The letter underscores the right of the press to inform the public without fear of assault or injury and calls on Noem to ensure that federal personnel and other institutions under her command refrain from the use of force against members of the press.

A copy of the letter, authored by the First Amendment Coalition, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and the Los Angeles Press Club, can be found here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

The Clarksdale Press Register was ordered to remove an editorial from its website and other online portals on Feb. 18, 2025, after the City of Clarksdale, Mississippi, alleged the article was defamatory.

The editorial, headlined “Secrecy, deception erode public trust” — pulled from the site but archived here — was published on Feb. 8, and detailed how the mayor’s office had failed to properly notify the public of a special meeting held four days prior.

“Mayor Chuck Espy has always touted how ‘open’ and ‘transparent’ he is and he is ‘not like previous administrations of the past 30 years,’” the editorial said. While notice of the meeting was posted on the door of City Hall, it continued, “This newspaper was never notified. We know of no other media organization that was notified.”

In an affidavit, the city clerk admitted that she had not emailed the media a notice announcing the meeting, as required by state law. Floyd Ingram, publisher and editor of the Press Register, approached her after the meeting to ask about its subject, and she said that she gave him a copy of the notice, an agenda, a resolution passed during the meeting and other materials.

Chancery Court Judge Crystal Wise Martin granted the city’s motion for a temporary restraining order without allowing the newspaper to argue against it, ruling that the Press Register must unpublish the article.

“The injury in this case is defamation against public figures through actual malice in reckless disregard of the truth,” Wise Martin wrote in her order, “and interferes with their legitimate function to advocate for legislation they believe would help their municipality during this current legislative cycle.”

The city praised the ruling in a post to its official Facebook page.

“The judge ruled in our favor that a newspaper cannot tell a malicious lie and not be held liable,” Mayor Espy said. “The only thing that I ask, that no matter what you print, just let it be the truth; be it good or bad.”

City Attorney Melvin Miller II added: “The City touts this as a victory for truth. Not even newspapers can imply lies against City officials conducting city business and get away with it.”

First Amendment advocates, however, criticized the decision. Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in a statement that an order compelling a newspaper to take down an editorial critical of the government was blatantly unconstitutional.

“The underlying lawsuit here appears frivolous for any number of reasons,” Stern said. “But even in constitutionally permissible defamation lawsuits, it’s been well-established law for decades that the remedy for plaintiffs is monetary damages, not censorship orders.”

Adam Steinbaugh, a First Amendment lawyer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, also noted that the Supreme Court ruled in New York Times v. Sullivan that governments can’t sue for libel.

The editorial was removed from the Press Register website on the morning of Feb. 19. The newspaper did not respond to requests for comment.

A full hearing on granting a permanent injunction is scheduled for Feb. 27.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

NBC affiliate KARE-TV was barred from publishing an improperly filed memo in a high-profile murder case in St. Paul, Minnesota, on July 19, 2024. Five days later, the broadcast station filed a petition to overturn the gag order with the state Court of Appeals, the outlet reported.

Joseph Sandoval was charged with the murders of two men at a St. Paul sober home in 2022, and he pleaded guilty in May 2024. Ahead of Sandoval’s sentencing, his attorney filed a sentencing memorandum with the court detailing the failures of the state and the sober home to provide him the medical care he needed given his history of mental illness and drug-induced psychosis, KARE-TV reported.

KARE-TV has followed the prosecution as part of a series focusing on the systemic failings in cases involving individuals found incompetent to stand trial who are released without court-ordered mental health treatment and go on to commit new, sometimes more serious, crimes.

The station obtained a publicly available copy of the memo through the court’s website and attempted to film the July 19 sentencing, but Ramsey County District Judge Joy Bartscher refused to allow the camera in her courtroom.

“I believe that the media coverage would make this case more of a circus than a solemn proceeding in which the Court is making a decision about many people’s lives,” Bartscher said during the hearing. “The purpose of media coverage is supposed to be, supposedly what I have been instructed, is to have transparency about what is going on in a courtroom. I don’t think that that’s what the purpose is of media coverage quite frankly.”

Bartscher then granted a protective order for the memo — first orally and then in writing — requiring anyone who had obtained a copy to refrain from publishing and to destroy their copies of the document.

“It’s my understanding that at least one media outlet was able to access that information that should have been confidential,” Bartscher said. “That memorandum shall not be used for any purpose other than consideration by the Court and parties for sentencing.”

Attorneys representing KARE-TV filed a petition with the Minnesota Court of Appeals on July 24, arguing that the gag order violates the First Amendment and amounts to an unconstitutional prior restraint. “The Court’s July 19 Orders had immediate and far-reaching consequences on KARE 11’s reporting,” the appeal stated.

It added that, without a reversal from the court, the outlet would be “forced to choose between reporting on information it lawfully obtained from the Court’s public docket, and risk being held in contempt, or giving up its constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of the press and depriving the public of information on matters of significant public interest and concern.”

The appeal is still pending and no hearing dates have been scheduled, according to records reviewed by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Attorneys for KARE-TV did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

A magistrate judge ordered a legal journalist on June 20, 2024, not to publish the name of a plaintiff that had mistakenly appeared on court documents in a revenge porn case. The ruling was overturned a month later.

Eugene Volokh — co-founder of the legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy, a law professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University — was singled out in the ruling by Magistrate Judge Elizabeth S. Chestney as the only person who was barred from using the plaintiff’s name.

The case, initially filed in 2019, involves a woman who ended an extramarital affair with a man, who she said then posted revenge porn to several adult websites. The case was sealed to protect her privacy. She and the defendant later settled, but the question of whether the case was improperly sealed remained.

Volokh told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that he initially noticed the case in an alert from Westlaw, a database of legal documents, and thought it raised First Amendment questions that he might want to write about, given his expertise as a free speech scholar.

Even though the case was sealed, the names of both the plaintiff and defendant were published in an opinion available on Westlaw, along with other documents that should have been sealed under the judge’s order. It’s not clear exactly why they were published, but Volokh said it appeared to be an error.

“It was just a simple mistake,” he told the Tracker.

Volokh moved to intervene in the case and have it unsealed. Chestney, the magistrate judge, agreed on July 18, 2022, to let him intervene but ruled that Volokh could not write about the case until a decision was made on unsealing the case.

“Professor Volokh may not blog or write about this case until any renewed motion to unseal has been granted,” the ruling ordered.

Volokh appealed the case to District Judge Xavier Rodriguez, who on Aug. 3, 2022, vacated the prior restraint language and said the entire case should be unsealed. Volokh then published the plaintiff’s name in a blog post in August 2022 since, he said, it was also the name of the case.

The plaintiff appealed the unsealing of the case to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that it should be partially sealed with certain personal information redacted.

The case then returned to Chestney to determine what exactly should be redacted and whether the plaintiff could retroactively use a pseudonym, Jane Doe.

In her June 20, 2024, ruling, Chestney ruled in favor of the retroactive pseudonym.

“And then to my surprise, she says that even though I don't have to take down past writings that mention the plaintiff’s name, I cannot use her name in future writings,” Volokh told the Tracker.

The ruling stated: “Professor Volokh may not, however, publicly disclose Plaintiff’s name or personal identifying information in any future writings, speeches, or other public discourse.”

Volokh again appealed and on July 16 Rodriguez vacated that prior restraint language.

“The order restricts Volokh from sharing information that is publicly available through his prior writings but allows for any of Volokh’s readers to share that same information,” Rodriguez wrote. “As such, the language at issue here is an unconstitutional prior restraint.”

Volokh detailed the ruling in a post on The Volokh Conspiracy.

The plaintiff could still appeal the ruling to the 5th Circuit.

Volokh said he was deciding whether to go back to his August 2022 article and redact the name.

But whether he uses her name in future articles, he added, should be a matter of editorial discretion, not a judge’s ruling.

“I think it’s important that this be a decision for the individual journalist, the individual speaker, and not something that they’re ordered to do,” Volokh told the Tracker.

Volokh said he sees this case as an example of the system working. But he noted that he was uniquely positioned to fight these instances of prior restraint.

“I should also acknowledge that maybe if I weren’t a law professor, if I weren’t a specialist on the subject, if I had to pay a lawyer to challenge the prior restraints, maybe the situation might not have come out as well,” he told the Tracker.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Suddenly, western politicians from US President Joe Biden to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak have become ardent champions of “restraint” – in a very last-minute scramble to avoid regional conflagration.

Iran launched a salvo of drones and missiles at Israel at the weekend in what amounted a largely symbolic show of strength. Many appear to have been shot down, either by Israel’s layers of US-funded interception systems or by US, British and Jordanian fighter jets. No one was killed.

It was the first direct attack by a state on Israel since Iraq fired Scud missiles during the Gulf war of 1991.

The United Nations Security Council was hurriedly pressed into session on Sunday, with Washington and its allies calling for a de-escalation of tensions that could all too easily lead to the outbreak of war across the Middle East and beyond.

“Neither the region nor the world can afford more war,” the UN’s secretary general, Antonio Guterres, told the meeting. “Now is the time to defuse and de-escalate.”

Israel, meanwhile, vowed to “exact the price” against Iran at a time of its choosing.

But the West’s abrupt conversion to “restraint” needs some explaining.

After all, western leaders showed no restraint when Israel bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus two weeks ago, killing a senior general and more than a dozen other Iranians – the proximate cause of Tehran’s retaliation on Saturday night.

Under the Vienna Convention, the consulate is not only a protected diplomatic mission but is viewed as sovereign Iranian territory. Israel’s attack on it was an unbridled act of aggression – the “supreme international crime”, as the Nuremberg tribunal ruled at the end of the Second World War.

For that reason, Tehran invoked article 51 of the United Nations charter, which allows it to act in self-defence.

Shielding Israel

And yet, rather than condemning Israel’s dangerous belligerence – a flagrant attack on the so-called “rules-based order” so revered by the US – western leaders lined up behind Washington’s favourite client state.

At a Security Council meeting on 4 April, the US, Britain and France intentionally spurned restraint by blocking a resolution that would have condemned Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate – a vote that, had it not been stymied, might have sufficed to placate Tehran.

At the weekend, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron still gave the thumbs-up to Israel’s flattening of Iran’s diplomatic premises, saying he could “completely understand the frustration Israel feels” – though he added, without any hint of awareness of his own hypocrisy, that the UK “would take very strong action” if a country bombed a British consulate.

The foreign secretary is asked about Israel bombing the Iranian consulate in Syria & he says he understands Israels frustration!

Hes then asked what the UK would do if another country flattened one of our consulates & he says we would take very strong action pic.twitter.com/l3E0A8gzri

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) April 15, 2024

By shielding Israel from any diplomatic consequences for its act of war against Iran, the western powers ensured Tehran would have to pursue a military response instead.

But it did not end there. Having stoked Iran’s sense of grievance at the UN, Biden vowed “iron-clad” support for Israel – and grave consequences for Tehran – should it dare to respond to the attack on its consulate.

Iran ignored those threats. On Saturday night, it launched some 300 drones and missiles, at the same time protesting vociferously about the Security Council’s “inaction and silence, coupled with its failure to condemn the Israeli regime’s aggressions”.

Western leaders failed to take note. They again sided with Israel and denounced Tehran. At Sunday’s Security Council meeting, the same three states – the US, UK and France – that had earlier blocked a statement condemning Israel’s attack on Iran’s diplomatic mission, sought a formal condemnation of Tehran for its response.

Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, ridiculed what he called “a parade of Western hypocrisy and double standards”. He added: “You know very well that an attack on a diplomatic mission is a casus belli under international law. And if Western missions were attacked, you would not hesitate to retaliate and prove your case in this room.”

There was no restraint visible either as the West publicly celebrated its collusion with Israel in foiling Iran’s attack.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak praised RAF pilots for their “bravery and professionalism” in helping to “protect civilians” in Israel.

In a statement, Keir Starmer, leader of the supposedly opposition Labour party, condemned Iran for generating “fear and instability”, rather than “peace and security”, that risked stoking a “wider regional war”. His party, he said, would “stand up for Israel’s security”.

My statement on the Iranian regime’s attack on Israel. pic.twitter.com/8vth7Aok5E

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) April 13, 2024

The “restraint” the West demands relates only, it seems, to Iran’s efforts to defend itself.

Starving to death

Given the West’s new-found recognition of the need for caution, and the obvious dangers of military excess, now may be the time for its leaders to consider demanding restraint more generally – and not just to avoid a further escalation between Iran and Israel.

Over the past six months Israel has bombed Gaza into rubble, destroyed its medical facilities and government offices, and killed and maimed many, many tens of thousands of Palestinians. In truth, such is the devastation that Gaza some time ago lost the ability to count its dead and wounded.

At the same time, Israel has intensified its 17-year blockade of the tiny enclave to the point where, so little food and water are getting through, the population are in the grip of famine. People, especially children, are literally starving to death.

The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, chaired by an American judge, ruled back in January – when the situation was far less dire than it is now – that a “plausible” case had been made Israel was committing genocide, a crime against humanity strictly defined in international law.

And yet there were no calls by western leaders for “restraint” as Israel bombed Gaza into ruins week after week, striking its hospitals, levelling its government offices, blowing up its universities, mosques and churches, and destroying its bakeries.

Rather, President Biden has repeatedly rushed through emergency arms sales, bypassing Congress, to make sure Israel has enough bombs to keep destroying Gaza and killing its children.

When Israeli leaders vowed to treat Gaza’s population like “human animals”, denying them all food, water and power, western politicians gave their assent.

Sunak was not interested in recruiting his brave RAF pilots to “protect civilians” in Gaza from Israel, and Starmer showed no concern about the “fear and instability” felt by Palestinians from Israel’s reign of terror.

Quite the reverse. Starmer, famed as a human rights lawyer, even gave his approval to Israel’s collective punishment of the people of Gaza, its “complete siege”, as integral to a supposed Israeli “right of self-defence”.

In doing so, he overturned one of the most fundamental principles of international law that civilians should not be targeted for the actions of their leaders. As is now all too apparent, he conferred a death sentence on the people of Gaza.

Where was “restraint” then?

Missing in action

Similarly, restraint went out of the window when Israel fabricated a pretext for eradicating the UN aid agency UNRWA, the last lifeline for Gaza’s starving population.

Even though Israel was unable to offer any evidence for its claim that a handful of UNRWA staff were implicated in an attack on Israel on 7 October, western leaders hurriedly cut off funding to the agency. In doing so, they became actively complicit in what the World Court already feared was a genocide.

Where was the restraint when Israeli officials – with a long history of lying to advance their state’s military agenda – made up stories about Hamas beheading babies, or carrying out systematic rapes on 7 October? All of this was debunked by an Al Jazeera investigation drawing largely on Israeli sources.

Those genocide-justifying deceptions were all too readily amplified by western politicians and media.

Israel showed no restraint in destroying Gaza’s hospitals, or taking hostage and torturing thousands of Palestinians it grabbed off the street.

All of that got a quiet nod from western politicians.

Where was the restraint in western capitals when protesters took to the streets to call for a ceasefire, to stop Israel’s bloodletting of women and children, the majority of Gaza’s dead? The demonstrators were smeared – are still smeared – by western politicians as supporters of terrorism and antisemites.

And where was the demand for restraint when Israel tore up the rulebook on the laws of war, allowing every would-be strongman to cite the West’s indulgence of Israeli atrocities as the precedent justifying their own crimes?

On each occasion, when it favoured Israel’s malevolent goals, the West’s commitment to “restraint” went missing in action.

Top-dog client state

There is a reason why Israel has been so ostentatious in its savaging of Gaza and its people. And it is the very same reason Israel felt emboldened to violate the diplomatic sanctity of Iran’s consulate in Damascus.

Because for decades Israel has been guaranteed protection and assistance from the West, whatever crimes it commits.

Israel’s founders ethnically cleansed much of Palestine in 1948, far beyond the terms of partition set out by the UN a year earlier. It imposed a military occupation on the remnants of historic Palestine in 1967, driving out yet more of the native population. It then imposed a regime of apartheid on the few areas where Palestinians remained.

In their West Bank reservations, Palestinians have been systematically brutalised, their homes demolished, and illegal Jewish settlements built on their land. The Palestinians’ holy places have been gradually surrounded and taken from them.

Separately, Gaza has been sealed off for 17 years, and its population denied freedom of movement, employment and the basics of life.

Israel’s reign of terror to maintain its absolute control has meant imprisonment and torture are a rite of passage for most Palestinian men. Any protest is ruthlessly crushed.

Now Israel has added mass slaughter in Gaza – genocide – to its long list of crimes.

