This is due to a statement made on Bluestone’s blog referring to a malpractice case against Marina Tylo.

The Citizen Media Law Project sees the case as frivolous.

Unless I’m missing something, this looks like a purely frivolous case, perhaps a situation where sanctions against Tylo are appropriate. As explained in our legal guide [6], section 74 of the New York Civil Rights Law [7] codifies the fair report privilege [8]. Under the statute, speakers cannot be held liable for giving a “fair and true report of any judicial proceeding, legislative proceeding or other official proceeding.”

We will monitor the case and give you further updates.

The police, whom one might reasonably assume were not unfamiliar with the DA, seemed to agree with Jim, that saying mean stuff was illegal, and, after an investigation, a subpoena was issued to site owner, Harold King.

The subpoena demands the identities of 35 local users of the site. Aside from the obvious breach of First Amendment protection, local critics have also pointed out that the subpoena did not contain information on who issued it, which can only be a judge or prosecutor, not a district attorney. (Miller denies responsibility for the document, claiming only to have filed the complaint as a public citizen.)

Oklahoma is a state with an iffy history when it comes to electronic free speech. The Tulsa World newspaper attempted, unsuccessfully, to sue a blogger for linking to the site in 2005, making itself a laughing stock. It remains to be seen if Jim Bob and McAlester join John Bair and the Tulsa World in the permanent pantheon of online boobery.

According to the Oklahoman:

Former state Sen. Gene Stipe, a frequent target of King’s Web site, filed a criminal libel complaint against King in 2005. Miller’s predecessor declined to file charges.

At that time, an official with the state agency that represents district attorneys said he’d never heard of a criminal libel report being filed with police, much less filed as a charge by a prosecutor.

Update: Facebook responds. Kind of.

***

Update: RSF is trying to find out how Moroccan prosecutors determined Mourtada’s indentity.

Reporters Without Borders wonders how the police identified Mourtada. “Did the police get his computer’s IP address? And if so, how? We have asked the ISP, Maroc Telecom, in which the French company Vivendi is a shareholder, to provide us with the relevant information.”

The CPB wonders as well. And, keeping Yahoo in mind, as well as Facebook’s response below, we wonder if the list of people to ask is one name shorter than it ought to be? Laila Lalami wonders the same thing, in The Nation.

How the Moroccan police found out Mourtada’s identity remains a bit of a mystery. They could have obtained his IP address from Facebook, or from his service provider, Maroc Telecom, or from an old-fashioned snitch. But the preliminary court hearing did not include details of the police investigation, so the possibility of corporate cooperation cannot be ruled out. After all, China cracked down on dissidents last year with the help of Yahoo.

***

We wondered how Facebook felt about the recent arrest and three year sentence of Moroccan Fouad Mourtada for his satirical Facebook page of his country’s crown prince. So we wrote them. What we got was, well, given the precendents set by Yahoo, Google and other American companies, it can hardly be called surprising. It was disheartening, though.

Here’s my first email to the PR department.

To Whom It May Concern:

Could I get someone at Facebook to comment on the recent arrest in Morrocco of Fouad Mourtada? As you no doubt know, satirical Facebook pages are rampant.

I would also be interested in Facebook’s position on the arrest of Facebook commenters in Lebanon and its ban in Syria and Iran.

I am asking for two reasons. I am the director of the Committee to Protect Bloggers and I am also taking part in a weekly conversation with PRI’s The World. Here’s that public radio show’s last Tech Podcast, in which I took part. The next time Clark Boyd and I talk I would like to be able to mention Facebook’s position on these issues.

Regards,
Curt Hopkins
Director
Committee to Protect Bloggers

I received a response, if you can call it that, from a Facebook representative named Jaime Schopflin.

Hi Curt,

Here is our statement on this:

“We do not comment on these specific situations. Under our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, Facebook may share information with law enforcement and other government agencies when it has a good faith belief it is legally obligated to do so.”

Please attribute this to a Facebook spokesperson.

