The Open Society Foundations National Security and Human Rights Campaign invites you to a panel discussion on Joshua E.S. Phillips' new book, None of Us Were Like This Before.

The Open Society Justice Initiative is hosting a panel discussion on Priscilla Hayner's recently updated book on truth commissions, Unspeakable Truths.

Chalk up another victim to unwarranted political intimidation by state attorneys general. On Friday evening, Craigslist, which has long been under intense pressure to crack down on sex crimes, replaced its adult services section in the U.S. with a black censor bar. This move comes on the heels of a scathing letter sent to Craigslist by seventeen state AGs insinuating that Craigslist is culpable for the “victimization of children.” While the state attorneys general are likely celebrating victory this holiday weekend, all they’ve really done is to stifle free speech online and complicate efforts by law enforcement authorities to go after the real bad guys — you know, the ones who are forcing kids into sex slavery.

This isn’t the first time states have publicly attacked Craigslist for its involvement in sex crimes. Various AGs been trying to intimidate the site into eliminating avenues of adult content for years, as Alex Harris and Jim Harper have chronicled on these pages. In response to state AGs’ relentless saber-rattling, Craigslist made several major changes last year aimed at curbing illegal postings. The site shut down its notorious “erotic services” section and began charging $10 for every posting made to the adult services section. Craigslist even began manually screening all posts submitted to the adult services section. Since May 2009, over 700,000 postings have been rejected.

Apparently none of these concessions were enough for state AGs, always eager to score political points. Despite the safeguards Craigslist implemented last year, users continued to use the site in the commission of sex crimes. This is hardly surprising; given the sheer volume of user submissions and the increasingly complex measures taken by criminals to obfuscate their unlawful solicitations, some illegal postings are bound to circumvent any filtering regime. Now that Craigslist has censored its adult services section, former users of the section will invariably flock to other sites, as has happened every single time a major Bittorrent site has been taken offline or crippled by litigation. Craigslist is just one of many, many websites on the Internet that’s frequented by criminals, after all. From popular sites like Google and Yahoo! to small blogs that accept user comments, nearly any site that allows user submissions can be used to break the law.

Such websites generally aren’t legally liable for crimes committed by their users, as courts across the country have held time and time again (1,2,3,4). That’s because when Congress overhauled America’s telecom laws in 1996, it enacted the Communications Decency Act, which grants “providers” of “interactive computer service” immunity from state criminal prosecution for illegal content posted by users. Thus, while prosecutors can and do pursue criminal charges against individuals who post illegal content to Craigslist, they can’t go after Craigslist itself, as long as the site complies with enforceable governmental requests and promptly removes content it knows to be illegal.

This legal provision, known as Section 230, has been crucial to the growth of the Internet as we know it. As Adam Thierer aptly put it last year, it’s the “cornerstone of Internet Freedom.” Section 230 has enabled website operators to offer an array of incredible user-driven offerings without fear of being sued or jailed for their users’ unlawful actions. Without it, “Web 2.0″ sites like YouTube, Digg, and Reddit might never have gotten off the ground. Monitoring user submissions can be enormously burdensome, especially for smaller sites like WashingtonWatch.com, a popular user-centric site operated and owned by the Cato Institute’s Jim Harper. Were these sites liable for the content of their users’ postings, they likely wouldn’t even accept them in the first place.

Congress established this protection in order to “to maintain the robust nature of Internet communication and, accordingly, to keep government interference in the medium to a minimum,” as the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded in its forceful 1997 opinion in Zeran v. America Online, Inc. In their assault on Craigslist, state attorneys general ignore Congress’s clear intent in establishing Section 230 — to keep government’s hands off the Internet.

To be sure, Section 230 does have a downside, as Craigslist itself has underscored time and time again. Illegal user postings can result in tragedy, as was the case for AK and MC, two girls who took out ads in The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle last month recounting their experiences as victims of sex crimes facilitated through Craigslist. Despite Section 230′s flaws, however, the alternative is far worse.