Israel’s displacements of Palestinians to neighbouring states caused by its ethnic cleansing operations and slaughter have destabilised the wider region. And to secure its militarised settler-colonial project in the Middle East – and its place as Washington’s top-dog client state in the region – Israel has intimidated, bombed and invaded its neighbours on a regular basis.

Its attack on Iran’s consulate in Damascus was just the latest of serial humiliations faced by Arab states.

And through all of this, Washington and its vassal states have directed no more than occasional, lip-service calls for restraint towards Israel. There were never any consequences, but instead rewards from the West in the form of endless billions in aid and special trading status.

‘Something rash’

So why, after decades of debauched violence from Israel, has the West suddenly become so interested in “restraint”? Because on this rare occasion it serves western interests to calm the fires Israel is so determined to stoke.

The Israeli strike on Iran’s consulate came just as the Biden administration was finally running out of excuses for providing the weapons and diplomatic cover that has allowed Israel to slaughter, maim and orphan tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza over six months.

Demands for a ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel have been reaching fever pitch, with Biden haemorrhaging support among parts of his Democratic base as he faces a re-run presidential election later this year against a resurgent rival, Donald Trump.

Small numbers of votes could be the difference between victory and defeat.

Israel had every reason to fear that its patron might soon pull the rug from under its campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza.

But having destroyed the entire infrastructure needed to support life in the enclave, Israel needs time for the consequences to play out: either mass starvation there, or a relocation of the population elsewhere on supposedly “humanitarian” grounds.

A wider war, centred on Iran, would both distract from Gaza’s desperate plight and force Biden to back Israel unconditionally – to make good on his “iron-clad” commitment to Israel’s protection.

And to top it all, with the US drawn directly into a war against Iran, Washington would have little choice but to assist Israel in its long campaign to destroy Iran’s nuclear energy programme.

Israel wants to remove any potential for Iran to develop a bomb, one that would level the military playing field between the two in ways that would make Israel far less certain that it can continue to act as it pleases across the region with impunity.

That is why Biden officials are airing concerns to the US media that Israel is ready to “do something rash” in an attempt to drag the administration into a wider war.

The truth is, however, that Washington long ago cultivated Israel as its military Frankenstein’s monster. Israel’s role was precisely to project US power ruthlessly into the oil-rich Middle East. The price Washington was more than willing to accept was Israel’s eradication of the Palestinian people, replaced by a fortress “Jewish state”.

Calling for Israel to exercise “restraint” now, as its entrenched lobbies flex their muscles meddling in western politics, and self-confessed fascists rule Israel’s government, is beyond parody.

If the West really prized restraint, they should have insisted on it from Israel decades ago.

• Article first published in Middle East Eye

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

A&E Television Networks was briefly barred from distributing its new documentary, “Where Is Wendy Williams?”, after a New York justice granted a temporary restraining order against the company on Feb. 22, 2024. The order was reversed the following day.

According to court filings reviewed by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, A&E worked with former TV host Williams and her family to chronicle her life for nearly two years following the end of her talk show, including her subsequent health issues and placement under guardianship. Williams is credited as an executive producer on the documentary.

A trailer for the four-episode documentary aired on Feb. 2. Nearly three weeks later, Williams’ court-appointed guardian, Sabrina Morrissey, filed a lawsuit against A&E seeking a temporary restraining order to halt its planned release and requesting that the case proceed under seal. A New York Supreme Court justice granted both requests on Feb. 22 without providing A&E the opportunity to argue against them.

Morrissey argued that Williams — who has been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia and aphasia — was not competent to sign a talent agreement with producer Entertainment One and that the documentary was exploitative and could permanently damage Williams’ reputation.

The order forbade A&E from releasing the documentary or any further footage, trailers, dialogue or communications to anyone other than Morrissey or their respective attorneys without court approval.

An attorney representing A&E filed an appeal with the Appellate Division of the court the following day, arguing that the restraining order constituted a prior restraint and that Morrissey sought to prevent the airing of criticisms of her and the guardianship process.

“At a time when guardianship proceedings are being debated in our own State legislature and through headlines across the nation, the Order impermissibly gags Defendants from publishing speech that is unquestionably a matter of public concern,” attorney Rachel Strom wrote. She added that the restraint also deprived Williams and her family of “their right to speak out about her experiences, including and especially to criticize her care and treatment under a guardianship regime—the same regime which seeks to silence her now.”

Strom argued that Williams, her family and her manager were actively involved in the production of the documentary and that Morrissey had been aware of the documentary for more than a year. She also noted that, without an emergency reversal, A&E would be unable to proceed with the documentary’s planned release on Feb. 24, at great financial and reputational cost.

Appellate Justice Peter Moulton lifted the restraining order on Feb. 23, writing in a decision that was briefly made public that the restraining order was “an impermissible prior restraint on speech that violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” Moulton, however, upheld the decision to keep the court proceedings under seal.

The documentary was released on A&E’s Lifetime channel as planned on Feb. 24 and 25, but the lawsuit remains ongoing.

Attorneys for Morrissey and A&E did not respond to requests for comment.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

San Francisco police on Jan. 24, 2024, obtained a warrant to search independent news outlet Indybay’s electronic data, along with a 90-day gag order preventing Indybay from discussing or writing about its existence, according to court documents.

The warrant, which police later decided against pursuing, sought to identify the author of an Indybay post who claimed to have vandalized the San Francisco Police Credit Union.

The nondisclosure order was ultimately lifted on March 7 by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Linda Colfax, allowing Indybay to speak publicly about the warrant. Also on March 7, the San Francisco Police Department said it had decided not to act on the warrant due to potential First Amendment issues.

The warrant stemmed from a Jan. 18 post on Indybay, published under the pseudonym “some anarchists,” in which the author took responsibility for having smashed windows at the credit union earlier that day in an “act of vengeance” on the one-year anniversary of the police shooting death of an environmental activist in Atlanta.

Indybay, a volunteer-run, community-sourced newswire also known as the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center, allows anyone to self-publish articles, photos, videos and other material on the site. The posts are reviewed by Indybay editors, who according to the site’s editorial policies may combine them, make edits for spelling or grammar, or hide them if they are deemed “false, libelous, abusive … or hate speech.”

On Jan. 24, the police obtained the search warrant, which required Indybay to turn over information that would help identify the author of the story, such as IP addresses, website login credentials, and email addresses and phone numbers.

Indybay asked the police to withdraw the warrant on Jan. 29, arguing that it was illegal under California’s shield law and the federal Privacy Protection Act, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which provided the outlet with pro bono legal assistance. The SFPD told Indybay on Jan. 31 that it would take no further action on the warrant.

Indybay filed a motion on Feb. 22 not only to formally quash the warrant but also the nondisclosure order — which remained in effect — arguing that it violated the First Amendment as a “content-based prior restraint on speech.”

Colfax vacated the gag order on March 7, while also confirming that the search warrant had become void on Feb. 3, “as no search occurred and no records were received.”

EFF Staff Attorney F. Mario Trujillo told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker in an email that “SFPD and the judge did not end up taking a position” on the argument that the search warrant was unlawful. “SFPD, instead, took the position that—regardless of whether the warrant was unlawful when it was first issued—it became void after 10 days when SFPD declined to pursue it further in the face of Indybay’s resistance,” he added.

Trujillo went on to say that Colfax supported that interpretation in her order, adding, “It was important for the judge to confirm that and give Indybay certainty on the record.”

SFPD, in a March 7 news release, said that when Police Chief William “Bill” Scott learned of the warrant, he “immediately ordered officers to not pursue it over questions about possible First Amendment and Freedom of the Press issues.”

The statement added that the police department is committed to supporting the free press and has policies and training related to California’s shield law. The SFPD had previously pledged to ensure that all employees were properly trained on journalist protections with regard to police searches and subpoenas as part of a settlement after a police raid and search of a journalist’s home in 2019.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

A federal judge ordered The Oregonian on Jan. 26, 2024, to return documents related to a gender discrimination lawsuit against Nike and destroy any copies, after the plaintiff’s lawyer inadvertently sent them to a reporter on Jan. 19.

Judge Jolie A. Russo said in her order that the Portland, Oregon-based daily newspaper must agree “not to disseminate that information in any way; and to destroy any copies in its possession” by Jan. 31.

That publishing gag was vacated, or withdrawn, on Jan. 30 by another judge, who ruled that Russo must hold a hearing to allow The Oregonian to make arguments against the order before reviewing the issue again. The paper, in a Jan. 29 appeal, had argued that Russo did not allow the news organization to be heard in court, which it called a “quintessential due process violation.”

Russo held a hearing Jan. 30 and ordered the plaintiff’s attorneys to respond by Feb. 6 to arguments made by The Oregonian in its appeal.

“Prior restraint by government goes against every principle of the free press in this country,” Therese Bottomly, editor and vice president of content for The Oregonian, said in a statement emailed to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. “This is highly unusual, and we will defend our First Amendment rights in court.”

In its Jan. 29 appeal, The Oregonian argued that because it is a “non-party intervener” and has no stake in the outcome of the lawsuit, it is not subject to a protective order covering the documents.

“The Documents contain no national security implications, there is no risk of bodily harm or safety to any individual, and there are no competing constitutional rights at play—The Oregonian is the only one whose constitutional rights are on the line,” the filing read.

The Oregonian was writing an article, based on its independent reporting, about a culture of sexual harassment at Nike, when the attorney for the plaintiffs in the suit accidentally shared the documents in an email attachment.

The judge said the documents were subject to the case’s protective order, which makes them unviewable to the public. Other documents have been unsealed after a coalition of news outlets, including The Oregonian, filed a motion in court in April 2022.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Photograph Source: U.S. Department of State – Public Domain

The role of the US State Department regarding Israel’s continued obliteration of Gaza is becoming increasingly clear.  As the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces continue, the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, is full of meaningless statements about restraint and control, the protection of civilians, the imperatives of humanitarianism in war.  As the war continues, so do those statements.

As the new year began, an official from the White House expressed satisfaction at what appeared “to be the start of the gradual shift to lower-intensity operations in the north that we have been encouraging”.  But the revised Israeli approach did not “reflect any changes in the south”.  The monstrous death toll, in short, would continue to rise.

As Washington feigns a reproachful attitude to the IDF’s grossly lethal tactics, claiming success in restraining them, another, failing front is also being pursued in the Arab world and beyond.  As Israel’s great defender, the US is attempting to hold back fury and consternation as the dirty deeds by their favourite ally in the Middle East are being executed.

Blinken’s latest round of travelling has the flavour of swinging by tetchy neighbours to see how they are faring in the sea of blood and acrimony.  The itinerary includes Istanbul, Crete, Amman, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Al-’Ula, Tel Aviv, the West Bank, Manama and Cairo.  The State Department’s media release on January 4 outlines the obsolete agenda any sensible diplomat would do best to discard.  “Throughout his trip, the Secretary will underscore the importance of protecting civilian lives in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza; securing the release of all remaining hostages; our shared commitment to facilitating the increased, sustained delivery of life-saving humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza and the resumption of essential services; and ensuring that Palestinians are not forcibly displaced in Gaza.”

So far, Palestinians are being massacred by the IDF in Gaza, forcibly deprived of life-saving humanitarian assistance and essential services in a sustained act of strangulation while being forcibly displaced.  They are being oppressed, harassed and murdered by vigilante Israeli settlers in the West Bank, even as the army looks the other way.

It follows that Blinken is telling tall stories and hoping that legs carry them far.  They are also being told as proceedingsbefore the International Court of Justice instituted by South Africa commence to determine whether Israel’s conduct in Gaza satisfies the definition of genocide in international law.

The strategy becomes clearer in the second part of the disingenuous traveller’s agenda.  Blinken “will also discuss urgent mechanisms to stem violence, calm rhetoric, and reduce regional tensions, including deterring Houthi attacks on commercial shopping in the Red Sea and avoiding escalation in Lebanon.”

The Houthi attacks and the increasingly violent situation in Lebanon serve as golden distractions for Washington, since they give the Biden administration room to simultaneously claim to be preventing a widening of the conflict while permitting Israel’s butchery to continue.

Corking the conflict, however, is not proving such a success.  The war is widening, even if reporting on the subject remains sketchy in the negligently lazy news outlets of the Anglosphere.  In addition to the bold moves of the Houthis and escalating violence on the border between Israel and Lebanon come ongoing, harrying efforts from the Islamic Resistance in Iraq.  An Al-Mayadeen report on January 7 took note of an announcement from the group, also known as the Iraqi al-Najuba Movement, that it had fired an al-Arqab long-range cruise missile at Haifa “in support of our people in Gaza and in response to the massacres committed by the usurping entity against Palestinian civilians, including children, women, and the elderly.”

A spokesperson for the Iraqi Resistance, Hussein al-Moussawi, was bullish in claiming that the group had the capacity to strike targets beyond Haifa.  Conditions to develop the group’s weapons had also been “favourable”.

In a separate statement, the Islamic Resistance also revealed that its fighters had targeted an Israeli base on the occupied Golan Heights, using drones.  To this can be added drone attacks on the US army base of Qasrok, located in the countryside of Hasakah in northeastern Syria, and the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq.  The base continues to host US forces.

Perhaps the greatest canard of all in this briefest of trips by Blinken is the continued, now absurd claim, that Washington is committed “to working with partners to set the conditions necessary for peace in the Middle East, which includes comprehensive, tangible steps towards the realization of a future Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel, with both living in peace and security.”

In his remarks to President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, Blinken showed the hardened ignorance that will ensure the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will continue in some form.  In his mind, a “reformed” Palestinian Authority will take over the reins of a ruined Gaza (“effective responsibility”) whatever the residents of Gaza think.

Palestinians will never, given current conditions, be permitted sovereignty and anything remotely resembling a thriving, viable state.  Israel, whose very existence is based on predation, dispossession and war, will never permit a Palestinian entity to be given equal standing at the diplomatic or security table.  The US, in the tatty drag of an independent broker, will go along with the pantomime, promoting, as Blinken is, a sham, counterfeit form of autonomy, one forever subject to conditions, demarcations and restraints.  And one thing is almost certain about any future rump Palestinian entity: it will be deprived of any right to defend itself.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Photograph Source: U.S. Department of State – Public Domain

The role of the US State Department regarding Israel’s continued obliteration of Gaza is becoming increasingly clear.  As the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces continue, the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, is full of meaningless statements about restraint and control, the protection of civilians, the imperatives of humanitarianism in war.  As the war continues, so do those statements.

As the new year began, an official from the White House expressed satisfaction at what appeared “to be the start of the gradual shift to lower-intensity operations in the north that we have been encouraging”.  But the revised Israeli approach did not “reflect any changes in the south”.  The monstrous death toll, in short, would continue to rise.

As Washington feigns a reproachful attitude to the IDF’s grossly lethal tactics, claiming success in restraining them, another, failing front is also being pursued in the Arab world and beyond.  As Israel’s great defender, the US is attempting to hold back fury and consternation as the dirty deeds by their favourite ally in the Middle East are being executed.

Blinken’s latest round of travelling has the flavour of swinging by tetchy neighbours to see how they are faring in the sea of blood and acrimony.  The itinerary includes Istanbul, Crete, Amman, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Al-’Ula, Tel Aviv, the West Bank, Manama and Cairo.  The State Department’s media release on January 4 outlines the obsolete agenda any sensible diplomat would do best to discard.  “Throughout his trip, the Secretary will underscore the importance of protecting civilian lives in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza; securing the release of all remaining hostages; our shared commitment to facilitating the increased, sustained delivery of life-saving humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza and the resumption of essential services; and ensuring that Palestinians are not forcibly displaced in Gaza.”

So far, Palestinians are being massacred by the IDF in Gaza, forcibly deprived of life-saving humanitarian assistance and essential services in a sustained act of strangulation while being forcibly displaced.  They are being oppressed, harassed and murdered by vigilante Israeli settlers in the West Bank, even as the army looks the other way.

It follows that Blinken is telling tall stories and hoping that legs carry them far.  They are also being told as proceedingsbefore the International Court of Justice instituted by South Africa commence to determine whether Israel’s conduct in Gaza satisfies the definition of genocide in international law.

The strategy becomes clearer in the second part of the disingenuous traveller’s agenda.  Blinken “will also discuss urgent mechanisms to stem violence, calm rhetoric, and reduce regional tensions, including deterring Houthi attacks on commercial shopping in the Red Sea and avoiding escalation in Lebanon.”

The Houthi attacks and the increasingly violent situation in Lebanon serve as golden distractions for Washington, since they give the Biden administration room to simultaneously claim to be preventing a widening of the conflict while permitting Israel’s butchery to continue.

