Censorship

FCC Kevin Martin has responded to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision on “fleeting expletives," which not only went completely against the FCC but suggested that the grounds for the FCC’s authority to regulate indecency on the broadcast airwaves may no longer exist. Here’s part of what he had to say: I completely disagree with the Court’s ruling and am disappointed for American families. I find it hard to believe that the New York court would tell American families that “shit” and “fuck” are fine to say on broadcast television during the hours when children are most likely to be in the audience. The court even says the Commission is “divorced from reality.” It is the New York court, not the Commission, that is divorced from reality in concluding that the word “fuck” does not invoke a sexual connotation. ...

Arizona Senate Majority Leader Thayer Verschoor (R-Gilbert) is at it again, with a bill that prohibits any public school or college instructor from advocating or opposing a political candidate or issue. This is the same legislator who last year proposed a bill that would have required colleges and universities to “provide a student with alternative coursework if the student deems regular coursework to be personally offensive” where “a course, coursework, learning material or activity is personally offensive if it conflicts with the student’s beliefs or practices in sex, morality or religion." While it is appropriate to define limits on partisan advocacy in public primary and secondary schools (where state educational standards define the curriculum and individual school districts set policy on appropriate classroom behavior), it doesn’t make sense to do it at the college level, where professors have much broader freedom to create their own course curricula. Verschoor was also one of several legislators accepting gifts from the Church of Scientology and sponsoring legislation for Scientology’s Citizens Commission on Human Rights last year.

Ross Anderson and Tyler Moore have published a nice paper that gives an overview of recent research in the economics of information security and some open questions (PDF). The paper begins with an overview of the relevance of economic factors to information security and a discussion of “foundational concepts.” The concept of misaligned incentives is described with the now-standard example of how UK and U.S. regulations took opposite positions on liability for ATM fraud is given–the UK held customers liable for loss, while the U.S. held banks liable for loss. This led to U.S. banks having incentives to make their systems secure, while UK banks had no such incentives (and the UK has now reversed its position after this led to “an epidemic of fraud”). other examples are given involving anti-virus deployment (where individuals may not have incentives to purchase software if the major benefit is preventing denial of service attacks on corporations), LoJack systems (where auto theft plummets after a threshold number of auto owners in a locality install the system), and the use of peer-to-peer networks for censorship resistance. The authors examine the economics of vulnerabilities, of privacy, of the deployment of security mechanisms including digital rights management, how regulation and certification can affect system security (and sometimes have counterintuitive adverse effects, such as Ben Edelman’s finding that TRUSTe certified sites are more likely to contain malicious content than websites as a whole). They end the paper with some open issues–attempts to develop network protocols that are “strategy-proof” to prevent cheating/free-riding/bad behavior, how network topologies have different abilities to withstand different types of attacks (and differing vulnerabilities), and how the software development process has a very high failure rate for large projects, especially in public-sector organizations (e.g., as many as 30% are death-march projects). There are lots of interesting tidbits in this paper–insurance for vulnerabilities, vulnerability markets, the efficacy of spam on stock touting, the negligible effect of music downloads on music sales, and how DRM has moved power from record labels to platform owners (with Apple being the most notable beneficiary), to name a few. (Hat tip to Bruce Schneier’s blog, where you can find links to a slide presentation that covers the highlights of this paper.)

Talking Points Memo has been collecting examples of information (website content, reports, studies, etc.) that the Bush administration has suppressed because they were somehow contrary to the administration’s positions. The list has become fairly lengthy. Here’s what they’ve got so far: * In March, the administration announced it would no longer produce the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, which identifies which programs best assist low-income families, while also tracking health insurance coverage and child support. * In 2005, after a government report showed an increase in terrorism around the world, the administration announced it would stop publishing its annual report on international terrorism. ...

