Slashdot Mirror
Censorship: It's Not Just For Web Sites
rares passed on to us this story from APBNews.com which ought to give pause to all readers: It seems that in Illinois, a revised set of guidelines for professional conduct of police (the guidelines are here in PDF) was issued by the state's Supreme Court. Though the guidelines are not state law, they have led to a sudden drop in the availability of formerly routine information available to the public, including newspapers, about police activities. Question is, whose rights are being respected here, and whose lost? What other formerly public information might soon be at risk -- and should all of it have been public in the first place? Interestingly, the word "censorship" appears only twice in the article.
Not to downplay the seriousness, if any, but APBNews's business relies on the re-reporting of police information; they therefore have incentive to decry any rule changes making this information harder to get, even ones you and I wouldn't necessarily mind.
I'd say that two basic needs clash here, public access to information vs. privacy.
Public access: if a murderer is prowling your neighborhood, you damn sure want to know about it.
Privacy: if a vengeful ex were to tactically accuse you of child abuse in a custody dispute, you might not want it on the nightly news until you'd had your day in court.
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Based on the last few years of crime coverage in the news, getting enough info hasn't been the problem - applying some basic standards of journalism has. Crime pushes up those ratings, and it's a happy news channel that can get live footage of, heavens, some drunk idiot refusing to pull over for his traffic ticket.
I notice one of the new rules forbids people involved in a trial to publically predict a verdict. Maybe this is as it should be; before a verdict happens, nobody's done their best to figure out whether an accused person is actually guilty, but that doesn't stop the media from destroying their reputation with rating-boosting innuendo. This rule could return verdict power to the actual jury (who hear the actual evidence) and actually keep the system more honest.
Also mentioned is a rule forbidding police from prejudicing a trial with public leaks. APB argues that this could prevent public access to critical information, but there's a case in favor of it too - a jury first briefed by Channel 9 might find it harder to make an objective decision, and there's an important public interest in court trials being fair and unbiased.
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To sum up: it's an interesting debate, but I bet APBNews isn't the most reliable source for it.
The new regulations passed in Illinois do not restrict publishing of material once a case is resolved. Nor does it restrict releasing information to relevant parties, such as those accused, their lawyers, the accuser, and the lawyers of the accuser.
This means the regulations will *not*, I repeat, *not* affect your personal experience. Yes, I can see where you find the lack of information annoying.
However, there is a great difference between your circumstance and the one where the newspaper headline reads: "romco house raided for drugs!", at which point your employer forces you to take drug tests and undergo psychological examinations. Meanwhile a credit agency gets hold of the article and decides to deny your next credit card.
This is what the regulation is designed to prevent.
However, you then run into the problem that sort of falls into the Hitchhikers Guide situation: they could make it as hard as possible to find the public notices, but they are still available.
Maybe there needs to be a public good consideration in these releases. Does the incidence affect more than a certain percentage of the local population? Are the lives or personal property of the population in trouble? Sure, this could cause more problems, but if the police were to report on every incidence they cover, local papers would be rather thick...
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
The way it usually is, police and prosecutors have the overwhelming upper hand when it comes to news coverage of a case. As soon as they label someone a "suspect" and "charge" them with something, that defendant becomes less credible in the public's perception. Almost all of us tend to believe what "authorities say" in police statements to the media. (If you think you're immune to such manipulation, watch yourself more closely.) Once that happens, we are less prone to believe the defendant because "they'll say anything to get out of a conviction", or "why would police lie?". Not many people consider the self-interest at stake for police officers, police departments, and prosecutors, to get a conviction, even if the defendant is innocent. But there are plenty of reasons why convictions benefits those parties, for money, power, and ego.
Anyway, police and presecutors are used to creating an impression of guilt in the public's perception. Take that power away from them, and they get upset, and try to make the media blame the big bad judge for it. They do this by clamming up, even though they know they're perfectly safe if they stick to facts. They're not willing to act like the defendant is innocent until proven guilty.
This becomes dangerous. It is just as important to know what the various authorities are doing as it is to prevent them from doing freedom-depriving things. How else can the public judge when corrective action is required?
Freedom of information is a very important concept. If you don't know what someone is doing, how can you protest or stop it? The secret police are so named because their actions are secret.
If a police officer wanted to talk about an arrest, and did do, and was sanctioned for doing so, that might be a violation of 1st amendment rights, but probibly not. Especially if the job duties clearly state that the officer is not to talk about cases.
Just as it's not my job to make it easier for the police to investigate a crime, it's not the police's job to make it easier for reporters to cover stories.