Corking the conflict, however, is not proving such a success.  The war is widening, even if reporting on the subject remains sketchy in the negligently lazy news outlets of the Anglosphere.  In addition to the bold moves of the Houthis and escalating violence on the border between Israel and Lebanon come ongoing, harrying efforts from the Islamic Resistance in Iraq.  An Al-Mayadeen report on January 7 took note of an announcement from the group, also known as the Iraqi al-Najuba Movement, that it had fired an al-Arqab long-range cruise missile at Haifa “in support of our people in Gaza and in response to the massacres committed by the usurping entity against Palestinian civilians, including children, women, and the elderly.”

A spokesperson for the Iraqi Resistance, Hussein al-Moussawi, was bullish in claiming that the group had the capacity to strike targets beyond Haifa.  Conditions to develop the group’s weapons had also been “favourable”.

In a separate statement, the Islamic Resistance also revealed that its fighters had targeted an Israeli base on the occupied Golan Heights, using drones.  To this can be added drone attacks on the US army base of Qasrok, located in the countryside of Hasakah in northeastern Syria, and the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq.  The base continues to host US forces.

Perhaps the greatest canard of all in this briefest of trips by Blinken is the continued, now absurd claim, that Washington is committed “to working with partners to set the conditions necessary for peace in the Middle East, which includes comprehensive, tangible steps towards the realization of a future Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel, with both living in peace and security.”

In his remarks to President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, Blinken showed the hardened ignorance that will ensure the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will continue in some form.  In his mind, a “reformed” Palestinian Authority will take over the reins of a ruined Gaza (“effective responsibility”) whatever the residents of Gaza think.

Palestinians will never, given current conditions, be permitted sovereignty and anything remotely resembling a thriving, viable state.  Israel, whose very existence is based on predation, dispossession and war, will never permit a Palestinian entity to be given equal standing at the diplomatic or security table.  The US, in the tatty drag of an independent broker, will go along with the pantomime, promoting, as Blinken is, a sham, counterfeit form of autonomy, one forever subject to conditions, demarcations and restraints.  And one thing is almost certain about any future rump Palestinian entity: it will be deprived of any right to defend itself.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

As the new year began, an official from the White House expressed satisfaction at what appeared “to be the start of the gradual shift to lower-intensity operations in the north that we have been encouraging”.  But the revised Israeli approach did not “reflect any changes in the south”.  The monstrous death toll, in short, would continue to rise.

As Washington feigns a reproachful attitude to the IDF’s grossly lethal tactics, claiming success in restraining them, another, failing front is also being pursued in the Arab world and beyond.  As Israel’s great defender, the US is attempting to hold back fury and consternation as the dirty deeds by their favourite ally in the Middle East are being executed.

Blinken’s latest round of travelling has the flavour of swinging by tetchy neighbours to see how they are faring in the sea of blood and acrimony.  The itinerary includes Istanbul, Crete, Amman, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Al-’Ula, Tel Aviv, the West Bank, Manama and Cairo.  The State Department’s media release on January 4 outlines the obsolete agenda any sensible diplomat would do best to discard.  “Throughout his trip, the Secretary will underscore the importance of protecting civilian lives in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza; securing the release of all remaining hostages; our shared commitment to facilitating the increased, sustained delivery of life-saving humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza and the resumption of essential services; and ensuring that Palestinians are not forcibly displaced in Gaza.”

So far, Palestinians are being massacred by the IDF in Gaza, forcibly deprived of life-saving humanitarian assistance and essential services in a sustained act of strangulation while being forcibly displaced.  They are being oppressed, harassed and murdered by vigilante Israeli settlers in the West Bank, even as the army looks the other way.

It follows that Blinken is telling tall stories and hoping that legs carry them far.  They are also being told as proceedings before the International Court of Justice instituted by South Africa commence to determine whether Israel’s conduct in Gaza satisfies the definition of genocide in international law.

The strategy becomes clearer in the second part of the disingenuous traveller’s agenda.  Blinken “will also discuss urgent mechanisms to stem violence, calm rhetoric, and reduce regional tensions, including deterring Houthi attacks on commercial shopping in the Red Sea and avoiding escalation in Lebanon.”

The Houthi attacks and the increasingly violent situation in Lebanon serve as golden distractions for Washington, since they give the Biden administration room to simultaneously claim to be preventing a widening of the conflict while permitting Israel’s butchery to continue.

Corking the conflict, however, is not proving such a success.  The war is widening, even if reporting on the subject remains sketchy in the negligently lazy news outlets of the Anglosphere.  In addition to the bold moves of the Houthis and escalating violence on the border between Israel and Lebanon come ongoing, harrying efforts from the Islamic Resistance in Iraq.  An Al-Mayadeen report on January 7 took note of an announcement from the group, also known as the Iraqi al-Najuba Movement, that it had fired an al-Arqab long-range cruise missile at Haifa “in support of our people in Gaza and in response to the massacres committed by the usurping entity against Palestinian civilians, including children, women, and the elderly.”

A spokesperson for the Iraqi Resistance, Hussein al-Moussawi, was bullish in claiming that the group had the capacity to strike targets beyond Haifa.  Conditions to develop the group’s weapons had also been “favourable”.

In a separate statement, the Islamic Resistance also revealed that its fighters had targeted an Israeli base on the occupied Golan Heights, usin drones.  To this can be added drone attacks on the US army base of Qasrok, located in the countryside of Hasakah in northeastern Syria, and the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq.  The base continues to host US forces.

Perhaps the greatest canard of all in this briefest of trips by Blinken is the continued, now absurd claim, that Washington is committed “to working with partners to set the conditions necessary for peace in the Middle East, which includes comprehensive, tangible steps towards the realization of a future Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel, with both living in peace and security.”

In his remarks to President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, Blinken showed the hardened ignorance that will ensure the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will continue in some form.  In his mind, a “reformed” Palestinian Authority will take over the reins of a ruined Gaza (“effective responsibility”) whatever the residents of Gaza think.

Palestinians will never, given current conditions, be permitted sovereignty and anything remotely resembling a thriving, viable state.  Israel, whose very existence is based on predation, dispossession and war, will never permit a Palestinian entity to be given equal standing at the diplomatic or security table.  The US, in the tatty drag of an independent broker, will go along with the pantomime, promoting, as Blinken is, a sham, counterfeit form of autonomy, one forever subject to conditions, demarcations and restraints.  And one thing is almost certain about any future rump Palestinian entity: it will be deprived of any right to defend itself.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

BusinessDen reporter Justin Wingerter, who covers courts and white-collar crime for the local business news site, was ordered on Nov. 30, 2023, to return or delete all copies of legal filings he had obtained from a court in Denver, Colorado. He ignored the order and on Dec. 4 published an article with details about the underlying case containing information he obtained from the court filings.

Wingerter told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that he had been reviewing recently filed lawsuits on Nov. 28 when he noticed something unusual: a civil case with a pending motion for it to be “suppressed,” more commonly referred to as sealed. He then requested records from the case.

“I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get the documents,” Wingerter said. “The nature of a records request is you don’t know exactly what you’re going to get back, but you make the request because you’d rather be told ‘no’ than to not file it at all.”

A clerk of the court later called to notify him that the request had been granted, and, after paying 25 cents per page over the phone, Wingerter received the files via email the following morning, Nov. 29.

That same evening, however, District Judge Kandace Cecilia Gerdes granted the plaintiff’s motion to suppress. When Gerdes learned that Wingerter had obtained the records before they were sealed, she issued a second order on Nov. 30 that read:

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

An U.S. district judge in Asheville, North Carolina, issued a second temporary restraining order on Oct. 10, 2023, barring members of the press from publishing about a former student who is suing the University of North Carolina System and multiple university administrators, according to court records.

The plaintiff, who filed the suit on Feb. 15 under the pseudonym Jacob Doe, alleges that he was wrongfully expelled from UNC-Chapel Hill after being accused of sexual assault by four undergraduate women.

When filing the suit, Doe simultaneously filed the motion for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction, requesting that no information be released by the defendants or published by the media. Chief U.S. District Judge Martin Reidinger granted that temporary restraining order on Feb. 22, citing possible irreparable harm to the plaintiff.

Immediately after the restraint went into effect, however, the parties jointly filed to withdraw the motion and Reidinger dissolved the order on March 1.

Doe refiled his motion seven months later, after UNC informed him that it had received a public records request seeking to identify him, according to court records. On Oct. 10, District Judge Max Cogburn Jr. granted the motion.

As with the initial prior restraint, the university is barred from disclosing any information about the disciplinary proceedings at the heart of the lawsuit. UNC is also required to instruct news outlets that they are barred from publishing any information about Doe or his disciplinary proceedings that they may receive.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

West Virginia television station WSAZ, which had sued a state agency over access to documents that included a contentious draft letter terminating a senior official, was freed to publish the letter on Aug. 28, 2023, after Kanawha County Circuit Judge Kenneth Ballard lifted a temporary protective order.

In May 2022, WSAZ sued to access documents from the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources after the department had rebuffed an earlier Freedom of Information Act request. The station was, in part, seeking records related to the termination of the agency’s deputy secretary by its top administrator.

Ballard ruled in favor of the station, requiring the release of the requested documents, with the exception of the draft termination letter itself. But when the agency sent a PDF with hundreds of pages to the station in July 2023, it inadvertently included the letter. When the agency learned of the error, it asked that the letter be deleted. The station refused to delete it, so the agency asked the court to prevent its publication.

On July 14, Ballard issued a temporary protective order barring disclosure of the letter’s contents. Ultimately, however, he determined a permanent bar would represent an unconstitutional prior restraint, so in August he lifted the protective order, allowing the station to publish the letter.

“The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held,” the judge wrote in his decision, “that the news media has a First Amendment right, absent the government’s demonstration of a ‘state interest of the highest order,’ to publish information about a matter of public concern that it has lawfully obtained, regardless of whether the news media’s source violated the law in providing that information.”

Claire Magee Ferguson, an attorney with WSAZ’s parent company Gray Media, told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, “Judge Ballard’s ruling underlined that our daily pursuit of public information is a necessary, worthy fight. WSAZ and Gray Media were thrilled to receive judicial confirmation that the ‘overriding interest of justice’ inevitably sides with free speech.”

The agency did not respond to requests for comment from the Tracker.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

The post Wild, Natural Wilderness Requires Restraint appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Nickas.

Red Rock Lakes Wilderness Area. Photo: Erin Clark, USFWS.

Trout Unlimited (TU) recently published a piece in Montana disparaging Wilderness advocates’ opposition to an arctic grayling project that TU is pursuing in the Red Rock Lakes Wilderness. The project calls for using heavy machinery to bury a 14-inch pipeline through the Wilderness to artificially increase winter oxygen levels in Upper Red Rock Lake. As the executive director of Wilderness Watch, one of the organizations bringing the lawsuit against the project, I’d like to correct the record and explain why people should be skeptical of TU’s approach.

TU writers quoted our website for the notion that Wilderness is reflected by “native wildlife at naturally occurring population levels.” That’s true, but they omitted the rest of the statement in which we also discuss why Wilderness is dependent upon a “lack of human structures, roads, motor vehicles or mechanized equipment” and how Wilderness must be “untrammeled, wild and self-willed, where natural processes occur without intentional human interference.” The bottom line is that a species’ naturally occurring population levels—by definition—cannot be those that rely upon human structures and human machinery to exist. Re-engineering the landscape takes away what’s natural and replaces it with human infrastructure and value bias, a scenario that inevitably harms wildlife and their habitat in the long run.

This has been a fundamental tenet of the Wilderness Act from the beginning. As Howard Zahniser, the wilderness bill’s author and chief advocate explained during testimony on the wilderness bill, efforts to conserve wildlife should be encouraged, but “[i]n no such [wilderness] areas…should management for any purpose be permitted to include modification of the wilderness character of the area. Management for wildlife…should not include the installation of water-control or other structures modifying the wilderness, even though these might be deemed to be measures to increase the area’s wildlife.”

It’s extremely rare to protect wild, unmanipulated wetland areas where nature persists without our modern technology and without manhandling to meet immediate desires. That’s what Congress had in mind when it set aside the Red Rock Lakes Wilderness a half-century ago to be preserved in its wild, untrammeled condition forever. And that’s why we’ve taken the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to court over its decision—prompted by TU and Montana Fish Wildlife & Parks—to reconfigure Upper Red Rock Lake into an arctic grayling aquarium, where oxygen levels—and seemingly the number of grayling in the lake—are controlled by turning a valve on a pipeline.

The whole point of wilderness preservation is to have areas that humans leave alone, where we exercise restraint and let nature call the shots. Allowing federal managers—of their own volition, or in this case prodded by a state agency and special interest groups—to manage for their desired conditions rather than what nature provides undermines the whole idea of Wilderness and our relationship to it.

As for the arctic grayling, the writers from Trout Unlimited lament the “very real possibility of extinction.” As a factual matter, arctic grayling are nowhere near going extinct; they’re abundant in their native habitats further north and artificially stocked in lakes and waterways all around western Montana and in other states. The challenge that southwestern Montana’s arctic grayling face, in the southern extreme of their native range, is habitat degraded by human activities—herds of cattle, roads, water diversions, other man-made infrastructure, and too much stomping around in the creeks and streams. Yet, instead of addressing these issues, TU points the finger at winter, arguing that seasonal oxygen levels in the lake should be reengineered to make winter easier. That concept just doesn’t pass the smell test; it’s no secret that grayling decline in the Centennial Valley is the result of people’s impact on the landscape, not winter.

Wilderness benefits wildlife by providing habitat security and allowing nature to evolve on its own terms as it has since time immemorial. Grayling won’t be saved at Red Rock Lakes by trying to change winter. Their only chance is if we’re willing to change ourselves, to stop doing the things that harm the fish and give wild nature a chance.

The plan pushed by TU and the Fish and Wildlife Service is rooted in a different approach, one of protecting ourselves from having to deal with our impacts on nature by re-engineering wild habitats once they start reflecting the harm we’ve inflicted. This approach is unlawful in places we’ve set aside as Wilderness, and that’s why we sued.

To learn more about this issue, check out this resource page we put together.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Nickas.

Kenwyn Caranna, a government reporter for the News & Record, was covering a juvenile court hearing on July 28, 2023, when a North Carolina judge seized her notes and told her she was under a gag order.

News & Record Executive Editor Dimon Kendrick-Holmes wrote that Caranna had been observing proceedings in the Greensboro courtroom most of the day, the only exception being a closed hearing when all observers were ordered to leave the courtroom.

District Court Judge Ashley Watlington-Simms reportedly asked Caranna to identify herself later in the day. When Caranna did so, the judge denied the reporter’s request to speak with an attorney and left the courtroom to consult with Chief District Court Judge Teresa Vincent.

When she returned, Watlington-Simms told Caranna she was under a gag order. The judge then directed bailiffs to seize Caranna’s notes from the day’s proceedings, telling the journalist she could appeal the decision on a later date.

Watlington-Simms entered a formal protective order on Aug. 2, which stated that the prior restraint was necessary to protect confidential information from the juvenile court cases, according to the News & Record. The order also sealed Caranna’s notes and barred her from disclosing information from the cases she observed.

The News & Record has requested a hearing to vacate the gag order as well as unseal and return Caranna’s notes.

When reached by email, Caranna directed the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker to a newsletter about the ruling, but declined to comment further. The newsletter reported that a district trial court coordinator refused to release a copy of the protective order, stating that it is confidential.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

A Missouri judge on May 23, 2023, barred the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and one of its reporters from publishing details from the mental health evaluation of a man set to stand trial for allegedly killing a police officer in 2020.

Post-Dispatch reporter Katie Kull obtained a copy of a mental health report on the defendant, Thomas J. Kinworthy Jr., when it was filed in St. Louis City Circuit Court on May 18. According to court filings reviewed by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, two copies of the report were filed by mistake, with one incorrectly made available to the public.

Kull contacted the public defender representing Kinworthy for comment on May 22, the Riverfront Times reported, and the attorney immediately filed a request for a temporary restraining order. The following day, Judge Elizabeth Hogan granted the order, barring Kull, the Post-Dispatch and any of its employees from publishing about the report.

In a tweet, Kull wrote, “I tried to write a story but instead I found myself under a court order.”

On May 23, the Post-Dispatch filed an initial response to the order, asking that it be dissolved and noting that the Supreme Court has consistently rejected such orders when the documents were legally obtained.

“This is true even when statutes prohibit dissemination of such information, as is the case here,” attorneys for the Post-Dispatch wrote. “It is also true when information is inadvertently released that should not have been released, which is the apparent situation here.”