Let me know if you have any other questions,

-Jaime

Well, that’s boilerplate nonsense. And it stank of expectation. Here’s our non-answer and you’ll report it like a good little collaborator. I decided instead to talk Jaime’s offer seriously and send some questions. Here they are.

Jaime:

Really? That’s it? No condemnation of the imprisonment of one of your users for making a joke? No condemnation of authorities known to use torture (such as Syria) for arresting your customers (sic-Lebanon arrested; Syria banned)? No condemnation of censorship? No advocacy for the free speech that makes your service, site and business possible in the first place? In a morally unambiguous situation such as the suborning of communications for the preservation of personal power no comment except “no comment”? When students in Lebanon are arrested no expression of fellow-feeling or solidarity based on the fact that Facebook could not have been possible were it not for a) free speech and b) an engaged student population?

I’m very disappointed in this response, Jaime, and in Facebook. I hope someone higher up decides that it is incumbent on them to distinguish themselves from companies like Yahoo and Google. In the meantime, I’ll accept this as your answer. (And as to instructing me in how to attribute this “quote” of yours, don’t.)

Best wishes,
Curt Hopkins

I got the same response from a different PR person, Malorie Lucich, from an outside agency called Outcast.

Hi Curt,
Thanks for your email. Here is Facebook’s statement on the issue:

“We do not comment on these specific situations. Under our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, Facebook may share information with law enforcement and other government agencies when it has a good faith belief it is legally obligated to do so.”

Please attribute to Facebook or a Facebook spokesperson.

Best,
Malorie

This is ridiculous PR boobery, especially for a company that provides a product for radical communication and connection. Do you think they’ll find their voice, if not their souls, if a great many more people ask the same questions? It’s worth a try.

Here’s Facebook’s general PR email address: press@facebook.com. Here’s Jaime’s email address: jaimes@facebook.com And here’s Malorie’s: malorie@outcastpr.com.

Part of the injunction appears on the Wikileaks site.

Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court.

The injunction was a result of a suit brought by Cayman Island’s Bank after Wikileaks posted a report alleging that money laundering was rampant in the Caribbean nation. Wikileaks was obliged to stop publishing and the site authors insist the injunction is illegal.

The Wikileaks.org injunction is ex-parte, engages in prior restraint and is clearly unconstitutional.

Wikileaks continues to publish outside U.S. jurisdiction. This ill-advised decision has put the U.S. in the same position as China when it comes to censoring this site and the work-around to continue publishing.

smaller courts have swung back in the other direction. First, a Divorce Court judge in Vermont, Thomas Devine, issued an injunction against William Krasnansky, forbidding him to continue posting fictionalized accounts of his divorce. Now, John Mutter, a Family Court judge in Rhode Island has instructed Anne Grant, a retired minister, to stop publishing her blog, which focuses on the perceived failures of her state’s Department of Children, Youth and Families.

Although the wording in this ruling instructs her to remove material and stop blogging material “pertaining” to children in a specific case, it is loose enough that there is significant doubt that general and well established free speech law in this country would not be abrogated pretty easily. It looks like another case of “prior restraint,” a type of censorship which is clearly unconstitutional and against which there is a tremendous amount of case law.

Additionally, a South Florida District Court judge, Joan Lenard, has forbidden an attorney, David Markus, to blog about a case, despite the fact that the attorney is not involved in it!

U.S. Army Major, and blogger, Andrew Olmsted was the first casualty of the year in Iraq. According to Rocky Mountain News (via KCHBlog) the 38-year-old from Colorado was killed by small arms fire.

Last spring, his commanders asked him to tone down his blog, Andrew Olmsted.com. So, he turned to writing more focused pieces in blog form for the Rocky Mountain News.

His last post, one he wrote to be published in the event of his death and that was published on his own blog, is…something.

What I don’t want this to be is a chance for me, or anyone else, to be maudlin. I’m dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren’t going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.) . . . I’m dead, but if you’re reading this, you’re not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact.