After all, the police are not telling the press that they cannot cover a particular story, it's just no longer going to be an active source of information. (shock) Oh no! reporters will soon have to become journalists!(/shock) :)
Goldmeer
Hmm...your ideas intrigue me and I want to subscribe to your newsletter... :)
What I really believe is that utilitarian concepts are the best to follow. Ultimately if I were desperate enough then my boss would get a nice suprise in his back
The problem is that it's risky. You have to set up in the bushes wait, and then fire and make sure no one can tell what you did.
Now my idea (this may have been done before) is to simply to make a device with a silencer which would be remotely operated and could fire from a distance. It could send a video singal to a remote operator and the operator could then fire the projectile without being in the same general vicinity. Add a nice little cache of thermite to destroy the device when finished and you have secussfully gotten away with it. However that dosn't mean you totally could without any chance of failure at all.
Commiting crimes entails risk. Problem with risk is that is usually dosn't work for me. Maybe your the kind of guy who can just pop a quarter into a slot machine in Vega and win a jackpot but I bet I could spend $100 and still not get anything.
Most of the time I really don't like to take a risk I know I can't win at all or am not sure of winning. I have this little theory. Life thinks it's in charge of you but if it tries to make a slave of me I will always have a way to opt out.
Yes jail is crummy but I really don't fear the disapproval of a few lone people in a vacuum. I think where it begins to be a problem is where you could get blighted for being a person who is a criminal. I fully intend to cary a nice concentrated cyanide capsule. If the police try to arrest me for anything at all that results in an attempted stay in the big house I will take it. By the way in current toxicology I can't find anything more toxic in small doses that works as well.
Quick, easy, and better than having fun in the big house.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
It's based on the idea that your superiors are in fact supposedly smarter, bnetter, and always right within areas like the military.
A great deal of organizations are warped into thinking that the reason America sucks is because more people aren't like the military. That is where this comes from. Even if you are a rapist you have a right to at least a decent reputation. People have to live and not have their entire lives totally ruined. If your life is ruined then wehat possible excuse do you have to live? I think that the only one that needs to know about your life is maybe you and a few select people who can be trusted with that information.
Now I don't look for ways to help rapists but anyone who commits a crime has a right to be eventually left alone and allowed to be a natural citizen again. I mean what would happen if say you did someone stupid and shoplifted something when you were a kid. What if you were reqired to wear a nice big stylized logo in red that said THIEF on it for the rest of your life? What if most stores except crappy ones wouldn't let you in if you wore the THIEF logo?
This means that you are a second class citizen and you have no future.
My personal favorite is getting revenge. Say if they did that you could always get a gun and let a few people have an "accident" before I used it on me.
I just think that Justice should be used but not to the extent that justice kills mercy or allows life to be a farce.
What about this senario:
A group of heavily armed men with assault riffles and such is approached by the police and then an arrest attempt is made. Suppose those people resist and say the cops get gunned down by the guys. Now what if they decide to say use some mussle and take out the HQ of the police?
Has this ever happened. Has a group of people ever been that secussful with it?
More to the point I think that full disclosure of data is importnt in any organization where you intersect with "citizens" of any type. Hiding data bsecause you called all people stupid or made systematic quasi-legal concepts in said documents is your problem and should have not but anything in there like that.
I have made repeated evidence that the supposed "keeper of rights" that the states seem to be on slashdot are in fact corrupt groups of greedy pigs.
The reason why we have a FoIA is because we have people in washington who are actually more concerned with rights than individual states. I would no more trust my local leaders than fly to the moon. However the Bill of rights and the constitution are in a better position to be obeyed by the people who actually run our country than in little feifdoms.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
This could ultimately turn out to be a bad thing for the police forces.
As an example... Although the Department of Justice has reported a decline in the amount of teen violence and murders, the news media has the general public convinced that it's actually the opposite. Net effect, people vote for politicians and laws that throw increased funding at the problem, mainly in the form of law enforcement.
Maybe the police need to rethink that. The minute people feel safe, funding is diverted elsewhere. Having the media around to sensationalize ultimately profits the police business.
Screw you "Coward"! If you post a hateful little comment like this, you should at least have the brass valls to post it from your real account. As the bloody judge himself said, I was prosecuted as an 18 year old high school student under a law that's meant to protect young people from adults who can take advantage of them through significant differences in age, power, authority, and other imbalancing factors. It is *NOT* a law that was meant to be levied against a high school kid for some pretty normal sexual exploration. It's not like I posted the damn things to the Net, in fact they were at *her* house in *her* posession which is how her militant Nazi of a father found them.
You know what? Reactions like yours are *exactly* what's wrong with this country--no regard for justice and common sense, just an ignorant statement based on a general principle which is good but which can be taken too far. Justice has to take into account individual circumstances, not just blindly quote statutes. "There can be no justice when laws are absolute."
I have respect for a judge who could look at the circumstances of a case and say "case dismissed" not because the law says he should dismiss a case in those circumstances, but because he knows that it's the just thing to do.
I do not, however, have respect for a worthless troll such as yourself who'd rather be an insulting louse than take into account the person to whom he's responding was deeply emotionally scarred by a misapplication of law and the corresponding volley of heartless press coverage which also failed to take into account a little something called THE FACTS.
Fact is, the law was meant to protect young people from predators, not to screw over a high school senior for dating a high school junior when many people in my grade were dating freshmen. A crime of photography? Between 2 people IN THE SAME PEER GROUP?
In short, you, dear sir, are an ass.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
And lets get something straight. The First Amendment states Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. I don't see "the people's right to know about criminal activity" in there anywhere.
Frankly, the people of Illinois should be thankful that the newspapers will have fewer sources of official information, which is usually an oxymoron anyway. Maybe journalists in Illinois will actually do some work now to get background information instead of relying on what the police and the DA want us to know.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
In my case most of the libel issues in the case referred to non-computer related cases.
Censorship has been going on in the United States for over 200 years. That is why we have many first amendment cases. Libel and censorship cases go from old media to new media as the new media matures. Many of the libel cases went towards newspapers, then radio, then TV. Now, it goes to the internet.
Some of the limits of what public officials can say, is just a CYA move. Look at Richard Jewell. High profile cases can be harder to try, look at Louis Woodward.
But on the otherside of the coin, by seeing the accussed, others may come forward with information on the case.
In Boston, there is John TV. It is designed to discourage prostitution in Boston. They put the arrested Johns on the local cable network.
But what about the people who were not convicted?
For those not in the United States, we have laws against prostitution and a stigma attached to most things related to sex.
Fight Spammers!
The media takes great delight in making and breaking heroes and zeros by basically being highly-paid ambulance-chasers. Choke, gasp, gulp. Highly paid? Highly paid? Not print journalists, that's for sure. How does $18K a year sound? Journalists traditionally take less pay as a sacrifice to the importance of our vocation. ::cynical laugh::
This forces newspapers and TV stations to get involved with a story if they want to cover it. No longer can they just skim the surface, quickly condemn whoever looks guilty and call it a done deal. Now they have to actually do some investigation and REAL JOURNALISM to get facts to sell their papers! How novel.
Perhaps this hasn't been made clear in the mainstream media, but reporters absolutely love getting their by-lines on top of a nice, juicy story. Unfortunately, many of the media in which those stories would be published are becoming moderately monolithic (You may have noticed a brief or two about a couple of obscure newspaper companies: The Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, for example).
Yes, we'd love to spend the time to do research, but the public can't wait, the publisher says. Gotta get the stories out the door. Have to have something to fill up the space we didn't get advertising for.
I was recently sacked from my first honest-to-gods reporting position for spending too much time doing research. Newspaper owners don't want muck-raking. They want press releases that don't quite sounds like PR.
There are papers that aren't like this. For example:
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0003a/default.html
But even most of the local "Independents" aren't.
Yes, I'd love to work for a paper that permitted me to do in-depth reporting. That's what I got in this business for. I think that's what most journalists got in the business for. But the current business model makes it impossible for all but a few to pursue true reporting. I'll let you know if I come up with a solution for this, but don't hold your breath.
Where's my idealism? I know I left it around here somewhere?
"Who has lit his pipe in the morning calm that follows the midnight stress/Hath sold his heart to the old black art we call the daily press." R. Kipling, "The Press"
"...virtue springs from iron within, not lead without." R. Kipling
"Just as it's not my job to make it easier for the police to investigate a crime, it's not the police's job to make it easier for reporters to cover stories."
That's exactly what a cop's job is. That's one of the things that seperate us (The US) from countries like China. The Police in the US are public servants. They are accountable to the pubic .
I know from personal experince what can happen when we lose rights to make our police publicly accountable.
In Florida (as in some other states) we are at "war" with drugs. I did not fully understand what that ment till my local police department did an armed raid on my house. Because they they did not arrest or charge anyone (or find anything ilegal)
we cannot force them to release the search warrent info. We could force them only if they charged me or my family with a crime because only then would they have to prove grounds for a search warrant
Because no one was hurt (although getting thrown to the ground and a shotgun put to your head is a little trumatic) We cannot sue them for damages.
Police not having to report and account for what they do is a BAD THING.
AdFuel
Censorship is something that the government does to you. Individuals (Taco, myself, you) or companies (Andover, Enquirer) can do whatever they want with their property.