Neither Kull nor the Post-Dispatch responded to requests for comment.

Freedom of the Press Foundation, which oversees the operation of the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, condemned the prior restraint.

“On the rare occasion when the government has a legitimate basis to withhold records from the public, the onus is on the government, not the press, to ensure that they’re withheld,” Advocacy Director Seth Stern wrote. “That’s why the Court has held at least four times that once the government releases records to the press, even accidentally, it cannot claw them back or prohibit or punish their publication, regardless of how sensitive the records may be.”

The restraining order will remain in place as the case progresses, according to the Times, and the Post-Dispatch has until June 12 to submit motions in opposition.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

The post Wilderness Needs Our Humility and Restraint, Not Our Poison appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kevin Proescholdt.

Arizona Capitol Times reporter Camryn Sanchez was ordered to have no contact with state Sen. Wendy Rogers after the lawmaker obtained a restraining order against her on April 19, 2023.

The Capitol Times reported that Sanchez, who covers the state senate, was investigating whether Rogers lives in the Flagstaff-area district she was elected in 2020 to represent. The senator had purchased a home in Chandler and listed Tempe as her place of residence in the title documents, not Flagstaff. But Rogers had listed Flagstaff as her home on her nominating paperwork and campaign finance report. Both Chandler and Tempe are located near Phoenix, approximately two-and-a-half hours from Flagstaff.

Sanchez traveled to both the Chandler and Tempe homes in an attempt to identify where the senator was living, ringing the doorbells and speaking with neighbors, according to the Capitol Times. Sanchez declined to comment, citing advice from the newspaper’s attorneys.

Flagstaff Justice Court Magistrate Judge Amy Criddle granted the restraining order on April 19 following a hearing without Sanchez being notified or allowed the opportunity to speak in her own defense, according to the Capitol Times.

Rogers’ petition for an injunction against harassment not only requested that Sanchez be barred from approaching the senator’s homes, but also asked that the reporter be barred from entering the Arizona Senate building, the Capitol Times reported. Rogers had also asked Senate leadership to revoke Sanchez’s access to the floor in March, but Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen declined, instead directing the reporter not to approach Rogers on the floor.

On April 20, Rogers tweeted a copy of the restraining order and doorbell camera screenshots of Sanchez at her homes, calling the reporter’s behavior “creepy” and “bizarre.” In a statement by Rogers released by the Arizona Senate Republicans the same day, the lawmaker alleged that she was fearful for her physical safety.

“I don’t know this reporter personally, I don’t know what she is capable of, and I don’t believe anyone in their right mind would show up uninvited to my home at night,” Rogers said in the statement. “Therefore, I don’t trust that this person wouldn’t lash out and try to physically harm me in some fashion.”

Rogers did not respond to a voicemail requesting comment.

Society of Professional Journalists Phoenix Chapter President Tim Eigo released a statement supporting Sanchez, writing that she was engaging in standard journalistic newsgathering.

“Senator Rogers has made unfounded suggestions that the reporter may be a danger to the senator. But Sanchez was doing nothing more than her job as a journalist, inquiring into the accurate residence of a lawmaker,” Eigo wrote. “In the reporting process, she reached out to the senator for comment and clarification. It is that process, done by hundreds of reporters every day on hundreds of stories, that Senator Rogers has suggested is a criminal act.”

Capitol Times Publisher Michael Gorman condemned the no contact order in an op-ed for the newspaper, stating that it was an unconstitutional prior restraint.

“The petition and injunction were not about the Senator’s personal safety but were about silencing the press in direct contravention of the First Amendment,” Gorman wrote.

Gorman added that the Capitol Times intends to challenge the injunction. Executive Editor Gary Grado told Freedom of the Press Foundation, which oversees the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, that a hearing on the restraining order is scheduled for May 10.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Pennsylvania journalist Jerry Geleff, host of The Exeter Underground podcast and publisher of The Exeter Examiner, was ordered on Dec. 15, 2022, to take down reporting on a leaked document and destroy copies of it.

In July 2022, Geleff filed a public records request for a report from an investigation into allegations of harassment against a Township Supervisor. His request and subsequent appeal were denied. During a Dec. 14 episode of the Underground, Geleff announced that he had obtained excerpts of the report and read sections aloud. He also published images of the first page and the last two pages on his local news website, the Examiner, which transitioned to Facebook-only in early 2023.

According to court records reviewed by the Tracker, an attorney for the Township emailed Geleff on Dec. 15 at 10:45 a.m., threatening legal action against him unless he immediately agreed to return all physical or electronic copies of the report, and destroy copies and descriptions of it that had been published on his platforms. The attorney said he would bring a lawsuit against Geleff and his media companies, and had plans to present an emergency motion for a preliminary injunction, an order requiring Geleff to destroy and unpublish the report, to a judge at 1:30 p.m. that day.

Geleff told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that he replied he would not comply with the request.

The judge granted the Township’s motion at 2 p.m., and within two hours Geleff had removed the podcast and the article with images of the report.

“I had no time to get legal representation and how a judge allowed that to happen I can’t understand,” Geleff said.

That evening, Geleff posted on the Examiner’s Facebook page a link to an external website that published photos of the report. Within 15 minutes, he was contacted by the Township’s attorney who alleged posting the link violated the order. Geleff promptly removed that post and mentions of the website from his podcast.

Two days later, Geleff published an article (available through a web archive) about the emergency order and the lawsuit against him, alleging that it was entirely retaliatory.

“This is nothing but retribution for a very vocal critic who has a media outlet and audience. They are attempting to silence any dissent of their plans. And they must be stopped,” Geleff wrote.

On Dec. 23, an attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed a motion to dissolve the restraint on Geleff’s behalf. RCFP Local Legal Initiative Attorney Paula Knudsen Burke wrote that the prior restraint “flatly violates” the First Amendment and the state’s constitution.

That same day, the Township’s attorney filed a motion for Geleff to be held in contempt for the Facebook post linking to the external website, asking that the court fine Geleff and order him to pay the Township’s attorney and court fees.

In its January 2023 filing of arguments against the lawsuit and the motion to hold Geleff in contempt, RCFP attorney Burke wrote that the Township was asking the court to further punish Geleff without cause.

“This behavior would be troubling from a private litigant. From the Township, a local government seeking to punish one of its residents for speech on a matter of public interest, it shocks the conscience,” Burke wrote.

On Jan. 10, the Township’s attorney withdrew the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning that it cannot be refiled at a later date. The preliminary injunction barring Geleff from publishing the report was also lifted.

Geleff republished his article and podcast episode that day, writing on the Examiner’s Facebook, “The cowardly Exeter Township Supervisors dropped their lawsuit against me, and I'm able to put this back up. The unconstitutional temporary injunction they were granted no longer applies.”

On its Facebook page, the Township acknowledged that portions of the report had continued to be shared online and that continuing the lawsuit would only incur additional expenses for the taxpayers.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

An Asheville judge issued an order barring members of the press from publishing about a former student who is suing the University of North Carolina System and multiple university administrators on Feb. 22, 2023, according to court records.

The plaintiff, who filed the suit on Feb. 15 under the pseudonym Jacob Doe, alleges that he was wrongfully expelled from UNC Chapel Hill after being accused of sexual assault by four undergraduate women.

When filing the suit, Doe simultaneously filed the motion for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction, requesting that no information be released by the defendants or published by the media. Those filings appear to have been sealed and are not available for public review.

Chief United States District Judge Martin Reidinger granted the temporary restraining order on Feb. 22, citing possible irreparable harm to the plaintiff. The order bars the defendants from disclosing any information about the disciplinary proceedings at the heart of the lawsuit and requires them to inform media outlets about the restraint.

The order also requires the defendants to instruct news outlets that “they are prohibited from publishing any information concerning the Plaintiff, the disciplinary proceedings, or the outcomes of such proceedings.” It is unclear which media outlets, if any, were informed of the order.

Immediately after the restraint went into effect, the parties jointly filed to withdraw the motion, asking the judge to dissolve the TRO and cancel a preliminary hearing scheduled for March 7.

As of publication the restraining order remains in effect.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Defining “Censorship by Proxy”

Online restrictions—including content moderation, advertising blocklists, and enforcement of “community standards,”implemented by Big Tech platforms such as Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook—increasingly combine with government legislation to yield dangerous, but submerged threats to online freedom of information, not to mention the offline safety historically-oppressed or marginalized groups.

Censorship has typically been treated as a matter of government control, with emphases in the United States on the role of the First Amendment and a host of legal precedents that establish limits on “prior restraint” by government. However, the rise of digital-era media giants—including Alphabet (which owns Google and YouTube), Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), and Twitter—makes clear that media corporations now stand alongside government as commanding arbiters of legitimate discourse on public issues. “Google may not be a country, but it is a superpower,” Timothy Garton Ash wrote in Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. Though Google, Facebook, Twitter and other media entities lack the formal legal authority of sovereign nation-states, “their capacity to enable or limit freedom of information and expression is greater than that of most states.”

We explore these significant changes in the media landscape by developing the concept of censorship by proxy, which we define as restrictions on freedom of information 1) undertaken by private corporations, which 2) exceed the usual legal limits on governmental censorship, and 3) serve both corporate and government or third-party interests.

The Example of RT America

As an example of censorship by proxy, consider the demise of RT America, also known as Russia Today, which from 2010 until 2022 served as the US-based channel of the global, multilingual RT news network funded by the Russian government. On March 3, 2022, after the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and amidst a popular wave of anti-Russian sentiment in the United States, RT America shut down. Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who hosted “On Contact” on RT America, wrote, “This was long the plan of the US government.”

But, in fact, it was not the US government that shut down RT America. Instead, DirectTV, Roku, Sling TV and Dish—all corporate entities—effectively censored RT America by deplatforming the channel: On March 1, 2022, DirecTV dropped RT America from its services; the following day, Roku did the same; and, on March 4, Sling TV and its parent company Dish removed RT America their platforms.

But Hedges’ analysis of the US government’s aims was not off-target. Well before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the US government had placed restrictions on RT America and journalists working for it. In November 2017, facing legal pressure from the US Department of Justice, RT America had registered as a “foreign agent” under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). Although RT America, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera, and several Chinese state media outlets have been required to register under FARA, the BBC, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, and Canada’s CBC have not, leading some critics to suggest that the designation “has more to do with geopolitics than with journalism.”

An intelligence assessment spurred the Justice Department’s pressure to register RT under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. A now-declassified January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) concluded that “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine” contributed to the Russian “influence campaign” to swing the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. According to the ICA—which combined analyses by the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA—RT America’s programing highlighted “criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties” and was an important “messaging tool” in the “Kremlin-directed campaign to undermine faith in the US government and fuel political protest.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists criticized the Justice Department for forcing RT to register as a foreign agent, describing this as a “shift in how the law has been applied in recent decades” and “a bad idea” that empowered governments to decide “what constitutes journalism or propaganda.” Journalists at registered outlets stated that “the stigma attached with registering” compromised their ability “to carry out normal journalistic activities,” the CPJ reported subsequently.

The US government could have silenced RT America outright, but doing so would have prompted negative repercussions. An overt government decision to censor RT America would likely have generated not only widespread domestic criticism of the action as a violation of constitutionally-protected press freedoms, but also Russian blowback in the form of retaliation in kind against US-based news organizations operating in Russia.

Instead, the decisions of a handful of US-based media service providers achieved the same end without any of the domestic or international political costs. This case exemplifies the phenomenon we describe as censorship by proxy. Because censorship by proxy can occur wherever the interests and powers of global corporations and national governments intersect, it is an international phenomenon.

Returning to the case of RT America, note that, in addition to the groundwork laid by the Justice Department’s designation of the broadcaster and its journalists as registered “foreign agents,” the marked rise in anti-Russian public opinion following the Russian invasion of Ukraine also contributed to the news channel’s demise. DirectTV, Roku, Sling TV, and Dish each decided to drop RT America from their platforms in protest against the Russian invasion, and likely in response to public campaigns urging them to do so. The corporate deplatforming of RT America should be understood not only as a case of censorship by proxy, but also as a product of a “moral panic” in which the Russian news channel was cast as a “folk devil” and the media service providers that deplatformed it positioned themselves as defenders of established values.

Moral Panics Prompt Censorship by Proxy

Informed by pioneering studies in the sociology of deviance by Howard Becker, Stanley Cohen, and Stuart Hall, social scientists, media scholars use the term “moral panic” to describe social fears based on the belief that a stereotyped group or category of people threatens the values, safety, or interests of a community. These stereotypes often center on identities marginalized within the community or wider society, including, for example, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, nationality, religion, or class.

Despite the concept’s wording, moral panics are usually about politics as much as morality. This is especially so in contexts of social, political, or economic tension, when the manufacture of moral panic is useful because it can quickly and effectively produce social solidarity. Moral panics can rapidly convert outrage into political action. Notably, however, studies on a diverse range of moral panics, from the Salem witch trials in the 17th century to the “War on Drugs” in the 1980s and 1990s, demonstrate that political action in response to moral panics often serves to reinforce and expand the authority of groups already holding power.

Our analysis shows how practitioners of censorship by proxy often participate in the construction or amplification of moral panics to justify restrictions on freedom of information. Political leaders and Big Tech platforms alike champion online safety—often with paternalistic calls to protect women and children—in the name of “cleaning up” online spaces, but the measures they propose often serve to muzzle legitimate political dissent, further marginalize already vulnerable communities, and divide members of the public by pitting, for example, the safety of children against freedom of information.

How Censorship by Proxy Works: Content Moderation, Community Standards, and Advertising Blocklists

Online censorship has been made more palatable through rebranding as “content moderation” or enforcement of “community standards,” undertaken by corporations as much as government agencies. Content moderation often leads to innocent content being flagged as harmful or explicit, which leads to the silencing of marginalized voices. Here we focus especially on LGBTQ+ content, but, under the guise of countering “fake news,” censorship by proxy also restricts progressive independent news outlets that depend on major media platforms for content distribution, advertising revenue, and fundraising.

From Facebook to YouTube, the biggest social media platforms all engage in forms of content blocking that negatively impact LGBTQ people and communities. Due to a double-standard, the same algorithms that ban LGBTQ-themed hashtags and demonetize YouTube channels with LGBTQ content often permit or even promote homophobic and transphobic content. No overarching policy, much less any kind of government directive leads to these outcomes; instead, the marginalization or erasure of queer content online is a case of censorship by proxy that reflects—and reinforces—moral panic orchestrated by the religious right and embraced by many Republican politicians, as Katherine Stewart documented in The Power Worshippers.

Under the guise of addressing hate speech, Facebook has applied strict real-name policies that prevent transgender people from using their chosen names and identities, blocked advertising with LGBTQ content or themes, while instituting criteria for “protected” and “unprotected” categories that promote homophobic and transphobic content. To moderate “adult” content, Instagram has deplatformed users, banned hashtags, and shadow-banned posts and ads with LGBTQ content. In efforts to manage bullying or harassment based on users’ “physical or mental condition,” TikTok has implemented moderation guidelines that outlaw LGBTQ content.  Twitter has implemented bans on “sensitive media” terms that restrict efforts by LGBTQ people to reclaim and take pride in slurs, because content moderation processes often disregard the poster’s intent. In January 2021, a federal judge dismissed a class-action lawsuit against YouTube, filed by LGBT content creators, who claimed that the video sharing platform had violated their First Amendment rights by censoring their content and demonetizing their channels. US District Court Magistrate Virginia DeMarchi ruled that, as private entities, YouTube and its parent company, Google, were not bound by the First Amendment, a ruling that received nearly no news coverage.

Advertising Interests Drive Censorship by Proxy

In a new wrinkle on how advertising interests shape the production and distribution of online content, advertisers now use “blocklists” to avoid having their products associated with content that they believe might damage their brands’ reputations with target consumers. The advertising blocklists employed by many prominent corporations to promote “brand safety” now employ artificial intelligence technology to scan for as many as 7,000 different words and phrases.

A 2019 study by CHEQ, a cybersecurity business, found that “more than half (57%) of neutral or positive stories on major news sites are being incorrectly flagged as unsafe for advertising.” The impact of blocklists was most pronounced on LGBTQ-focused news outlets: 73 percent of the safe content in The Advocate and PinkNews was inappropriately flagged as unsafe for advertising, CHEQ found. The editor of PinkNews, Benjamin Cohen, told CHEQ that a lot of content gets blocked “for no legitimate reason.” Ad networks are “blocking content for the word ‘lesbian’ because they lazily think lesbian equals porn,” Cohen explained.

