A new book is out entitled, "Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering" edited by Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain from the Berkman Center's OpenNet Initiative. This is a must-have for libraries -- many of whom deal with filtering at the personal computer level -- in order to inform the public on the more insidious filtering of internet traffic that happens at the country or backbone level. "Access Denied provides the definitive analysis of government justifications for denying their own people access to some information and also documents global Internet filtering practices on a country-by-country basis. (Jonathan Aronson, Annenberg School for Communication, USC)"

The site includes country profiles for those countries "in which it was believed that there was the most to learn about the extent and processes of Internet filtering." Read the BBC review and the Review in Nature.

Bush Hits the Delete Button: Public information the administration doesn't want you to see, by Paul Kiel, Utne Reader, March-April 2008.

Since 2006 ... the investigative website TPMmuckraker.com [has] been keeping a running tally of the diminishing access to government information. Reporter Steve Benen got the list started over at his own blog, the Carpetbagger Report. Then his fellow Muckrakers joined in by trawling the news and--as is the website's custom--tapping the collective wisdom of their readers to cobble together a dossier on an administration that has, as deputy editor Paul Kiel writes, "discontinued annual reports, classified normally public data, de-funded studies, quieted underlings, and generally done whatever was necessary to keep bad information under wraps."

Here, Utne Reader presents an excerpted (but not redacted) version of the list Kiel continues to compile. [Bush Admin: What You Don't Know Can't Hurt Us, 2007 Version By Paul Kiel - November 23, 2007.]

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) now has online all five volumes of the Iraqi Perspectives Project report, which the Department of Defense (DoD) refused to put online.

• The announcement: DoD Report on Captured Iraqi Documents by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, March 20, 2008.
• The five volume report: Iraqi Perspectives Project Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents (Redacted) Institute for Defense Analyses November 2007 (released March 2008)

ABC News is reporting that the Pentagon canceled plans to post a new comprehensive military study of Saddam Hussein's links to terrorism on the website of the Joint Forces Command. The story says, "The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. It won't be emailed to reporters and it won't be posted online." The Pentagon also canceled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's release.

• Pentagon Report on Saddam's Iraq Censored?, ABC News: Rapid Report March 12, 2008.
• Report Shows No Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda, ABC News: Rapid Report, March 13, 2008.

The report was prepared by Kevin M. Woods and James Lacey "under the Iraqi Perspectives sub task of the Joint Advanced Warfighting Program (JAWP) task order for the Director, Joint Center for Operational Analyses and Lessons Learned, United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM)" and the Institute For Defense Analyses. It is based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion and on thousands of hours of interrogations of former top officials in Saddam's government in U.S. custody.

The executive summary of the report says

This study found no "smoking gun" (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda. Saddam's interest in, and support for, non-state actors was spread across a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations.

The ABC report says that when asked why the report would not be posted online and could not be emailed a Pentagon official said initial press reports on the study made it "too politically sensitive."

ABC has posted a copy of an executive summary of the document here:

• Iraqi Perspectives Report Saddam And Terrorism: Emerging Insights From Captured Iraqi Documents Volume 1 (Redacted) January 2007. IDA Paper P-4287. (9 pages, 3.4 Meg PDF) [another copy is available at www.webcitation.org/5WJZa7Cuc]

ABC also has a copy of a longer version of what is apparently the same report here:

• Iraqi Perspectives Project Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents Volume 1 (Redacted) "This volume is a redacted version of Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents, Volume I (IDA Paper P-4151). November 2007 Approved for public release; distribution unlimited. IDA Paper P-4287 Log: H 07-001575 ( 94 page, 11.7 Megs, PDF) [another copy is available at www.webcitation.org/5WJaXglxS]

Great Lakes: Danger Zones?, By Sheila Kaplan, The Center for Public Integrity, February 7, 2008.

For more than seven months, the nation’s top public health agency has blocked the publication of an exhaustive federal study of environmental hazards in the eight Great Lakes states, reportedly because it contains such potentially “alarming information” as evidence of elevated infant mortality and cancer rates.

The 400-plus-page study, Public Health Implications of Hazardous Substances in the Twenty-Six U.S. Great Lakes Areas of Concern, was undertaken by a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the request of the International Joint Commission, an independent bilateral organization that advises the U.S. and Canadian governments on the use and quality of boundary waters between the two countries. The study was originally scheduled for release in July 2007 by the IJC and the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR).

The Center for Public Integrity has obtained the study, which warns that more than nine million people who live in the more than two dozen “areas of concern”—including such major metropolitan areas as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee—may face elevated health risks from being exposed to dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, lead, mercury, or six other hazardous pollutants.

Excerpts are available on the Center for Public Integrity web site.

US censors Arctic scientists' findings as it prepares for oil and gas auction, By Daniel Howden, The Independent, January 22, 2008.

The United States has blocked the release of a landmark assessment of oil and gas activity in the Arctic as it prepares to sell off exploration licences for the frozen Chukchi Sea off Alaska, one of the last intact habitats of the polar bear.

Scientists at the release of the censored report in Norway said there was "huge frustration" that the US had derailed a science-based effort to manage the race for the vast energy reserves of the Arctic.

The long-awaited assessment was meant to bring together work by scientists in all eight Arctic nations to give an up-to-date picture of oil and gas exploitation in the high north. In addition to that it was supposed to give policy makers a clear set of recommendations on how to extract safely what are thought to be up to one quarter of the world's energy reserves.

Speaking yesterday from Tromso, one of the report's lead authors, who asked not to be named, said: "They [the US] have blocked it. We have no executive summary and no plain language conclusions."...