Believe it or not, one of the things I will miss most is not being able to blog any longer. The ability to put my thoughts on (virtual) paper and put them where people can read and respond to them has been marvelous, even if most people who have read my writings haven’t agreed with them. If there is any hope for the long term success of democracy, it will be if people agree to listen to and try to understand their political opponents rather than simply seeking to crush them.

I do ask (not that I’m in a position to enforce this) that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn’t a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side.

Congress returns to Washington DC this week, and with them returns the battle over telecom immunity. Recall that on the eve of a key vote in December 2007, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid delayed action on the surveillance bill until January, giving Senators additional time to hear from their constituents.

***

Update: Excellent news. According to EFF, a Dodd-led filibuster pressured Democratic head Harry Reid to postpone the vote on this bill.

Right on, Doddmeister! (or His Doddness, or Dodder, or El Dodderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.)

***

According to Threat Level, the bill currently wending its way through the U.S. Senate that allows the government to spy with impunity on its own people and gives immunity to communications companies that have cooperated in ostensibly illegal spying activities.

The bill provides “amnesty for telecoms that helped the government spy on Americans without court orders and greatly expand the government’s ability to spy using American telecom facilities and communication services.”

If you’re a U.S. citizen, by all means contact your Senator and ask him or her to join Christopher Dodd (D-Connecticut), in opposing this asinine bill.

(District Attorney) Martens said he could not charge Buss with a crime because the blog was not likely to incite “imminent lawless action.” He said it was unclear whether the comment advocated violence against teachers, and even if it did, its language was not likely to incite others to act.

Bass said the comment was a sarcastic response to the other negative comments regarding teachers on the blog where he commented.

According to a report by Associated Press. The a teacher in the U.S. state of Wisconsin was arrested today for violent comments praising the “Columbine” murderers.

Some were disturbed by the post police say James Buss left on a conservative blog, but other observers said it was a sarcastic attempt to discredit critics of education spending.

The suburban Milwaukee high school chemistry teacher was arrested last week for the Nov. 16 comment left on http://www.bootsandsabers.com, a blog on Wisconsin politics. The comment, left under the name “Observer,” came during a discussion over teacher salaries after some commenters complained teachers were underworked and overpaid.

Buss, a former president of the teacher’s union, allegedly wrote that teacher salaries made him sick because they are lazy and work only five hours a day. He praised the teen gunmen who killed 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide in the April 1999 attack at Columbine High School.

“They knew how to deal with the overpaid teacher union thugs. One shot at a time!” he wrote, adding they should be remembered as heroes.

The comment disturbed at least one teacher, who called police in West Bend, 40 miles north of Milwaukee and home of the blog’s administrator. Police traveled to arrest Buss at his home in Cudahy, south of Milwaukee, last week after the blogger gave them the anonymous poster’s IP address.

After his arrest, Buss spent an hour in the Washington County jail before he was released on $350 bail . . . Washington County District Attorney Todd Martens is considering whether to charge Buss with disorderly conduct and unlawful use of computerized communication systems.

“If you look at all the factors in this case, it’s pretty clear it would be a mistake to charge,” said Larry Dupuis, legal director of The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin. “At worst, it was somebody expressing admiration for somebody who did something reprehensible. But the more reasonable explanation is this is somebody who is trying to mock the conservative view of teacher salaries.”

That Buss is a half-wit is beyond argument. That he is guilty of a prosecutable crime is not and we hope the prosecutor thinks long and hard before charging Buss for an incitement that was only a fantastically ill thought out criticism.

Arizona Affirms Strong Protections for Anonymous Speech Online (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Congress to examine “the Internet” as a tool for homegrown terrorism (Ars Technica)

EFF Moves to Block New Jersey Township’s Attempt to Unmask Critical Blogger (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Judge rules in favor of blogger.

The Global Online Freedom Act would prevent repressive governments - those that punish dissidents and human rights activists who use their right to online free expression - from having access to personal data by banning US companies from locating the servers containing this data in the territories controlled by such governments.

The bill would also ban US companies from providing information enabling users to be identified, except in cases in which the law is being legitimately applied. This, however, would be decided by the US justice department and not the companies.