Deprived of precious advertising revenue, LGBTQ+ media outlets become even more vulnerable to cuts, layoffs, and closures. Brand safety based on blocking keywords is “hurting minority voices, such as LGBT communities,” CHEQ concluded. Jerry Daykin, an ad exec and LGBTQ+ advocate, put it even more starkly, telling CHEQ, without more careful consideration of how advertising blocklists work, “We’ll continue to see minority voices squeezed out of media.”

The EARN IT Act

To clarify the potential scope of censorship by proxy, consider the EARN IT Act, introduced by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in early 2022. The bill proposes to establish a national commission to “develop best practices for interactive computer services providers (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) to prevent, reduce, and respond to the online sexual exploitation of children,” and also limits “the liability protections of interactive computer service providers with respect to claims alleging violations of child sexual exploitation laws.” The EARN IT Act would severely weaken Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which gives immunity from prosecution to electronic service providers for most user-posted content, a provision the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) cites as “the most important law protecting internet speech.”

The 2022 EARN IT Act revived a 2020 version of the legislation, which lawmakers had dropped after it was strongly opposed by a number of organizations that promote press freedoms and digital rights, including EFF, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Article 19, and Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. Both versions of the EARN IT Act build on a 2018 federal law known as FOSTA-SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA). FOSTA-CESTA established an exception to Section 230, making online platforms legally liable for third-party content that promotes sex trafficking. As numerous critics have noted, FOSTA-SESTA has chilled online speech and restricted privacy rights in ways that disproportionately harm LGBTQ+ people, sex workers, and others who depend on internet privacy. FOSTA-SESTA led to the closure of Craigslist personals, the gutting of Tumblr after it banned all “adult” content, and new restrictions on Instagram, consequences that only begin to foreshadow the potential impacts of the 2022 EARN IT Act.

While affirming the importance of curbing “the scourge of child exploitation online,” in February 2022, Article 19 and 48 additional organizations— including the American Civil Liberties Union, the EFF, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and PEN America—sent an open letter to the US Senate, opposing the EARN IT Act on the grounds that it “will actually make it harder for law enforcement to protect children. It will also result in online censorship that will disproportionately impact marginalized communities and will jeopardize access to encrypted services.”

Opponents of the EARN IT Act foresee a dramatic expansion of liability under state laws if the EARN IT Act revokes the protections afforded service providers by Section 230, a watershed change that would lead service providers to engage in overbroad censorship of online speech. As Article 19’s open letter to the US Senate noted, these chilling effects would especially restrict “content created by diverse communities, including LGBTQ individuals, whose posts are disproportionately labeled erroneously as sexually explicit.”

Critics of the EARN IT Act also decry it as a Trojan horse effort to erode end-to-end encryption, which helps internet users—including journalists, activists, and members of marginalized communities—keep their online data and communications private and secure. Online services would be likely to stop using end-to-end encryption because it is also considered a “red flag” for law enforcement officials investigating online child sex-abuse materials (CSAM). Although end-to-end encryption protects the freedom of expression and privacy of all internet users, it is especially important for members of LGBTQ+ communities. As LGBT Tech and the Internet Society have noted, strong encryption provides privacy for LGBTQ+ people while coming out and connecting, and it empowers transgender people “to safely use the Internet to find doctors and treatment during transitions.”

Outside the United States, other nations have enacted or are pursuing similar laws. In January 2022, Australia enacted its Online Safety Act. According to the government, the law strengthens previous cyberbullying protections for children and adults and authorizes the nation’s eSafety Commissioner to “get the ‘worst of the worst’ content removed no matter where it’s hosted.” In March 2022, the Australian news site Junkee reported that the law’s “overly broad take-down powers” are threatening queer online spaces and “silencing LGBTIQ culture.” Comparable legislation, the Online Safety Bill, is under review in the United Kingdom, and subject to similar criticisms.

Online Restrictions and Offline Repercussions

Some worst-case consequences of what US legislation such as the EARN IT might lead to can be appreciated by reviewing the chilling effects of Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda law.”

In 2011, Russia established a federal law that restricted the distribution of “harmful” material among minors, including information that depicted violence, illegal activities, substance abuse, self-harm, or that might “elicit fear, horror, or panic in children.” After subsequent revisions to the law, in 2012 and 2013, legislation first enacted as a content rating system morphed into a sweeping law that criminalizes “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships” as a class of harmful content. As the Guardian reported at the time, the 2013 law “stigmatizes gay people and bans giving children any information about homosexuality.” In 2018, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report that analyzed Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda” law as “a classic example of political homophobia,” which “targets vulnerable sexual and gender minorities for political gain.” Based on in-depth interviews with sexual and gender minority youth and mental health providers and social workers in Russia, HRW found that the law not only limits sexuality education, but also has been used to shut down online information and mental health referrals for youth, exacerbated hostility toward LGBT people, and had a chilling effect on mental health professionals and others who work with LGBT youth.

Although there has been global protest against Russia’s anti-LGBTQ policies, especially during the leadups to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and the Russian-hosted 2018 World Cup, much less attention has been focused on the role of the religious right in the United States in creating Russia’s anti-gay movement. As Mother Jones reported in February 2014, Russians have “adopted the kind of language the American religious right has long deployed to fight acceptance of homosexuality”—including terms such as “natural family,” “traditional values,” and “protecting children.”

This was the result, Mother Jones reported, of the direct influence of the Illinois-based World Congress of Families, an umbrella organization for many of the most influential religious right groups in the US. “The rise of anti-gay laws in Russia has mirrored, almost perfectly, the rise of WCF’s work in the country,” Mother Jones reported in 2014. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the WCF as a designated hate group, based on its anti-LGBTQ ideology:

Though its origins are in the American Christian Right, the WCF has built a web of influence in different countries, providing a point of networking for global anti-LGBT forces… Its legacy includes the mainstreaming of the so-called “natural family” doctrine, one that has been used to curtail LGBT and reproductive rights across the world.

The channels of influence between anti-LBGTQ interests in the United States and Russia run in both directions. As Mother Jones reported in 2014, “elements of the US religious right have come to see Russia as a redoubt in a global battle against homosexuality.”

Inspired though it may by the Russian model, the crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights in the United States has developed through different channels. In Russia, the national government has spearheaded the crackdown; in the United States, media giants and state governments, spurred by anti-LGBT groups such as Project Blitz, have acted in concert to provide the one-two punch necessary to create what even establishment news outlets have reported as an “unprecedented” wave and “historic tally” of anti-LGBTQ legislation, as monitored by Blitz Watch. These dynamics exemplify a more complex and subtle variation of censorship by proxy.

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott ordered the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to consider gender-affirming care for transgender adolescents child abuse; in Florida, Ron DeSantis signed into law a controversial Parental Rights in Education bill, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics, which bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade classrooms and requires any instruction on those topics to be age-appropriate and in accordance with state standards. Across the United States, educational gag orders—including 15 legislative bills in nine states and “sweeping book bans”—target speech about LGBTQ+ identities, PEN America reported in February 2022.

These legislative efforts dovetail with restrictions on LGBTQ+ content online, including content moderation, community standards, and advertising blocklists administered by corporate platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, as described in earlier sections of this article. From online content restrictions to offline curriculum regulations and other forms of exclusionary legislation, the United States is at risk of rivaling Russia in silencing LGBTQ+ voices and marginalizing LGBTQ+ identities.

Three Strategies to Counter Censorship by Proxy

The ability to censor is not limited to government agencies. Instead, corporate entities—including especially media giants such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter—exert profound influence on our channels of communication, controlling what members of the public are most likely to see—and what content and perspectives those audiences are unlikely to ever to come across, unless they actively seek them out.

In the hope of spurring engagement with these concerns, we conclude with a brief overview of three possible remedies to online censorship by proxy.

First, Design from the Margins (DFM) offers one promising approach for developing technology, apps, and online platforms that protect historically oppressed or marginalized groups. Developed by Afsaneh Rigot, a researcher affiliated with Article 19 and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, DFM originated from an effort to counter what Rigot has described as the “weaponization of social media, messenger, and dating apps.” By contrast, when technology is designed from the onset with the vulnerabilities of oppressed and marginalized users in mind, all users benefit from greater security. Rigot’s research has already led to significant improvements in the design of dating apps used by LGBTQ+ people in countries where authorities and non-state actors regularly target members of LGBTQ+ communities.

Second, we ought to think creatively about how DFM principles might apply to media more broadly. There are promising overlaps between DFM and a number of the guidelines for ethical journalism advocated by the Society of Professional Journalists. Under the basic guideline, “Seek Truth and Report It,” for example, the SPJ includes guidance to avoid stereotypes, to label advocacy as such, and to support “the open and civil exchange of views,” even when those views might be deemed “repugnant” by some. A full discussion of the crossover between these principles of ethical journalism and a Design from the Margins approach goes beyond the scope of this concluding discussion. But, for now, we note that content moderation, community standards, and advertising guidelines, would likely look rather different in the future than they do now, if DFM principles served as foundations, rather than afterthoughts. Similarly, strong encryption—imperiled by legislation such as the EARN IT Act—protects vulnerable groups subject to systemic discrimination.

US policy decisions will affect not only US users but also set precedents around the world. Those concerned with opposing global crackdowns on freedom of information and expression should lend their support to efforts to preserve end-to-end encryption online.

Third and finally, critical media literacy—as championed by organizations such as Project Censored, the Critical Media Project, and the Propwatch Project, to name only a few—can help to raise public awareness about the extent of censorship by proxy, and to defuse the power of moral panics. Censorship is most powerful when it is invisible; moral panic is most inflammatory when heightened anxieties make it easier to draw conclusions that might be counter to logic. Informed by the basic principles of critical media literacy, members of the public are more likely to recognize censorship by proxy and less likely to be irrationally swayed by moral panic.

Andy Lee Roth is a sociologist and associate director of Project Censored. He is coeditor, with Mickey Huff, of Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2023, and a member of the Media Revolution Collective that wrote The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media LIteracy for Young People.

Avram Anderson is an electronic resources management specialist at California State University, Northridge, and a member and advocate of the LGBTQI+ community researching LGBTQI+ censorship, in print and online. In addition to coauthoring The Media and Me, they also serve on the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Committee at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).

Mickey Huff is director of Project Censored, coeditor of the Censored yearbook series, and coauthor of United States of Distraction, Let’s Agree to Disagree, and The Media and Me. Huff teaches social science, history, and journalism at Diablo Valley College, and serves as executive producer and cohost of The Project Censored Show, the Project’s nationally syndicated public affairs program.

The post Beyond Prior Restraint: Censorship by Proxy and the New Digital Gatekeeping appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

Defining “Censorship by Proxy”

Online restrictions—including content moderation, advertising blocklists, and enforcement of “community standards,”implemented by Big Tech platforms such as Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook—increasingly combine with government legislation to yield dangerous, but submerged threats to online freedom of information, not to mention the offline safety historically-oppressed or marginalized groups.

Censorship has typically been treated as a matter of government control, with emphases in the United States on the role of the First Amendment and a host of legal precedents that establish limits on “prior restraint” by government. However, the rise of digital-era media giants—including Alphabet (which owns Google and YouTube), Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), and Twitter—makes clear that media corporations now stand alongside government as commanding arbiters of legitimate discourse on public issues. “Google may not be a country, but it is a superpower,” Timothy Garton Ash wrote in Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. Though Google, Facebook, Twitter and other media entities lack the formal legal authority of sovereign nation-states, “their capacity to enable or limit freedom of information and expression is greater than that of most states.”

We explore these significant changes in the media landscape by developing the concept of censorship by proxy, which we define as restrictions on freedom of information 1) undertaken by private corporations, which 2) exceed the usual legal limits on governmental censorship, and 3) serve both corporate and government or third-party interests.

The Example of RT America

As an example of censorship by proxy, consider the demise of RT America, also known as Russia Today, which from 2010 until 2022 served as the US-based channel of the global, multilingual RT news network funded by the Russian government. On March 3, 2022, after the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and amidst a popular wave of anti-Russian sentiment in the United States, RT America shut down. Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who hosted “On Contact” on RT America, wrote, “This was long the plan of the US government.”

But, in fact, it was not the US government that shut down RT America. Instead, DirectTV, Roku, Sling TV and Dish—all corporate entities—effectively censored RT America by deplatforming the channel: On March 1, 2022, DirecTV dropped RT America from its services; the following day, Roku did the same; and, on March 4, Sling TV and its parent company Dish removed RT America their platforms.

But Hedges’ analysis of the US government’s aims was not off-target. Well before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the US government had placed restrictions on RT America and journalists working for it. In November 2017, facing legal pressure from the US Department of Justice, RT America had registered as a “foreign agent” under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). Although RT America, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera, and several Chinese state media outlets have been required to register under FARA, the BBC, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, and Canada’s CBC have not, leading some critics to suggest that the designation “has more to do with geopolitics than with journalism.”

An intelligence assessment spurred the Justice Department’s pressure to register RT under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. A now-declassified January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) concluded that “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine” contributed to the Russian “influence campaign” to swing the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. According to the ICA—which combined analyses by the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA—RT America’s programing highlighted “criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties” and was an important “messaging tool” in the “Kremlin-directed campaign to undermine faith in the US government and fuel political protest.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists criticized the Justice Department for forcing RT to register as a foreign agent, describing this as a “shift in how the law has been applied in recent decades” and “a bad idea” that empowered governments to decide “what constitutes journalism or propaganda.” Journalists at registered outlets stated that “the stigma attached with registering” compromised their ability “to carry out normal journalistic activities,” the CPJ reported subsequently.

The US government could have silenced RT America outright, but doing so would have prompted negative repercussions. An overt government decision to censor RT America would likely have generated not only widespread domestic criticism of the action as a violation of constitutionally-protected press freedoms, but also Russian blowback in the form of retaliation in kind against US-based news organizations operating in Russia.

Instead, the decisions of a handful of US-based media service providers achieved the same end without any of the domestic or international political costs. This case exemplifies the phenomenon we describe as censorship by proxy. Because censorship by proxy can occur wherever the interests and powers of global corporations and national governments intersect, it is an international phenomenon.

Returning to the case of RT America, note that, in addition to the groundwork laid by the Justice Department’s designation of the broadcaster and its journalists as registered “foreign agents,” the marked rise in anti-Russian public opinion following the Russian invasion of Ukraine also contributed to the news channel’s demise. DirectTV, Roku, Sling TV, and Dish each decided to drop RT America from their platforms in protest against the Russian invasion, and likely in response to public campaigns urging them to do so. The corporate deplatforming of RT America should be understood not only as a case of censorship by proxy, but also as a product of a “moral panic” in which the Russian news channel was cast as a “folk devil” and the media service providers that deplatformed it positioned themselves as defenders of established values.

Moral Panics Prompt Censorship by Proxy

Informed by pioneering studies in the sociology of deviance by Howard Becker, Stanley Cohen, and Stuart Hall, social scientists, media scholars use the term “moral panic” to describe social fears based on the belief that a stereotyped group or category of people threatens the values, safety, or interests of a community. These stereotypes often center on identities marginalized within the community or wider society, including, for example, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, nationality, religion, or class.

Despite the concept’s wording, moral panics are usually about politics as much as morality. This is especially so in contexts of social, political, or economic tension, when the manufacture of moral panic is useful because it can quickly and effectively produce social solidarity. Moral panics can rapidly convert outrage into political action. Notably, however, studies on a diverse range of moral panics, from the Salem witch trials in the 17th century to the “War on Drugs” in the 1980s and 1990s, demonstrate that political action in response to moral panics often serves to reinforce and expand the authority of groups already holding power.

Our analysis shows how practitioners of censorship by proxy often participate in the construction or amplification of moral panics to justify restrictions on freedom of information. Political leaders and Big Tech platforms alike champion online safety—often with paternalistic calls to protect women and children—in the name of “cleaning up” online spaces, but the measures they propose often serve to muzzle legitimate political dissent, further marginalize already vulnerable communities, and divide members of the public by pitting, for example, the safety of children against freedom of information.

How Censorship by Proxy Works: Content Moderation, Community Standards, and Advertising Blocklists

Online censorship has been made more palatable through rebranding as “content moderation” or enforcement of “community standards,” undertaken by corporations as much as government agencies. Content moderation often leads to innocent content being flagged as harmful or explicit, which leads to the silencing of marginalized voices. Here we focus especially on LGBTQ+ content, but, under the guise of countering “fake news,” censorship by proxy also restricts progressive independent news outlets that depend on major media platforms for content distribution, advertising revenue, and fundraising.