As an undergraduate, I read Victor Marchetti and John Marks’ book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. Marchetti, a former CIA officer, was forced to redact large portions of the book, and the publisher decided to print the book with a bunch of blank spaces to show where the redactions occurred. This led to a fun game of trying to fill in the blanks. (The only section I tried to fill in–successfully, as this was years after the book was published–was about CIA-operated air transportation companies operating out of Pinal Air Park in Arizona near Marana.) Now the New York Times has printed an op-ed by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann about Iran using the same strategy–it’s filled with black marks indicating the CIA-demanded redactions. This op-ed actually contained no classified information, but the Bush administration applied pressure to the CIA to get them to demand redactions. Leverett and Mann write, in an explanatory preface: Agency officials told us that they had concluded on their own that the original draft included no classified material, but that they had to bow to the White House. Indeed, the deleted portions of the original draft reveal no classified material. These passages go into aspects of American-Iranian relations during the Bush administration’s first term that have been publicly discussed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; former Secretary of State Colin Powell; former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; a former State Department policy planning director, Richard Haass; and a former special envoy to Afghanistan, James Dobbins. ...

The San Francisco-based Landmark Education, an offshoot of Werner Erhard’s est, has been misusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to threaten online video providers and cause the removal of material critical of the organization. They’ve specifically targeted a film that was broadcast on French television titled “Voyage to the Land of the New Gurus” (“Voyage Au Pays Des Nouveaux Gourous”) which was posted on Google Video, YouTube, and the Internet Archive. This film included footage shot undercover at Landmark events. In addition to demanding removal of the film under the DMCA on the bogus ground that their copyright in the “Landmark forum leaders manual” is being infringed, they have issued subpoenas to try to identify the individuals who have uploaded the video. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has acted to support the Internet Archive and Google in actions to fight the subpoenas; YouTube has notified its user and given them an opportunity to quash the subpoena. The EFF’s website documents their activities and the status of the case. These three videos include part of the content that Landmark Education is trying to suppress. The first begins with some references to Scientology and a quote from Christian anti-cultist Walter Martin (the late “Bible Answer Man,” whose successor was discredited creationist Hank Hanegraaf), followed by video footage of Anthony Rapp from “Rent” talking about Landmark Education. It then goes into “Voyage Au Pays Des Nouveaux Gourous” beginning at about 3 minutes in, which is French with English subtitles. Unfortunately, this is not the complete show, though it does show some interesting undercover footage of Alain Roth of Landmark Education verbally abusing a woman at a Landmark seminar. Landmark Education Part 1 Landmark Education Part 2 Landmark Education Part 3 UPDATE (December 10, 2006): Landmark Forum has withdrawn its subpoena of Google. ...

Independent filmmaker Brett Hanover made a very nice little one-hour film called “The Bridge," about the Church of Scientology, which he put out on Google Video and YouTube about a month ago. Scientology came after him, and he buckled, withdrawing the film and saying that he no longer supports it. Google and YouTube took it down. But it’s still out there. Watch it, it’s pretty well done.

Comedy Central has pulled the “Trapped in the Closet” episode, which criticizes and exposes Scientology, from reruns. Rumor has it that Tom Cruise threatened not to do publicity for the movie “Mission Impossible 3,” which will be released this summer, unless it was pulled. As Paramount, the distributor of the Cruise film, and Comedy Central are both owned by Viacom, this has some plausibility. A Cruise representative denied the rumor, phrased in a way that may have been crafted to be literally true but misleading (a method frequently used by George W. Bush, as documented in the book All the President’s Spin). (Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.) UPDATE (March 18, 2006): Trey Parker and Matt Stone have declared war on Scientology: Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of the animated satire, are digging in against the celebrity-endorsed religion after a controversial episode mocking outspoken Scientologist Tom Cruise was yanked abruptly from the schedule Wednesday - with Internet rumors it was covert warfare by Cruise that led to its departure. “So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun!” the “South Park” creators said in a statement Friday in Daily Variety. “Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies… You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail!”

