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Freedom of the Press Foundation launched! @FreedomofPress
This is exciting news. The Freedom of the Press Foundation has just been launched! Their goal is to help the public “donate to journalism organizations dedicated to transparency and accountability.” The goal is simple really: raise funds and help promote public-interest journalism. So far, they’re supporting Wikileaks, MuckRock News, National Security Archive, and the UpTake. I hope they’ll add other fine journalistic organizations like ProPublica and DemocracyNow.
Their board consists of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) co-founder John Perry Barlow, Glenn Greenwald, and several other journalists and activists. Early news coverage: New York Times, Huffington Post, Firedoglake.
You can receive updates from their site and/or follow them on twitter too (@FreedomofPress).
Please consider donating to support a free press!
Our Mission
The Freedom of the Press Foundation is dedicated to helping promote and fund aggressive, public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption, and law-breaking in government. We accept tax-deductible donations to a variety of journalism organizations dedicated to government transparency and accountability.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation is built on the recognition that this kind of transparency journalism — from publishing the Pentagon Papers and exposing Watergate, to uncovering the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program and CIA secret prisons — doesn’t just happen. It requires dogged work by journalists, and often, the courage of whistleblowers and others who work to ensure that the public actually learns what it has a right to know.
Online Child Protection and Free Speech Legislation
The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) has released a report from a joint project they conducted with the Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF). The project tracks more than 30 pieces of federal legislation that seek to protect children online, some of which pose serious threats to free speech. The reports summarize and categorize child online safety bills introduced in the 110th Congress, analyze free speech implications of key bills, and provide recommendations to Congress on how it can promote child online safety without impinging on First Amendment rights. Here’s the Bill Tracking Report [38 page PDF] which is nicely organized – it has the legislation indexed by popular name, topic, Senate Bill and House Bill numbers, and federal agency/department. For each bill you can see the text in html or pdf and then concise information about the bill as well as the analysis by both the CDT & PFF. You can also download the CDT Analysis [PDF] and the PFF Analysis [PDF] of the legislation. In their summary the CDT states that " Many of the child protection proposals now pending in Congress… would not be effective child protection measures and would raise very serious policy and constitutional problems."
Gingrich: free speech needs to be “reexamined”
In a supreme twist of irony, Newt Gingrich, speaking at the annual Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment award dinner which honors free speech, said the country will be forced to reexamine freedom of speech to meet the threat of terrorism. So in order to save the Constitution, Gingrich is proposing that it be “reexamined,” a poor euphemism for completely gutting it. Here’s the story about the speech, and here’s a link Keith Olbermann discussing Gingrich’s comments with George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley. George Orwell is truly rolling in his grave!
[Thanks Crooks & Liars!]
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