From Facebook to YouTube, the biggest social media platforms all engage in forms of content blocking that negatively impact LGBTQ people and communities. Due to a double-standard, the same algorithms that ban LGBTQ-themed hashtags and demonetize YouTube channels with LGBTQ content often permit or even promote homophobic and transphobic content. No overarching policy, much less any kind of government directive leads to these outcomes; instead, the marginalization or erasure of queer content online is a case of censorship by proxy that reflects—and reinforces—moral panic orchestrated by the religious right and embraced by many Republican politicians, as Katherine Stewart documented in The Power Worshippers.

Under the guise of addressing hate speech, Facebook has applied strict real-name policies that prevent transgender people from using their chosen names and identities, blocked advertising with LGBTQ content or themes, while instituting criteria for “protected” and “unprotected” categories that promote homophobic and transphobic content. To moderate “adult” content, Instagram has deplatformed users, banned hashtags, and shadow-banned posts and ads with LGBTQ content. In efforts to manage bullying or harassment based on users’ “physical or mental condition,” TikTok has implemented moderation guidelines that outlaw LGBTQ content.  Twitter has implemented bans on “sensitive media” terms that restrict efforts by LGBTQ people to reclaim and take pride in slurs, because content moderation processes often disregard the poster’s intent. In January 2021, a federal judge dismissed a class-action lawsuit against YouTube, filed by LGBT content creators, who claimed that the video sharing platform had violated their First Amendment rights by censoring their content and demonetizing their channels. US District Court Magistrate Virginia DeMarchi ruled that, as private entities, YouTube and its parent company, Google, were not bound by the First Amendment, a ruling that received nearly no news coverage.

Advertising Interests Drive Censorship by Proxy

In a new wrinkle on how advertising interests shape the production and distribution of online content, advertisers now use “blocklists” to avoid having their products associated with content that they believe might damage their brands’ reputations with target consumers. The advertising blocklists employed by many prominent corporations to promote “brand safety” now employ artificial intelligence technology to scan for as many as 7,000 different words and phrases.

A 2019 study by CHEQ, a cybersecurity business, found that “more than half (57%) of neutral or positive stories on major news sites are being incorrectly flagged as unsafe for advertising.” The impact of blocklists was most pronounced on LGBTQ-focused news outlets: 73 percent of the safe content in The Advocate and PinkNews was inappropriately flagged as unsafe for advertising, CHEQ found. The editor of PinkNews, Benjamin Cohen, told CHEQ that a lot of content gets blocked “for no legitimate reason.” Ad networks are “blocking content for the word ‘lesbian’ because they lazily think lesbian equals porn,” Cohen explained.

Deprived of precious advertising revenue, LGBTQ+ media outlets become even more vulnerable to cuts, layoffs, and closures. Brand safety based on blocking keywords is “hurting minority voices, such as LGBT communities,” CHEQ concluded. Jerry Daykin, an ad exec and LGBTQ+ advocate, put it even more starkly, telling CHEQ, without more careful consideration of how advertising blocklists work, “We’ll continue to see minority voices squeezed out of media.”

The EARN IT Act

To clarify the potential scope of censorship by proxy, consider the EARN IT Act, introduced by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in early 2022. The bill proposes to establish a national commission to “develop best practices for interactive computer services providers (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) to prevent, reduce, and respond to the online sexual exploitation of children,” and also limits “the liability protections of interactive computer service providers with respect to claims alleging violations of child sexual exploitation laws.” The EARN IT Act would severely weaken Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which gives immunity from prosecution to electronic service providers for most user-posted content, a provision the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) cites as “the most important law protecting internet speech.”

The 2022 EARN IT Act revived a 2020 version of the legislation, which lawmakers had dropped after it was strongly opposed by a number of organizations that promote press freedoms and digital rights, including EFF, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Article 19, and Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. Both versions of the EARN IT Act build on a 2018 federal law known as FOSTA-SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA). FOSTA-CESTA established an exception to Section 230, making online platforms legally liable for third-party content that promotes sex trafficking. As numerous critics have noted, FOSTA-SESTA has chilled online speech and restricted privacy rights in ways that disproportionately harm LGBTQ+ people, sex workers, and others who depend on internet privacy. FOSTA-SESTA led to the closure of Craigslist personals, the gutting of Tumblr after it banned all “adult” content, and new restrictions on Instagram, consequences that only begin to foreshadow the potential impacts of the 2022 EARN IT Act.

While affirming the importance of curbing “the scourge of child exploitation online,” in February 2022, Article 19 and 48 additional organizations— including the American Civil Liberties Union, the EFF, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and PEN America—sent an open letter to the US Senate, opposing the EARN IT Act on the grounds that it “will actually make it harder for law enforcement to protect children. It will also result in online censorship that will disproportionately impact marginalized communities and will jeopardize access to encrypted services.”

Opponents of the EARN IT Act foresee a dramatic expansion of liability under state laws if the EARN IT Act revokes the protections afforded service providers by Section 230, a watershed change that would lead service providers to engage in overbroad censorship of online speech. As Article 19’s open letter to the US Senate noted, these chilling effects would especially restrict “content created by diverse communities, including LGBTQ individuals, whose posts are disproportionately labeled erroneously as sexually explicit.”

Critics of the EARN IT Act also decry it as a Trojan horse effort to erode end-to-end encryption, which helps internet users—including journalists, activists, and members of marginalized communities—keep their online data and communications private and secure. Online services would be likely to stop using end-to-end encryption because it is also considered a “red flag” for law enforcement officials investigating online child sex-abuse materials (CSAM). Although end-to-end encryption protects the freedom of expression and privacy of all internet users, it is especially important for members of LGBTQ+ communities. As LGBT Tech and the Internet Society have noted, strong encryption provides privacy for LGBTQ+ people while coming out and connecting, and it empowers transgender people “to safely use the Internet to find doctors and treatment during transitions.”

Outside the United States, other nations have enacted or are pursuing similar laws. In January 2022, Australia enacted its Online Safety Act. According to the government, the law strengthens previous cyberbullying protections for children and adults and authorizes the nation’s eSafety Commissioner to “get the ‘worst of the worst’ content removed no matter where it’s hosted.” In March 2022, the Australian news site Junkee reported that the law’s “overly broad take-down powers” are threatening queer online spaces and “silencing LGBTIQ culture.” Comparable legislation, the Online Safety Bill, is under review in the United Kingdom, and subject to similar criticisms.

Online Restrictions and Offline Repercussions

Some worst-case consequences of what US legislation such as the EARN IT might lead to can be appreciated by reviewing the chilling effects of Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda law.”

In 2011, Russia established a federal law that restricted the distribution of “harmful” material among minors, including information that depicted violence, illegal activities, substance abuse, self-harm, or that might “elicit fear, horror, or panic in children.” After subsequent revisions to the law, in 2012 and 2013, legislation first enacted as a content rating system morphed into a sweeping law that criminalizes “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships” as a class of harmful content. As the Guardian reported at the time, the 2013 law “stigmatizes gay people and bans giving children any information about homosexuality.” In 2018, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report that analyzed Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda” law as “a classic example of political homophobia,” which “targets vulnerable sexual and gender minorities for political gain.” Based on in-depth interviews with sexual and gender minority youth and mental health providers and social workers in Russia, HRW found that the law not only limits sexuality education, but also has been used to shut down online information and mental health referrals for youth, exacerbated hostility toward LGBT people, and had a chilling effect on mental health professionals and others who work with LGBT youth.

Although there has been global protest against Russia’s anti-LGBTQ policies, especially during the leadups to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and the Russian-hosted 2018 World Cup, much less attention has been focused on the role of the religious right in the United States in creating Russia’s anti-gay movement. As Mother Jones reported in February 2014, Russians have “adopted the kind of language the American religious right has long deployed to fight acceptance of homosexuality”—including terms such as “natural family,” “traditional values,” and “protecting children.”

This was the result, Mother Jones reported, of the direct influence of the Illinois-based World Congress of Families, an umbrella organization for many of the most influential religious right groups in the US. “The rise of anti-gay laws in Russia has mirrored, almost perfectly, the rise of WCF’s work in the country,” Mother Jones reported in 2014. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the WCF as a designated hate group, based on its anti-LGBTQ ideology:

Though its origins are in the American Christian Right, the WCF has built a web of influence in different countries, providing a point of networking for global anti-LGBT forces… Its legacy includes the mainstreaming of the so-called “natural family” doctrine, one that has been used to curtail LGBT and reproductive rights across the world.

The channels of influence between anti-LBGTQ interests in the United States and Russia run in both directions. As Mother Jones reported in 2014, “elements of the US religious right have come to see Russia as a redoubt in a global battle against homosexuality.”

Inspired though it may by the Russian model, the crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights in the United States has developed through different channels. In Russia, the national government has spearheaded the crackdown; in the United States, media giants and state governments, spurred by anti-LGBT groups such as Project Blitz, have acted in concert to provide the one-two punch necessary to create what even establishment news outlets have reported as an “unprecedented” wave and “historic tally” of anti-LGBTQ legislation, as monitored by Blitz Watch. These dynamics exemplify a more complex and subtle variation of censorship by proxy.

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott ordered the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to consider gender-affirming care for transgender adolescents child abuse; in Florida, Ron DeSantis signed into law a controversial Parental Rights in Education bill, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics, which bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade classrooms and requires any instruction on those topics to be age-appropriate and in accordance with state standards. Across the United States, educational gag orders—including 15 legislative bills in nine states and “sweeping book bans”—target speech about LGBTQ+ identities, PEN America reported in February 2022.

These legislative efforts dovetail with restrictions on LGBTQ+ content online, including content moderation, community standards, and advertising blocklists administered by corporate platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, as described in earlier sections of this article. From online content restrictions to offline curriculum regulations and other forms of exclusionary legislation, the United States is at risk of rivaling Russia in silencing LGBTQ+ voices and marginalizing LGBTQ+ identities.

Three Strategies to Counter Censorship by Proxy

The ability to censor is not limited to government agencies. Instead, corporate entities—including especially media giants such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter—exert profound influence on our channels of communication, controlling what members of the public are most likely to see—and what content and perspectives those audiences are unlikely to ever to come across, unless they actively seek them out.

In the hope of spurring engagement with these concerns, we conclude with a brief overview of three possible remedies to online censorship by proxy.

First, Design from the Margins (DFM) offers one promising approach for developing technology, apps, and online platforms that protect historically oppressed or marginalized groups. Developed by Afsaneh Rigot, a researcher affiliated with Article 19 and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, DFM originated from an effort to counter what Rigot has described as the “weaponization of social media, messenger, and dating apps.” By contrast, when technology is designed from the onset with the vulnerabilities of oppressed and marginalized users in mind, all users benefit from greater security. Rigot’s research has already led to significant improvements in the design of dating apps used by LGBTQ+ people in countries where authorities and non-state actors regularly target members of LGBTQ+ communities.

Second, we ought to think creatively about how DFM principles might apply to media more broadly. There are promising overlaps between DFM and a number of the guidelines for ethical journalism advocated by the Society of Professional Journalists. Under the basic guideline, “Seek Truth and Report It,” for example, the SPJ includes guidance to avoid stereotypes, to label advocacy as such, and to support “the open and civil exchange of views,” even when those views might be deemed “repugnant” by some. A full discussion of the crossover between these principles of ethical journalism and a Design from the Margins approach goes beyond the scope of this concluding discussion. But, for now, we note that content moderation, community standards, and advertising guidelines, would likely look rather different in the future than they do now, if DFM principles served as foundations, rather than afterthoughts. Similarly, strong encryption—imperiled by legislation such as the EARN IT Act—protects vulnerable groups subject to systemic discrimination.

US policy decisions will affect not only US users but also set precedents around the world. Those concerned with opposing global crackdowns on freedom of information and expression should lend their support to efforts to preserve end-to-end encryption online.

Third and finally, critical media literacy—as championed by organizations such as Project Censored, the Critical Media Project, and the Propwatch Project, to name only a few—can help to raise public awareness about the extent of censorship by proxy, and to defuse the power of moral panics. Censorship is most powerful when it is invisible; moral panic is most inflammatory when heightened anxieties make it easier to draw conclusions that might be counter to logic. Informed by the basic principles of critical media literacy, members of the public are more likely to recognize censorship by proxy and less likely to be irrationally swayed by moral panic.

Andy Lee Roth is a sociologist and associate director of Project Censored. He is coeditor, with Mickey Huff, of Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2023, and a member of the Media Revolution Collective that wrote The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media LIteracy for Young People.

Avram Anderson is an electronic resources management specialist at California State University, Northridge, and a member and advocate of the LGBTQI+ community researching LGBTQI+ censorship, in print and online. In addition to coauthoring The Media and Me, they also serve on the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Committee at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).

Mickey Huff is director of Project Censored, coeditor of the Censored yearbook series, and coauthor of United States of Distraction, Let’s Agree to Disagree, and The Media and Me. Huff teaches social science, history, and journalism at Diablo Valley College, and serves as executive producer and cohost of The Project Censored Show, the Project’s nationally syndicated public affairs program.

The post Beyond Prior Restraint: Censorship by Proxy and the New Digital Gatekeeping appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

A judge in Waco, Texas, issued a sweeping gag order on Jan. 9, 2023, restricting media coverage ahead of a retrial in a murder case. The order was vacated two days later after attorneys for local broadcaster KWTX successfully argued that it amounted to an unconstitutional prior restraint, the outlet reported.

Judge David Hodges’ order prohibited the press from reporting on basic facts about the case, including testimony or evidence from the initial trial in 2015, that it resulted in a conviction, the fact that the case was reversed or the reason behind the reversal. It also barred any reporting on any pretrial rulings in the case.

The case — which was set to begin on Jan. 9 — was postponed citing concerns that there would not be insufficient jurors from which to select a jury, according to KWTX.

The Waco Tribune-Herald reported that the gag order forced it to hold its reporting on the postponement.

Attorneys for CBS-affiliate KWTX sent a three-page letter to the court arguing against the order the same day it was issued, according to the outlet. KWTX Vice President and General Manager Josh Young declined to comment when reached by email.

Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, told the outlet that the order would have infringed on First Amendment rights and Hodges was right to lift the restrictions on the press.

“Journalists have a right — and a duty — to cover what’s going on at the courthouse to keep the public informed,” Shannon said. “It’s understandable that the judge wants to ensure a fair trial and try to select a local jury, but attempting to restrain what the news media reports is not the answer.”

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi – who was in Cambodia’s capital for meetings with counterparts from ASEAN states and other nations – called the unprecedented live-fire drills “reasonable and legitimate steps to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” as China kept venting its fury over Pelosi’s stop in Taipei.

More than 100 aircraft and more than 10 warships took part on Thursday in the first day of live-fire exercises that will go until Sunday, Chinese state media reported. China began the exercises a day after Pelosi left Taiwan after becoming the highest ranking American official to visit the island in 25 years.

The Taiwan Defense Ministry responded by scrambling jets to warn away 22 Chinese aircraft that crossed into its air defense zone and also fired flares to drive away four drones involved in the exercises, according to Reuters.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, whose foreign ministers are meeting in Phnom Penh this week along with the top diplomats from China, the United States and other powers, came out with a rare collective statement expressing worry about the tensions in the Taiwan Strait.

Without naming China or the U.S., they said ASEAN was concerned about volatility that “could destabilize the region and eventually could lead to miscalculation, serious confrontation, open conflicts and unpredictable consequences among major powers.”

“ASEAN calls for maximum restraint” and for the powers to “refrain from provocative action,” according to excerpts from their statement.

“We should act together and ASEAN stands ready to play a constructive role in facilitating peaceful dialogue between all parties including through utilizing ASEAN-led mechanisms to de-escalate tension, to safeguard peace, security and development in our region,” the Southeast Asian foreign ministers said.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in Phnom Penh on Thursday, said he did not want China to manufacture a crisis to increase military activity in the region and that the United States opposed “any unilateral efforts to change the status quo” on Taiwan.

Retno Marsudi, the foreign minister of ASEAN member Indonesia, said her nation was “worried about the increasing rivalry between the big powers.”

“And if this rivalry is not managed properly, it will lead to an open conflict that will surely threaten peace and stability, including in the Taiwan Strait,” she warned.

In Manila, the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs joined the chorus of regional concern about tensions around Taiwan.

“Diplomacy and dialogue must prevail,” it said.

The United States also holds this policy, but maintains close unofficial ties with Taiwan and is obligated by law to provide defense support. Washington only acknowledges China’s sovereignty claim over Taiwan rather than endorsing it.