That’s a picture of me on September 9, 1995 in front of the Church of Scientology in Mesa, Arizona, picketing about the “Cancel poodle” (better known as the “Cancel Bunny”). This was about two years into Scientology’s war on the Internet, which, despite a few Pyrrhic victories in court, was characterized by huge losses on the part of Scientology in the court of public opinion. Shortly after this, Jeff Jacobsen and I published an article on the subject in Skeptic magazine, titled “Scientology v. the Internet," for which I received the Skeptics Society’s Martin Gardner award for “Best Skeptical Critic” in 1996. This article was one of the few published that went into detail about the Tom Klemesrud/“Miss Blood” affair and its relation to why Scientology was so insistent to compromise the anonymity of a user of Julf Helsingius’ Penet anonymizing remailer service in Finland. Some of these facts which are still not widely known, as seen by the Wikipedia entry on Penet. Scientology’s search for the user seemed to have stopped at Caltech, but they did find that the account holder was a Caltech alumnus who had been working for Scientology, and had accurately leaked Scientology internal documents in his own attempt to support Scientology’s position on the Klemesrud case. This article was responded to in the pages of Skeptic by Leisa Goodman, which the Skeptics Society decided was a good place to stop the discussion. My response to Goodman, available only on my website, updates the story to early 1996. This article is much less known than the original. Skeptic also published a letter from Linda Woolard. In May 1995, I put up a web page about Scientology’s private investigators. Initially this was to document photos of private investigators which Scientology had hired and sent from Los Angeles to Phoenix to take photographs of those of us who were picketing the Mesa Church of Scientology. It later was expanded to document some of the activities of former LAPD officer Eugene Ingram, who was a very active and sleazy PI for Scientology at the time. He was kicked off the force after allegations of his involvement with drug dealers and a prostitution ring, and was compensated very well by Scientology to intimidate critics. Jeff Jacobsen dug up some outstanding warrants for his arrest in Florida and Oklahoma (for impersonating a police officer and carrying a concealed weapon, respectively) which led to his Arizona PI license not being renewed. He doesn’t seem to have been active in recent years. I then added some photos of some California PIs who were hired to follow a German TV producer who was doing a program critical of Scientology. In 1999, I received two Digital Millenium Copyright Act notices from Scientology–one was regarding a customer of Frontier GlobalCenter, the company I worked for at the time, and the other was regarding my own website. The first was a website run by “xenubat” (Susan Mullaney) which contained some great audio file samples of L. Ron Hubbard speeches, saying absurd things. Under the DMCA we disabled public access to those files, but she filed a counter-notice, and we re-enabled access. I don’t believe Scientology ever sued her, but I don’t think the files are still online. This event led to a story about DMCA abuse in Salon in July 1999. My own DMCA notice was regarding the fact that I had configured my home web server to proxy an image of Scientology head David Miscavige from their website, as a proof of concept to demonstrate that their attempts to prevent people from inline links to that image were ineffective. I submitted my own counter-notice, but because I didn’t really want to be sued, I modified my web server configuration so that the link pointed to part of the text of Scientology’s OT III (Operating Thetan III) document in Hubbard’s own handwriting (hosted on Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Dave Touretzky’s web page). In those days I gave quite a few public talks about Scientology, including one for the Phoenix Skeptics which the local Church of Scientology kindly provided an OT VIII to give a mild rebuttal. (I don’t remember his last name, but his first name was also Jim and he was a Scientology “public” member, meaning one who has paid his way through the courses without actually working for a Scientology organization. He seemed like a nice guy, he remained calm and non-confrontational.) I never really received any noticeable harassment from Scientology, unlike other locals such as Jeff Jacobsen and Bruce Pettycrew. Jeff was harassed and picketed at his work place claiming he was a pornographer, Gene Ingram showed up at his house and his sister’s house, PIs went through his garbage, he was deposed by Kendrick Moxon in one of the Scientology lawsuits, and was loudly threatened at that deposition that he would also be sued (which I was privileged to witness). Bruce had a temporary restraining order filed against him by Scientology Office of Special Affairs (OSA) Director Leslie Francis Duhrman, who falsely claimed that he was shouting and “disrupting church services.” The judge was fooled by her testimony into thinking that Scientology actually has Sunday services, but the TRO on Bruce’s picketing was lifted except for a restriction on making noise. Bruce also ended up having flyers attacking him distributed in his neighborhood by Scientology. For my part, I was invited to lunch in March 1996 with OSA Director Ginny Leason (Scientology paid), where I was asked what could be done to stop my criticism and picketing. My response was that they could stop attacking and lying about Internet critics. Ginny Leason, who seemed like a nice woman caught up in a bad organization, ended up being replaced as OSA Director shortly thereafter by Leslie Duhrman, who was a nasty piece of work. Here’s a photo of her on February 28, 1998, pointing and shouting at me that I can’t stop in the driveway (I didn’t), right after taking my picture. Another Scientology-related piece I wrote was a very brief web page pointing out the presence of a Scientologist on Libertarian candidate for president Harry Browne’s finance committee, as well as L. Ron Hubbard-inspired nonsense being touted in Liberty magazine by another Browne election campaigner and prominent libertarian, investment newsletter publisher Douglas Casey (apparently a Scientologist himself). The only continuing interest from Scientology that I’ve seen in me is that they still visit my website periodically from Scientology-owned IP blocks (most recently from 205.227.165.11 on January 1, 2006). On May 14, 2005, they hit my page after doing a search on “The Onion Scientology”–no doubt they were looking for this story on “Scientology Losing Ground to New Fictionology." I was never a member of Scientology, but I’ve had an interest in the subject since reading Eugene Methvin’s October 1981 Reader’s Digest article, and after taking their test in Los Angeles and reading Norman Spinrad’s “The Mind Game” in 1992. During my editorship of the Arizona Skeptic (July 1991-March 1993) I published several articles by Jeff Jacobsen on Scientology. I took notice when the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup was first created in 1991 (and was a home for the “Free Zone”), and then started reading and participating regularly in 1994 when Dennis Erlich started posting there and Scientology decided to respond by trying to remove the entire newsgroup. For more information on Scientology, a great place to start is Operation Clambake. I’ve got a fairly extensive list of Scientology-related links on my Skeptical Information site, and the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup is still quite active. Got questions or comments about Scientology? Ask here, and I’ll answer or point you in the right direction… ...