Many, if not most, postings on Craigslist’s adult services section were perfectly legal, and until Friday thousands of individuals relied on the section to find consenting adults with whom to fulfill their intimate desires. In pressuring Craigslist to censor the section, state AGs have essentially stifled the free speech rights of thousands of individuals. Criminals will simply migrate to even shadier websites, further hindering efforts by law enforcement to put child sex traffickers behind bars.

It’s 2010, and nearly 5 billion devices worldwide are now connected to the Internet — a freely accessible, unfiltered, unauthenticated worldwide network. As long as such a network exists, it’s all but inevitable that it will have a seedy underbelly. Law enforcement officials should investigate sex crimes against children committed using the Internet and aggressively prosecute suspected child sex traffickers. Trying to intimidate interactive websites like Craigslist, however, is the wrong approach.

Efforts by state attorneys general to intimidate Craigslist into closing off potential avenues of illegal content run contrary to Congress’s intent in enacting Section 230. As the 4th Circuit concluded in its forceful 1997 opinion in Zeran v. America Online, Inc., in drafting the Communications Decency Act, Congress very clearly intended for sites like Craigslist to be free from undue governmental interference.

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Mitt Romney has likened President Obama’s foreign policy to an “apology tour.”  Former half-term governor Sarah Palin has stated that the Obama Doctrine is akin to “coddling enemies and alienating [our] allies.”  Radio and television personality Sean Hannity has broadcasted that Obama is “the Neville Chamberlain of out time.” The President shouldn’t be surprised.  In [...]

The statement by Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, on the situation of Roma in Europe is to be welcomed for its unequivocal and forthright commitment to Roma inclusion.

It’s no secret I and others have started to question whether Genachowski has what it takes to get things done in Washington. But at the same time, I’ve continued to hold out hope that Genachowski will reassess and reposition himself in time to leave behind a serious legacy of accomplishments. The proposed September Open Meeting agenda shows that Genachowski may be preparing to do just that. In addition to an important but relatively uncontroversial E911 item, the agenda includes two items that promise to have significant impact, but will also likely generate at least some resistance from significant industry groups.

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Many of you will be familiar with the now ubiquitous Linked Open Data cloud diagram, maintained by Richard Cyganiak. The diagram illustrates efforts to link together many different data sources, from the CIA World Factbook to DBpedia, a structured database of information extracted from Wikipedia. It looks like this:

We’re very pleased that the diagram’s maintainers, Anja Jentzsch, Richard Cyganiak, and Chris Bizer, have decided to use CKAN to maintain a registry of information about the datasets, from which the diagram will be automatically updated. They have put out a call for up to date information about datasets included in the diagram until next Wednesday 8th September.

From their announcement:

We are in the process of drawing the next version of the LOD cloud diagram. This time it is likely to contain around 180 datasets altogether having a size of around 20 billion RDF triples.

For drawing the next version of the LOD cloud, we have started to collect meta-information about the datasets to be included on CKAN, a registry of open data and content packages provided by the Open Knowledge Foundation.

The list of datasets about which we have already collected information is be found here:

• http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/lodcloud/

In addition to basic meta-information about a dataset such as its size and the number of links pointing at other datasets, we also collect additional meta-information about the license of the dataset, alternative access options like SPARQL endpoints or dataset dumps, and whether there exist a voiD description of the dataset or a Semantic Web Sitemap.

So if your dataset is not listed yet and you want to have it included into the next version of the LOD cloud, please add it to CKAN until next Wednesday (September 8th, 2010).

Also, if we have collected wrong information about your dataset or if your dataset is only partially described up till now, it would be great if you could add the missing information.

Guidelines about how to add datasets to CKAN as well as about the tags that we are using to annotate the datasets are found here:

• http://esw.w3.org/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData/DataSets/CKANmetainformation

We thank all contributors in advance for their input and help, which hopefully will allow us to draw the next version of the LOD cloud as accurate as possible.

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Related posts:

1. New Linking Open Data group on CKAN
2. CKAN 0.9 Released
3. CKAN 0.11 Released

CC BY by Steve Jurvetson

Registration is open for two open education events set to take place in early November in Barcelona, Spain. Open Ed 2010 is the seventh annual open education conference that is “the world’s premiere venue for research related to open education” and is focused this year on OER: Impact and Sustainability. Early bird registration for the conference has been extended until September 24th.