For its part, Cambodia said it considered issues related to Taiwan along with Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang as being “under the sovereign rights of the People’s Republic of China.”

Wang: Pelosi ‘irresponsible’

Wang, meanwhile, took a hardline stance on what he saw as efforts against Beijing. He lashed out at Pelosi for visiting Taiwan, saying it was a “manic, irresponsible and highly irrational” act, CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster, reported.

China’s foreign minister also rejected a statement from leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) nations on Wednesday, where they expressed concern about the proposed live-fire exercises.

“There is no justification to use a visit as pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait. It is normal and routine for legislators from our countries to travel internationally. The PRC’s escalatory response risks increasing tensions and destabilizing the region,” the G7 said.

Wang accused the G7 – which includes the United States and Japan – of ignoring the negative effects of Pelosi’s visit.

“It groundlessly criticizes China for taking such measures, which are reasonable and legitimate steps to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” China’s foreign ministry quoted Wang as saying in response to the G7.

Wang also challenged the U.S. to get on board with Beijing’s plan.

“The United States should not dream of obstructing China’s reunification. Taiwan is a part of China. The complete reunification of China is the trend of the times and an inevitability of history,” he said.

‘Abiding interest in peace’

On Thursday, Washington’s top diplomat reiterated the American government’s support for Taiwan while remaining committed to the One China policy.

“The United States continues to have an abiding interest in peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” Antony Blinken said in an opening statement at the ASEAN meeting where Retno Marsudi joined him.

“We oppose any unilateral efforts to change the status quo, especially by force,” he said. “And I want to emphasize [that] nothing has changed about our position.”

He also said that he did not want China to “manufacture a crisis or seek a pretext to increase its aggressive military activity,” according to a transcript from his joint press conference with Retno.

“We, and countries around the world believe that escalation serves no one and could have unintended consequences that serve no one’s interest including ASEAN members and including China.”

Blinken said U.S. officials had reached out to their Chinese counterparts over the last several days to convey this message.

“Maintaining cross-strait stability is in the interests of all countries in the region, including all of our colleagues within ASEAN,” he said.

Jason Gutierrez in Manila contributed to this report

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By John Bechtel for BenarNews.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi – who was in Cambodia’s capital for meetings with counterparts from ASEAN states and other nations – called the unprecedented live-fire drills “reasonable and legitimate steps to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” as China kept venting its fury over Pelosi’s stop in Taipei.

More than 100 aircraft and more than 10 warships took part on Thursday in the first day of live-fire exercises that will go until Sunday, Chinese state media reported. China began the exercises a day after Pelosi left Taiwan after becoming the highest ranking American official to visit the island in 25 years.

The Taiwan Defense Ministry responded by scrambling jets to warn away 22 Chinese aircraft that crossed into its air defense zone and also fired flares to drive away four drones involved in the exercises, according to Reuters.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, whose foreign ministers are meeting in Phnom Penh this week along with the top diplomats from China, the United States and other powers, came out with a rare collective statement expressing worry about the tensions in the Taiwan Strait.

Without naming China or the U.S., they said ASEAN was concerned about volatility that “could destabilize the region and eventually could lead to miscalculation, serious confrontation, open conflicts and unpredictable consequences among major powers.”

“ASEAN calls for maximum restraint” and for the powers to “refrain from provocative action,” according to excerpts from their statement.

“We should act together and ASEAN stands ready to play a constructive role in facilitating peaceful dialogue between all parties including through utilizing ASEAN-led mechanisms to de-escalate tension, to safeguard peace, security and development in our region,” the Southeast Asian foreign ministers said.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in Phnom Penh on Thursday, said he did not want China to manufacture a crisis to increase military activity in the region and that the United States opposed “any unilateral efforts to change the status quo” on Taiwan.

Retno Marsudi, the foreign minister of ASEAN member Indonesia, said her nation was “worried about the increasing rivalry between the big powers.”

“And if this rivalry is not managed properly, it will lead to an open conflict that will surely threaten peace and stability, including in the Taiwan Strait,” she warned.

In Manila, the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs joined the chorus of regional concern about tensions around Taiwan.

“Diplomacy and dialogue must prevail,” it said.

The United States also holds this policy, but maintains close unofficial ties with Taiwan and is obligated by law to provide defense support. Washington only acknowledges China’s sovereignty claim over Taiwan rather than endorsing it.

For its part, Cambodia said it considered issues related to Taiwan along with Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang as being “under the sovereign rights of the People’s Republic of China.”

Wang: Pelosi ‘irresponsible’

Wang, meanwhile, took a hardline stance on what he saw as efforts against Beijing. He lashed out at Pelosi for visiting Taiwan, saying it was a “manic, irresponsible and highly irrational” act, CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster, reported.

China’s foreign minister also rejected a statement from leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) nations on Wednesday, where they expressed concern about the proposed live-fire exercises.

“There is no justification to use a visit as pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait. It is normal and routine for legislators from our countries to travel internationally. The PRC’s escalatory response risks increasing tensions and destabilizing the region,” the G7 said.

Wang accused the G7 – which includes the United States and Japan – of ignoring the negative effects of Pelosi’s visit.

“It groundlessly criticizes China for taking such measures, which are reasonable and legitimate steps to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” China’s foreign ministry quoted Wang as saying in response to the G7.

Wang also challenged the U.S. to get on board with Beijing’s plan.

“The United States should not dream of obstructing China’s reunification. Taiwan is a part of China. The complete reunification of China is the trend of the times and an inevitability of history,” he said.

‘Abiding interest in peace’

On Thursday, Washington’s top diplomat reiterated the American government’s support for Taiwan while remaining committed to the One China policy.

“The United States continues to have an abiding interest in peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” Antony Blinken said in an opening statement at the ASEAN meeting where Retno Marsudi joined him.

“We oppose any unilateral efforts to change the status quo, especially by force,” he said. “And I want to emphasize [that] nothing has changed about our position.”

He also said that he did not want China to “manufacture a crisis or seek a pretext to increase its aggressive military activity,” according to a transcript from his joint press conference with Retno.

“We, and countries around the world believe that escalation serves no one and could have unintended consequences that serve no one’s interest including ASEAN members and including China.”

Blinken said U.S. officials had reached out to their Chinese counterparts over the last several days to convey this message.

“Maintaining cross-strait stability is in the interests of all countries in the region, including all of our colleagues within ASEAN,” he said.

Jason Gutierrez in Manila contributed to this report

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By John Bechtel for BenarNews.

A Florida judge granted an emergency injunction on June 10, 2022, barring the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and reporter Melissa Pérez-Carrillo from publishing the names of deputies involved in a fatal shooting in April, the outlet reported.

According to the Herald-Tribune, the State Attorney’s Office provided the outlet with the last names of the three deputies involved in a court-ordered eviction that resulted in the shooting death of a Sarasota resident as part of a routine public records request.

The Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office argues that two of the deputies’ identities are confidential under Marsy’s Law, which provides certain protections to crime victims and was added to the Florida Constitution in 2018.

Chief Circuit Judge Charles Roberts granted the request from the Sheriff’s Office and the 12th Judicial Circuit State Attorney’s Office at 6:30 p.m. on a Friday evening without notifying the Herald-Tribune, the outlet reported.

Attorneys for the Herald-Tribune filed an emergency motion to dissolve the injunction on June 13 on behalf of the newspaper Pérez-Carrillo. The motion, which was reviewed by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, contends that the order amounts to an unconstitutional prior restraint violating both the United States and Florida constitutions.

“Freedom of speech means that it’s up to the Herald-Tribune to decide whether to report information in its possession, especially facts about such a significant matter as a fatal shooting by law enforcement,” James Lake, an attorney for the Herald-Tribune, told the outlet. “We fully expect that, once our arguments are heard, the injunction will be set aside.”

The law firm representing the Herald-Tribune told the Tracker that a hearing on the motion to dissolve has been scheduled for June 21 before Judge Charles Williams.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

According to the newspaper’s motion, on April 14 Cardi requested a number of recent public filings in the cases of each of the police officers and paramedics charged in connection with the the death of Elijah McClain in August 2019. The clerk at the Adams County Courthouse provided her a stack of documents that included filings in the case of former Aurora police officer Nathan Woodyard, which a judge had sealed from public access.

Cardi wrote on Twitter that she notified the Attorney General’s office on the morning of April 25 that the Gazette would be publishing an article based on the mistakenly disclosed records. By that afternoon, she wrote, she received the order barring them from moving forward with the piece and telling her to destroy any copies of the documents.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Photograph Source: Bohdan Bobrowski – CC BY 2.0

In Western military circles, it’s common to refer to the “balance of forces” — the lineup of tanks, planes, ships, missiles, and battle formations on the opposing sides of any conflict. If one has twice as many combat assets as its opponent and the leadership abilities on each side are approximately equal, it should win. Based on this reasoning, most Western analysts assumed that the Russian army — with a seemingly overwhelming advantage in numbers and equipment — would quickly overpower Ukrainian forces. Of course, things haven’t exactly turned out that way. The Ukrainian military has, in fact, fought the Russians to a near-standstill. The reasons for that will undoubtedly be debated among military theorists for years to come. When they do so, they might begin with Moscow’s surprising failure to pay attention to a different military equation — the “correlation of forces” — originally developed in the former Soviet Union.

That notion differs from the “balance of forces” by placing greater weight on intangible factors. It stipulates that the weaker of two belligerents, measured in conventional terms, can still prevail over the stronger if its military possesses higher morale, stronger support at home, and the backing of important allies. Such a calculation, if conducted in early February, would have concluded that Ukraine’s prospects were nowhere near as bad as either Russian or Western analysts generally assumed, while Russia’s were far worse. And that should remind us of just how crucial an understanding of the correlation of forces is in such situations, if gross miscalculations and tragedies are to be avoided.

The Concept in Practice Before Ukraine

The notion of the correlation of forces has a long history in military and strategic thinking. Something like it, for example, can be found in the epilogue to Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel, War and Peace. Writing about Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812, Tolstoy observed that wars are won not by the superior generalship of charismatic leaders but through the fighting spirit of common soldiers taking up arms against a loathsome enemy.

Such a perspective would later be incorporated into the military doctrine of the Russian Bolsheviks, who sought to calculate not only troop and equipment strength, but also the degree of class consciousness and support from the masses on each side of any potential conflict. Following the 1917 revolution in the midst of World War I, Russian leader Vladimir Lenin argued, for example, against a continuing war with Germany because the correlation of forces wasn’t yet right for the waging of “revolutionary war” against the capitalist states (as urged by his compatriot Leon Trotsky). “Summing up the arguments in favor of an immediate revolutionary war,” Lenin said, “it must be concluded that such a policy would perhaps respond to the needs of mankind to strive for the beautiful, the spectacular, and the striking, but that it would be totally disregarding the objective correlation of class forces and material factors at the present stage of the socialist revolution already begun.”

For Bolsheviks of his era, the correlation of forces was a “scientific” concept, based on an assessment of both material factors (numbers of troops and guns on each side) and qualitative factors (the degree of class consciousness involved). In 1918, for example, Lenin observed that “the poor peasantry in Russia… is not in a position immediately and at the present moment to begin a serious revolutionary war. To ignore this objective correlation of class forces on the present question would be a fatal blunder.” Hence, in March 1918, the Russians made a separate peace with the German-led Central Powers, ceding much territory to them and ending their country’s role in the world war.

As the Bolshevik Party became an institutionalized dictatorship under Joseph Stalin, the correlation-of-forces concept grew into an article of faith based on a belief in the ultimate victory of socialism over capitalism. During the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras of the 1960s and 1970s, Soviet leaders regularly claimed that world capitalism was in irreversible decline and the socialist camp, augmented by revolutionary regimes in the “Third World,” was destined to achieve global supremacy.

Such optimism prevailed until the late 1970s, when the socialist tide in the Third World began to recede. Most significant in this regard was a revolt against the communist government in Afghanistan. When the Soviet-backed People’s Democratic Party in Kabul came under attack by Islamic insurgents, or mujahideen, Soviet forces invaded and occupied the country. Despite sending ever larger troop contingents there and employing heavy firepower against the mujahideen and their local supporters, the Red Army was finally forced to limp home in defeat in 1989, only to see the Soviet Union itself implode not long after.

For U.S. strategists, the Soviet decision to intervene and, despite endless losses, persevere was proof that the Russian leaders had ignored the correlation of forces, a vulnerability to be exploited by Washington. In the 1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, it became U.S. policy to arm and assist anticommunist insurgents globally with the aim of toppling pro-Soviet regimes — a strategy sometimes called the Reagan Doctrine. Huge quantities of munitions were given to the mujahideen and rebels like the Contras in Nicaragua, usually via secret channels set up by the Central Intelligence Agency. While not always successful, these efforts generally bedeviled the Soviet leadership. As Secretary of State George Shultz wrote gleefully in 1985, while the U.S. defeat in Vietnam had led the Soviets to believe “that what they called the global ‘correlation of forces’ was shifting in their favor,” now, thanks to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and elsewhere, “we have reason to be confident that ‘the correlation of forces’ is shifting back in our favor.”

And yes, the Soviet failure in Afghanistan did indeed reflect an inability to properly weigh the correlation of all the factors involved — the degree to which the mujahideen’s morale outmatched that of the Soviets, the relative support for war among the Soviet and Afghan populations, and the role of outside help provided by the CIA. But the lessons hardly ended there. Washington never considered the implications of arming Arab volunteers under the command of Osama bin Laden or allowing him to create an international jihadist enterprise, “the base” (al-Qaeda), which later turned on the U.S., leading to the 9/11 terror attacks and a disastrous 20-year “global war on terror” that consumed trillions of dollars and debilitated the U.S. military without eliminating the threat of terrorism. American leaders also failed to calculate the correlation of forces when undertaking their own war in Afghanistan, ignoring the factors that led to the Soviet defeat, and so suffering the very same fate 32 years later.

Putin’s Ukraine Miscalculations

Much has already been said about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s miscalculations regarding Ukraine. They all began, however, with his failure to properly assess the correlation of forces involved in the conflict to come and that, eerily enough, resulted from Putin’s misreading of the meaning of the U.S. exit from Afghanistan.

Like many in Washington — especially in the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party — Putin and his close advisers viewed the sudden American withdrawal as a conspicuous sign of U.S. weakness and, in particular, of disarray within the Western alliance. American power was in full retreat, they believed, and the NATO powers irrevocably divided. “Today, we are witnessing the collapse of America’s foreign policy,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian State Duma. Other senior officials echoed his view.

This left Putin and his inner circle convinced that Russia could act with relative impunity in Ukraine, a radical misreading of the global situation. In fact, along with top U.S. military leaders, the Biden White House was eager to exit Afghanistan. They wanted to focus instead on what were seen as far more important priorities, especially the reinvigoration of U.S. alliances in Asia and Europe to better contain China and Russia. “The United States should not, and will not, engage in ‘forever wars’ that have cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars,” the administration affirmed in its Interim National Security Strategic Guidance of May 2021. Instead, the U.S. would position itself “to deter our adversaries and defend our interests… [and] our presence will be most robust in the Indo-Pacific and Europe.”

As a result, Moscow has faced the exact opposite of what Putin’s advisers undoubtedly anticipated: not a weak, divided West, but a newly energized U.S.-NATO alliance determined to assist Ukrainian forces with vital (if limited) arms supplies, while isolating Russia in the world arena. More troops are now being deployed to Poland and other “front-line” states facing Russia, putting its long-term security at even greater risk. And perhaps most damaging to Moscow’s geopolitical calculations, Germany has discarded its pacifist stance, fully embracing NATO and approving an enormous increase in military spending.

But Putin’s greatest miscalculations came with respect to the comparative fighting capabilities of his military forces and Ukraine’s. He and his advisers evidently believed that they were sending the monstrous Red Army of Soviet days into Ukraine, not the far weaker Russian military of 2022. Even more egregious, they seem to have believedthat Ukrainian soldiers would either welcome the Russian invaders with open arms or put up only token resistance before surrendering. Credit this delusion, at least in part, to the Russian president’s unyielding belief that the Ukrainians were really Russians at heart and so would naturally welcome their own “liberation.”

We know this, first of all, because many of the troops sent into Ukraine — given only enough food, fuel, and ammunition for a few days of combat — were not prepared to fight a protracted conflict. Unsurprisingly, they have suffered from strikingly low morale. The opposite has been true of the Ukrainian forces who, after all, are defending their homes and their country, and have been able to exploit enemy weaknesses such as long and sluggish supply trains to inflict heavy losses.