As per Majikthise and Pharyngula: How many books on the American Library Association’s most-challenged books list have you read? Apparently having children gives you quite an advantage that I lack (I haven’t read any of the children’s books published after the 1970s). Looks like about 25 of them for me, though some of them I didn’t read all of (like William Powell’s idiotic and dangerously inaccurate The Anarchist Cookbook). I’m also not sure I actually read all of the Judy Blume books listed here. Do I get any bonus points for being a contributor to a challenged book (though not one of the top 100, it was actually removed from a South Carolina public library in response to complaints)? Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling Forever by Judy Blume Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger The Giver by Lois Lowry It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck The Color Purple by Alice Walker Sex by Madonna Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle Go Ask Alice by Anonymous Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard The Witches by Roald Dahl The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry The Goats by Brock Cole Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane Blubber by Judy Blume Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier Final Exit by Derek Humphry The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Beloved by Toni Morrison The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton The Pigman by Paul Zindel Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard Deenie by Judy Blume Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice) Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole Cujo by Stephen King James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy Ordinary People by Judith Guest American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume Crazy Lady by Jane Conly Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher Fade by Robert Cormier Guess What? by Mem Fox The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Lord of the Flies by William Golding Native Son by Richard Wright Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Fantasies by Nancy Friday Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen Jack by A.M. Homes Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle Carrie by Stephen King Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge Family Secrets by Norma Klein Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole The Dead Zone by Stephen King The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison Always Running by Luis Rodriguez Private Parts by Howard Stern Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett Running Loose by Chris Crutcher Sex Education by Jenny Davis The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier ...