Everything old is new again....

Internet Censorship Coming to Russia

via ReadWriteWeb:

Russia, which is home to almost 30 million of Europe's 350 million Internet users may begin to extend its strict media censorship laws to the Internet, according to a report in the AFP. State newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported today that Russia's prosecutor's office wants to toughen its "anti-extremism" laws on the web. Most newspapers and television are already under some form of governmental control, which makes the Internet one of the last places for free press in the country. New proposals would begin to erode the last bastion of press freedom in the country.

Read the rest of the story here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet_censorship_coming_to_russia.php

Book Groups Defend Reader Privacy from National Security Letters

Here's the story.

Misinformation- The War in Iraq

The video says it all:

Bush Administration's Anti-Abortion Stance Almost Trumps Scientific Inquiry

We were appalled to discover this story yesterday. Bush resurrected a Reagan administration policy that prevented USAID from funding any projects that offered abortions or encouraged abortion as a form of birth control. This has been termed by opponents as "The Global Gag Rule" and there have been several attempts to reverse the decision by both houses of Congress.

From the Ala's Office for Intellectual Freedom:

Controversy arose this week when librarians discovered that they could no longer use the word 'abortion' on POPLINE, a reproductive health database maintained by the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

When informed about the restriction, Dr. Michael J. Klag, the Dean of the Bloomberg School, reversed the decision and restored full access to the POPLINE database.

Loriene Roy, President of the American Library Association, issued the following statement on the controversy:

"We applaud Dr. Klag's swift action to restore full access to the POPLINE database. We are dismayed, however, at the circumstances that caused the administrators running the POPLINE database to begin blocking any and all searches on the word "abortion." Any federal policy or rule that requires or encourages information providers to block access to scientific information because of partisan or religious bias is censorship. Such policies promote ideology over science and only serve to deny researchers, students, and individuals on both sides of the issue access to accurate scientific information."

While critics had decried this policy for years as damaging both to efforts to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and to slow the growth of world population, this latest incident is the most Orwellian yet. In this case, it was not an order that came down from the executive branch- but rather the over-eagerness of a mid-level employee to ensure compliance with the policy (not law).

ALA Disappointed in Passage of FISA Amendments Act

"The American Library Association is deeply disappointed that earlier today, the U.S. Senate passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act (S. 2248), without important civil liberties amendments that would have added some privacy protections to the surveillance standards in FISA."

ALA Opposes National Security Letters Gunning for Access to Library Records

http://capwiz.com/ala/issues/alert/?alertid=9755706&queueid=1698581406

Congress Approves a Strengthened FOIA Bill

http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/currentnews/newsarchive/2007/december2007/foiareform.cfm