 

Library Journal Academic Newswire reports that Bassem Youssef, the Chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) unit responsible for administering two warrantless search programs, who was scheduled to discuss "a number of critical failures within the FBI's counterterrorism program undermining the basic Constitutional rights of American citizens and threatening the effectiveness of America's counterterrorism effort" on Saturday, January 12, at the ALA's Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia will now "only be allowed to answer selected questions."

The FBI cited "rules concerning prepublication clearance of any potential speech."  Youssef's lawyer says that these "are not the formal rules", that the FBI has not previously published them or incorporated into  employment agreements, that they are secret, that they "constitute secret censorship requirements", and that  "Mr. Youssef is prevented from showing these rules to anyone outside the FBI."

• FBI Agent's ALA Midwinter Talk "Censored." Library Journal Academic Newswire, January 10, 2008.

Dorothea Lange's pictures from the 1930s helped to create documentary photography. "Migrant Mother," her 1936 portrait of a 32-year-old stoop-laborer, which she shot on assignment for the federal Resettlement Administration, has become iconic, part of our collective memory of the Great Depression. The woman sits in a doorway with three of her seven children, staring into the distance, her expression an impossible combination of despair, dignity, and hallowed beauty. Over the decades and throughout the world, in countless exhibitions and publications, scores of people have seen this image and others by this major American artist. However, less than five years after she took "Migrant Mother," Lange shot another 1,000 photographs, also on commission from the US government, that are far less familiar. In fact, they were considered so revealing of this country's bias, brutality, and shame that they were immediately censored and confiscated by the same government agencies that had commissioned them. They were of Japanese internment camps in California during World War II.

Excerpt from Persons Of Japanese Ancestry by Marilyn Richardson, Women's Review of Books, Vol 24, Issue 3 (May/June 2007),  a review of Impounded: Dorothea Lange and Censored Images of Japanese Internment Edited by Dorothea Lange and Gary Y. Okihiro.

Tonight (Friday August 10, 2007), the BBC show Newsnight will cover this topic:

GAGGING ORDER?
The Ministry of Defence has updated its guidelines which some say effectively "gags" soldiers and others in the armed forces. Tonight we'll be asking if this is a reasonable restriction or not. The latest guidelines specifically say soldiers cannot blog, email or post photographs or videos which relate to defence matters without specific permission. We know a lot about the problems they've faced in Iraq and Afghanistan through the anonymous postings of British and US soldiers - and I imagine the MOD doesn't like it. The clarification follows the row over the selling of interviews by two of the Royal Navy personnel held captive in Iran, and the report into media communications that followed. But with two more British soldiers killed yesterday and casualties mounting - will there be online mutiny in the ranks?..

See also the U.S. version of the same issue: Pentagon promotes itself on YouTube, but prohibits troops from using it and New limits on blogging by U.S. soldiers.

According to National Journal's Technology Daily, "[Michigan] State Senate Republican leaders moved to restrict access to Blogging for Michigan, a liberal blog where their Democratic colleagues recently began contributing in a series of guest posts on a variety of issues. Access to the blog was restored after Democrats accused their rivals of limiting free speech."

According to the Michigan State University State News, "Other political Web sites, like the conservative-leaning blog, www.rightmichigan.com, and the liberal site, www.michiganliberal.com, weren't blocked. Matt Miner, Bishop's chief of staff, told MIRS, a Lansing political newsletter, www.michiganliberal.com doesn't 'say bad things about us,' according to The Associated Press."

This is a good example of the complexities of government information in the digital age. When governments start seeing the internet as a way of communicating with constituents and e-government becomes the the norm, are some avenues of communication legitimate and some not? Should anyone in government have the authority to cut off access to anything for any reason -- or is such control, by definition, censorship?

• Blog-Filtering Dispute Erupts In Michigan [subscription required] by Michael Martinez, National Journal's Technology Daily. State Roundup (August 9, 2007)
• Blogging Is Constituent Work by Christine, Blogging for Michigan, Wed Aug 08, 2007 at 19:52:36 PM EDT
• Senate loses liberal blog access, by Chris Christoff, Detroit Free Press August 7, 2007
• Blocking blog site shows political bias, Michigan State University State News

Susan Nevelow, author of the Library Law Blog recently wrote:

In the shameless self-promotion category, my article on FOIA and how to reclaim information disappearing from government web sites, Let the People Know the Facts: Can Government Information Removed from the Internet be Reclaimed?, 98 Law Library Journal 7 (2006), which was originally posted on this blog as a draft in June 2005, has been awarded the Law Library Journal article of the year award by the American Association of Law Libraries.

We don't think that's shameless. We're happy to recommend your work to others. Especially when it is a timely reminder to our readers that if your library depends on pointing to third party servers instead of serving locally housed electronic collections through the Internet, you could lose access in the blink of eye with NO public process.

There is another way. But you have to ask GPO and Congress for it.

Wikileaks.org is an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. It combines the protection and anonymity of cutting-edge cryptographic technologies with the transparency and simplicity of a wiki interface."

Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations.

According to their FAQ page
Wikileaks expects to go live sometime in February or March 2007.

Read more on their Media reports page.

New book reveals censorship's perils By Dave Zweifel, Capital Times (Madison WI) Dec. 27, 2006.

The book is First Into Nagasaki by George Weller and Anthony Weller

George Weller was a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who covered World War II across Europe, Africa, and Asia. At the war’s end in September 1945, under General MacArthur’s media blackout, correspondents were forbidden to enter both Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But instead of obediently staying with the press corps in northern Japan, Weller broke away. The intrepid newspaperman reached Nagasaki just weeks after the atomic bomb hit the city. Boldly presenting himself as a U.S. colonel to the Japanese military, Weller set out to explore the devastation.

More here:

George Weller, Reporting from Nagasaki NPR Weekend Edition Saturday, June 25, 2005

Long-Suppressed Nagasaki Article Discovered Democracy Now! August 5th, 2005