within months, we were told that the antiwar movement had gone away.  (Not true, but most people -- including much of the antiwar movement -- believed it.)
     But power seems to need to assert itself and finding a legal loophole is an effective way of doing that.  At least for a while.  Change comes when enough people become ungovernable.  The occupy movement isn't there yet, but it has made politicians uneasy enough to try to squash it and has altered the discussion -- which is another purpose of the protest.  In response to the court's decision, posters went up at Occupy Boston saying, "You can't evict an idea."
     Actually, you probably can, but you can't be certain of silencing it by pulling down tents, which is what matters now.  There are lots of public spaces left to occupy for some length of time and lots of other strategies for keeping that idea alive and promoted as a thorn in the side of the powerful.  Being forced to close down the tent cities before winter makes them really miserable is a gift to the movement.  It can declare, not victory, but persecution, which brings public sympathy and attention.  Then it can regroup and continue to build and find other ways to speak eloquently against unfairness and corruption.

hacking the First Amendment

       Is it possible that hacking could be protected political speech? 
       I read this article about Homeland Security issuing cyber-threat warnings against the apparently political hacker group, Anonymous, and its ilk, and about online organizing of protests in San Francisco, and I wonder.  There's a specific reference to "a call to physically occupy Manhattan's Wall Street," which I've received -- not from Anon, but from AdBusters, a very-much-above-ground magazine, published in Canada.  I'm on some list; who isn't? 
       (Shrug)
       Organizers of protests have been using the internet and email for years.  They'd be dumb not to.  And last time I checked, the First Amendment protects protests on city streets.  Wall Street may be paved with stock options, but it's still a city-owned thoroughfare.  But then, new technologies always engender new anxieties.  Except that the tech and the anxious have been around for a while.  Maybe it's time to move on?