The other notable event is the Mozilla Foundation’s Drumbeat Festival 2010: Learning, Freedom and the Web which is launching the same week as Open Ed. The Drumbeat Festival is the culmination of the year’s local Drumbeat events held throughout the year and the various open web and education projects engendered by them. Registration for the festival is now open at the site; alternatively, if you are already attending Open Ed 2010 you can register for Drumbeat for an extra 50 euro. Those interested in participating in both events can send an email to opened@uoc.edu.

Two months may seem like forever in internet time, but open web and education activists aren’t the only ones traveling to Barcelona in November. The Pope will be visiting around that time as well, so event planners are advising that you register and book accommodations as soon as possible.

Here is Friday’s look at transparency-related news items, today’s congressional committee hearings, transparency-related bills introduced in Congress, and transparency-related events.

News Roundup:

• Disclosed meeting logs show that Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and other firms have been lobbying the Federal Reserve after the financial regulation bill was signed into law. (The Wall Street Journal)($)
• The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board wants to make its enforcement proceedings public. (The Wall Street Journal)($)
• Open Secrets looked at the challenges facing campaign finance reform proponents. (Open Secrets)
• OMB Watch supported an effort to post government contracts online. (OMB Watch)
• In anticipation of Hurricane Earl, FEMA and other agencies are posting relevant data and resources on their websites. (InformationWeek)

Relevant committee hearings scheduled for 9/3:

• None

Relevant bills introduced:

• None

Transparency events scheduled for 9/3:

• None

Yesterday, Dubai became the first Arab city to celebrate a Creative Commons Iftar. It will be followed tomorrow by Amman, Damascus on September 5, and Cairo on September 7.

The iftar is the meal that breaks the fast of Muslims during the month of Ramadan. In the Arab world, it is traditionally associated with families sitting all together and enjoying the first meal of the day. CC Iftars, moreover, are social events where people celebrate the breaking of the fast, socialize, and talk about innovation, creativity, and the open web. The meetings are cozy, informal, and community-driven. They can feature lightning talks, engaging presentations, film screenings, or live remixes of CC-licensed works.

CC Iftars have been organized thanks to the great efforts of our Arab world communities, led by volunteer teams in Dubai, Amman, Damascus and Cairo. Each city’s iftar focuses on a different theme. In Dubai, it’s “mash-ups,” Amman’s is “fast-sharing,” Damascus’s is “remix!” and Cairo’s is “share!” Guests include educators, media professionals, artists, technologists, students, and members of the local CC jurisdiction teams. Each program is filled with performances, screenings, inspiring talks, and debates. The local volunteer teams have done a fantastic job pulling together the programs, finding speakers, and designing event t-shirts. In some cases, like in Dubai and Amman, there are themed competitions as well.

A big thank you to Aramex, who has been our incredible regional partner and supports the iftars in each city.

Best of luck to the teams in Dubai, Amman, Damascus, and Cairo. We hope you’ll be able to join them, break the fast, and share ideas!

In addition to providing a better sense of what specific broadband service options consumers have in more narrowly drawn geographic areas, the FCC’s most recent statistics on broadband show a significant decline in new subscriptions.   See INTERNET ACCESS SERVICES: STATUS AS OF JUNE 30, 2009 (September 2010); available at: http://www.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2010/db0902/DOC-301294A1.pdf.

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Here is a look at what happened yesterday on the Sunlight network.

• Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-OH) has introduced legislation that could give the public access to thousands of congressionally mandated reports. (Sunlight Foundation Blog)
• Scott Stadum looked at Google Fusion Tables, a project form Google that aims to make collaboration on large datasets simpler. (Sunlight Foundation Blog)
• The Federal Elections Commission is planning to release near-real time independent expenditure data and electioneering communication data next week. (Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group)
• Rep. John Campbell (R-CA), who is being scrutinized by the Office of Congressional Ethics, held a fundraiser at a D.C. townhouse owned by a lobbying firm. (Party Time)
• Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) plans to use Boise State’s season opening game in D.C. to fundraise. (Party Time)

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