Just because Taco lets us use his server doesn't give us any special rights. We're just lucky that he uses democratic moderation instead of monarchistic.
Good god people. IT'S NOT CENSORSHIP!!
I don't know when it happened, but censorship is not a catchall word describing everything to do with Stuff We Don't Like.
Nothing was censored here. No jack booted thugs busted into a local newspaper and smashed the presses. No threats of legal prosecutions were made, no fines for publication. IN OTHER WORDS, NO CENSORSHIP. The courts didn't make reporting crimes illegal, the police didn't beat crime reports with a batton. IN OTHER WORDS, NO CENSORSHIP. There was no prior restraint, no time place and manner restrictions, no content restrictions.
Aside from the sensationalist yellow journalism on Slashdot (something which NEEDS to be censored) what happened here was this:
The police no longer have to be as complete when reporting crime statistics to media.
THAT'S *NOT* censorship.
No sig is worth reading.
What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? When you publicize the name of someone *accused* of a crime, who hasn't been convicted, you're throwing that out the window. If you think people who are arrested are always guilty, you're deluding yourself. If you think people who may or may not have committed crimes should be paraded through the press by name--and the press *always* assume guilt, and see things in the worst possible light--I'd like to kick your ass. Proverbially, of course. I'm not saying that because I'm trying to be flamebait, I'm saying it because I'm mad and I have a right to be. Here's why:
Senior year of high school, I was as happy as a geek could be. I had a close circle of fine friends, and an active social life, and I'd been accepted early decision to the college of my choice. Best of all, I had my first real girlfriend. She was a HS junior, a fellow member of the academic team, and as gorgeous as she was smart. She was everything I'd wanted. Guess what ruined it? Her dad had me arrested on a serious-sounding felony charge, just because after going out for many months we fooled around as teenagers do and one time we took some risque photos of ourselves. We were two teenage kids experimenting, nothing serious or wrong, and I got arrested for felony production of child porn for playfully taking a few nude pictures of a girl who was just a year and a half younger than I was. It didn't matter that she'd had ten times the experience that I'd had, that I'd been a virgin and she'd been with three guys before me, or that everything was done between a boyfriend and girlfriend who loved each other in that sickeningly sweet adolescent way, all that mattered was a number. The justice system isn't about justice anymore, it's just about law without using common sense. Guess what the headline was in the next issue of the local paper? "Local man arrsted for making child pornography." A silly adolescent experiement for private use between 2 people, and suddenly the police and the press put me on the same level as some sick child molesting freak. They printed my full name and address, those worthless press bastards. They did this to a HS student who just barely turned 18. Instead of her name, they listed my girlfriend as "the victim" because by chance she was a year and a half younger than me. "The victim," as if I'd abused her in some way. The judge had common sense enough to dismiss the case, but by that time my future college read the article and it took a lot of explaining to avoid getting my admission revoked. Never mind that it's enough to have to deal with being accused of a serious felony like that, without your name and address printed in the paper for the world to see whether you deserve it or not.
Fuck the irresponsible press, they have no right to know when you haven't even had your day in court yet. Innocent until proven guilty left the legal system about the same time justice did. Americans should start caring about freedom more. Think about these quotes before whining about what the press ought to be told about *accused*, rather than convicted, people:
"Those who desire to give up Freedom in order to gain Security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."--Thomas Jefferson
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."--Benjamin Franklin - 1759
"The American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security."--FBI Director Louis Freeh - 1994
"Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured."--Thomas Paine, 1791
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
It's not like the judge is preventing the newspapers from reporting information. It's not the case that the police are being forced to be silent.
What's happening here is that the police have voluntarily decided not to give out this information, and the newspapers are pissed that they can't sell crime any more. Hey, bad news sells newspapers, and if they can't get the bad news, they can't get the paper! This has nothing to do with the First Amendment and everything to do with the media's bottom lines.
It's all about greenbacks.
This is great news, if you ask me. The media takes great delight in making and breaking heroes and zeros by basically being highly-paid ambulance-chasers. Consider the story of Chuck Jewell and the Atlanta bombing. That wasn't news; that was libel. The media made him into the criminal (with prodding from the police) without a trial.
This forces newspapers and TV stations to get involved with a story if they want to cover it. No longer can they just skim the surface, quickly condemn whoever looks guilty and call it a done deal. Now they have to actually do some investigation and REAL JOURNALISM to get facts to sell their papers! How novel.
There's a big difference between what's happening in Illinois and what's happening with things like the CDA from a couple of years ago; the difference is, the police chose this route. We just have a lot of publishers about to lose their bread-and-butter business, and so they're crying about it.
Let them cry.