We also know that Putin’s top intelligence officials fed him inaccurate information about the political and military situation in Ukraine, contributing to his belief that the defending forces would surrender after just a few days of combat. He subsequently arrested some of those officials, including Sergey Beseda, head of the foreign intelligence branch of the FSB (the successor to the KGB). Although they were charged with the embezzlement of state funds, the real reason for their arrest, claims Vladimir Osechkin, an exiled Russian human rights activist, was providing the Russian president with “unreliable, incomplete, and partially false information about the political situation in Ukraine.”

As Russia’s leaders are rediscovering, just two decades after the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan, a failure to properly assess the correlation of forces when engaging in battle with supposedly weaker foes on their home turf can lead to disastrous outcomes.

China’s Faulty Assessments

Historically speaking, the Chinese Communist Party leadership has been careful indeed to gauge the correlation of forces when facing foreign adversaries. They provided considerable military assistance, for example, to the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, but not so much as to be viewed by Washington as an active belligerent requiring counterattack. Similarly, despite their claims to the island of Taiwan, they have so far avoided any direct move to seize it by force and risk a full-scale encounter with potentially superior U.S. forces.

Based on this record, it’s surprising that, so far as we know, the Chinese leadership failed to generate an accurate assessment of either Putin’s plans for Ukraine or the likelihood of an intense struggle for control of that country. China’s leaders have, in fact, long enjoyed cordial relations with their Ukrainian counterparts and their intelligence services surely provided Beijing with reliable information on that country’s combat capabilities. So, it’s striking that they were caught so off-guard by the invasion and fierce Ukrainian resistance.

Likewise, they should have been able to draw the same conclusions as their Western counterparts from satellite data showing the massive Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s borders. Yet when presented with intelligence by the Biden administration evidently indicating that Putin intended to launch a full-scale invasion, the top leaders simply regurgitated Moscow’s assertions that this was pure propaganda. As a result, China didn’t even evacuate thousands of its own nationals from Ukraine when the U.S. and other Western nations did so, leaving them in place as the war broke out. And even then, the Chinese claimed Russia was only conducting a minor police operation in that country’s Donbas region, making them appear out of touch with on-the-ground realities.

China also seems to have seriously underestimated the ferocity of the U.S. and European reaction to the Russian assault. Although no one truly knows what occurred in high-level policy discussions among them, it’s likely that they, too, had misread the meaning of the American exit from Afghanistan and, like the Russians, assumed it indicated Washington’s retreat from global engagement. “If the U.S. cannot even secure a victory in a rivalry with small countries, how much better could it do in a major power game with China?” asked the state-owned Global Times in August 2021. “The Taliban’s stunningly swift takeover of Afghanistan has shown the world that U.S. competence in dominating major power games is crumbling.”

This miscalculation — so evident in Washington’s muscular response to the Russian invasion and its military buildup in the Indo-Pacific region — has put China’s leaders in an awkward position, as the Biden administration steps up pressure on Beijing to deny material aid to Russia and not allow the use of Chinese banks as conduits for Russian firms seeking to evade Western sanctions. During a teleconference on March 18th, President Biden reportedly warned President Xi Jinping of “the implications and consequences” for China if it “provides material support to Russia.” Presumably, this could involve the imposition of “secondary sanctions” on Chinese firms accused of acting as agents for Russian companies or agencies. The fact that Biden felt able to issue such ultimatums to the Chinese leader reflects a potentially dangerous new-found sense of political clout in Washington based on Russia’s apparent defenselessness in the face of Western-imposed sanctions.

Avoiding American Overreach

Today, the global correlation of forces looks positive indeed for the United States and that, in a strange sense, should worry us all. Its major allies have rallied to its side in response to Russian aggression or, on the other side of the planet, fears of China’s rise. And the outlook for Washington’s principal adversaries seems less than auspicious. Even if Vladimir Putin were to emerge from the present war with a larger slice of Ukrainian territory, he will certainly be presiding over a distinctly diminished Russia. Already a shaky petro-state before the invasion began, it is now largely cut off from the Western world and condemned to perpetual backwardness.

With Russia already diminished, China may experience a similar fate, having placed such high expectations on a major partnership with a faltering country. Under such circumstances, it will be tempting for the Biden administration to further exploit this unique moment by seeking even greater advantage over its rivals by, for instance, supporting “regime change” in Moscow or the further encirclement of China. President Biden’s March 26th comment about Putin — “this man cannot remain in power” — certainly suggested a hankering for just such a future. (The White House did later attempt to walk his words back, claiming that he only meant Putin “cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors.”) As for China, recent all-too-ominous comments by senior Pentagon officials to the effect that Taiwan is “critical to the defense of vital U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific” suggest an inclination to abandon America’s “one China” policy and formally recognize Taiwan as an independent state, bringing it under U.S. military protection.

In the coming months, we can expect far more discussion about the merits of such moves. Washington pundits and politicians, still dreaming of the U.S. as the unparalleled power on planet Earth, will undoubtedly be arguing that this moment is the very one when the U.S. could truly smite its adversaries. Such overreach — involving fresh adventures that would exceed American capacities and lead to new disasters — is a genuine danger.

Seeking regime change in Russia (or anywhere else, for that matter) is certain to alienate many foreign governments now supportive of Washington’s leadership. Likewise, a precipitous move to pull Taiwan into America’s military orbit could trigger a U.S.-China war neither side wants, with catastrophic consequences. The correlation of forces may now seem to be in America’s favor, but if there’s one thing to be learned from the present moment, it’s just how fickle such calculations can prove to be and how easily the global situation can turn against us if we behave capriciously.

Imagine, then, a world in which all three “great” powers have misconstrued the correlation of forces they may encounter.  As top Russian officials continue to speak of the use of nuclear weapons, anyone should be anxious about a future of ultimate overreach that will correlate with nothing good whatsoever.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael T. Klare.

In Western military circles, it's common to refer to the "balance of forces"—the lineup of tanks, planes, ships, missiles, and battle formations on the opposing sides of any conflict. If one has twice as many combat assets as its opponent and the leadership abilities on each side are approximately equal, it should win. Based on this reasoning, most Western analysts assumed that the Russian army—with a seemingly overwhelming advantage in numbers and equipment—would quickly overpower Ukrainian forces. Of course, things haven't exactly turned out that way. The Ukrainian military has, in fact, fought the Russians to a near-standstill. The reasons for that will undoubtedly be debated among military theorists for years to come. When they do so, they might begin with Moscow's surprising failure to pay attention to a different military equation—the "correlation of forces"—originally developed in the former Soviet Union.

Under such circumstances, it will be tempting for the Biden administration to further exploit this unique moment by seeking even greater advantage over its rivals by, for instance, supporting "regime change" in Moscow or the further encirclement of China.

That notion differs from the "balance of forces" by placing greater weight on intangible factors. It stipulates that the weaker of two belligerents, measured in conventional terms, can still prevail over the stronger if its military possesses higher morale, stronger support at home, and the backing of important allies. Such a calculation, if conducted in early February, would have concluded that Ukraine's prospects were nowhere near as bad as either Russian or Western analysts generally assumed, while Russia's were far worse. And that should remind us of just how crucial an understanding of the correlation of forces is in such situations, if gross miscalculations and tragedies are to be avoided.

The Concept in Practice Before Ukraine

The notion of the correlation of forces has a long history in military and strategic thinking. Something like it, for example, can be found in the epilogue to Leo Tolstoy's epic novel, War and Peace. Writing about Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812, Tolstoy observed that wars are won not by the superior generalship of charismatic leaders but through the fighting spirit of common soldiers taking up arms against a loathsome enemy.

Such a perspective would later be incorporated into the military doctrine of the Russian Bolsheviks, who sought to calculate not only troop and equipment strength, but also the degree of class consciousness and support from the masses on each side of any potential conflict. Following the 1917 revolution in the midst of World War I, Russian leader Vladimir Lenin argued, for example, against a continuing war with Germany because the correlation of forces wasn't yet right for the waging of "revolutionary war" against the capitalist states (as urged by his compatriot Leon Trotsky). "Summing up the arguments in favor of an immediate revolutionary war," Lenin said, "it must be concluded that such a policy would perhaps respond to the needs of mankind to strive for the beautiful, the spectacular, and the striking, but that it would be totally disregarding the objective correlation of class forces and material factors at the present stage of the socialist revolution already begun."

For Bolsheviks of his era, the correlation of forces was a "scientific" concept, based on an assessment of both material factors (numbers of troops and guns on each side) and qualitative factors (the degree of class consciousness involved). In 1918, for example, Lenin observed that "the poor peasantry in Russia… is not in a position immediately and at the present moment to begin a serious revolutionary war. To ignore this objective correlation of class forces on the present question would be a fatal blunder." Hence, in March 1918, the Russians made a separate peace with the German-led Central Powers, ceding much territory to them and ending their country's role in the world war.

As the Bolshevik Party became an institutionalized dictatorship under Joseph Stalin, the correlation-of-forces concept grew into an article of faith based on a belief in the ultimate victory of socialism over capitalism. During the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras of the 1960s and 1970s, Soviet leaders regularly claimed that world capitalism was in irreversible decline and the socialist camp, augmented by revolutionary regimes in the "Third World," was destined to achieve global supremacy.

Such optimism prevailed until the late 1970s, when the socialist tide in the Third World began to recede. Most significant in this regard was a revolt against the communist government in Afghanistan. When the Soviet-backed People's Democratic Party in Kabul came under attack by Islamic insurgents, or mujahideen, Soviet forces invaded and occupied the country. Despite sending ever larger troop contingents there and employing heavy firepower against the mujahideen and their local supporters, the Red Army was finally forced to limp home in defeat in 1989, only to see the Soviet Union itself implode not long after.

For U.S. strategists, the Soviet decision to intervene and, despite endless losses, persevere was proof that the Russian leaders had ignored the correlation of forces, a vulnerability to be exploited by Washington. In the 1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, it became U.S. policy to arm and assist anticommunist insurgents globally with the aim of toppling pro-Soviet regimes—a strategy sometimes called the Reagan Doctrine. Huge quantities of munitions were given to the mujahideen and rebels like the Contras in Nicaragua, usually via secret channels set up by the Central Intelligence Agency. While not always successful, these efforts generally bedeviled the Soviet leadership. As Secretary of State George Shultz wrote gleefully in 1985, while the U.S. defeat in Vietnam had led the Soviets to believe "that what they called the global 'correlation of forces' was shifting in their favor," now, thanks to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and elsewhere, "we have reason to be confident that 'the correlation of forces' is shifting back in our favor."

And yes, the Soviet failure in Afghanistan did indeed reflect an inability to properly weigh the correlation of all the factors involved—the degree to which the mujahideen's morale outmatched that of the Soviets, the relative support for war among the Soviet and Afghan populations, and the role of outside help provided by the CIA. But the lessons hardly ended there. Washington never considered the implications of arming Arab volunteers under the command of Osama bin Laden or allowing him to create an international jihadist enterprise, "the base" (al-Qaeda), which later turned on the U.S., leading to the 9/11 terror attacks and a disastrous 20-year "global war on terror" that consumed trillions of dollars and debilitated the U.S. military without eliminating the threat of terrorism. American leaders also failed to calculate the correlation of forces when undertaking their own war in Afghanistan, ignoring the factors that led to the Soviet defeat, and so suffering the very same fate 32 years later.

Putin's Ukraine Miscalculations

Much has already been said about Russian President Vladimir Putin's miscalculations regarding Ukraine. They all began, however, with his failure to properly assess the correlation of forces involved in the conflict to come and that, eerily enough, resulted from Putin's misreading of the meaning of the U.S. exit from Afghanistan.

Like many in Washington—especially in the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party—Putin and his close advisers viewed the sudden American withdrawal as a conspicuous sign of U.S. weakness and, in particular, of disarray within the Western alliance. American power was in full retreat, they believed, and the NATO powers irrevocably divided. "Today, we are witnessing the collapse of America's foreign policy," said Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian State Duma. Other senior officials echoed his view.

This left Putin and his inner circle convinced that Russia could act with relative impunity in Ukraine, a radical misreading of the global situation. In fact, along with top U.S. military leaders, the Biden White House was eager to exit Afghanistan. They wanted to focus instead on what were seen as far more important priorities, especially the reinvigoration of U.S. alliances in Asia and Europe to better contain China and Russia. "The United States should not, and will not, engage in 'forever wars' that have cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars," the administration affirmed in its Interim National Security Strategic Guidance of May 2021. Instead, the U.S. would position itself "to deter our adversaries and defend our interests… [and] our presence will be most robust in the Indo-Pacific and Europe."

As a result, Moscow has faced the exact opposite of what Putin's advisers undoubtedly anticipated: not a weak, divided West, but a newly energized U.S.-NATO alliance determined to assist Ukrainian forces with vital (if limited) arms supplies, while isolating Russia in the world arena. More troops are now being deployed to Poland and other "front-line" states facing Russia, putting its long-term security at even greater risk. And perhaps most damaging to Moscow's geopolitical calculations, Germany has discarded its pacifist stance, fully embracing NATO and approving an enormous increase in military spending.

But Putin's greatest miscalculations came with respect to the comparative fighting capabilities of his military forces and Ukraine's. He and his advisers evidently believed that they were sending the monstrous Red Army of Soviet days into Ukraine, not the far weaker Russian military of 2022. Even more egregious, they seem to have believed that Ukrainian soldiers would either welcome the Russian invaders with open arms or put up only token resistance before surrendering. Credit this delusion, at least in part, to the Russian president's unyielding belief that the Ukrainians were really Russians at heart and so would naturally welcome their own "liberation."

We know this, first of all, because many of the troops sent into Ukraine—given only enough food, fuel, and ammunition for a few days of combat—were not prepared to fight a protracted conflict. Unsurprisingly, they have suffered from strikingly low morale. The opposite has been true of the Ukrainian forces who, after all, are defending their homes and their country, and have been able to exploit enemy weaknesses such as long and sluggish supply trains to inflict heavy losses.

We also know that Putin's top intelligence officials fed him inaccurate information about the political and military situation in Ukraine, contributing to his belief that the defending forces would surrender after just a few days of combat. He subsequently arrested some of those officials, including Sergey Beseda, head of the foreign intelligence branch of the FSB (the successor to the KGB). Although they were charged with the embezzlement of state funds, the real reason for their arrest, claims Vladimir Osechkin, an exiled Russian human rights activist, was providing the Russian president with "unreliable, incomplete, and partially false information about the political situation in Ukraine."

As Russia's leaders are rediscovering, just two decades after the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan, a failure to properly assess the correlation of forces when engaging in battle with supposedly weaker foes on their home turf can lead to disastrous outcomes.

China's Faulty Assessments

Historically speaking, the Chinese Communist Party leadership has been careful indeed to gauge the correlation of forces when facing foreign adversaries. They provided considerable military assistance, for example, to the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, but not so much as to be viewed by Washington as an active belligerent requiring counterattack. Similarly, despite their claims to the island of Taiwan, they have so far avoided any direct move to seize it by force and risk a full-scale encounter with potentially superior U.S. forces.

Based on this record, it's surprising that, so far as we know, the Chinese leadership failed to generate an accurate assessment of either Putin's plans for Ukraine or the likelihood of an intense struggle for control of that country. China's leaders have, in fact, long enjoyed cordial relations with their Ukrainian counterparts and their intelligence services surely provided Beijing with reliable information on that country's combat capabilities. So, it's striking that they were caught so off-guard by the invasion and fierce Ukrainian resistance.

Likewise, they should have been able to draw the same conclusions as their Western counterparts from satellite data showing the massive Russian military buildup on Ukraine's borders. Yet when presented with intelligence by the Biden administration evidently indicating that Putin intended to launch a full-scale invasion, the top leaders simply regurgitated Moscow's assertions that this was pure propaganda. As a result, China didn't even evacuate thousands of its own nationals from Ukraine when the U.S. and other Western nations did so, leaving them in place as the war broke out. And even then, the Chinese claimed Russia was only conducting a minor police operation in that country's Donbas region, making them appear out of touch with on-the-ground realities.

China also seems to have seriously underestimated the ferocity of the U.S. and European reaction to the Russian assault. Although no one truly knows what occurred in high-level policy discussions among them, it's likely that they, too, had misread the meaning of the American exit from Afghanistan and, like the Russians, assumed it indicated Washington's retreat from global engagement. "If the U.S. cannot even secure a victory in a rivalry with small countries, how much better could it do in a major power game with China?" asked the state-owned Global Times in August 2021. "The Taliban's stunningly swift takeover of Afghanistan has shown the world that U.S. competence in dominating major power games is crumbling."

This miscalculation—so evident in Washington's muscular response to the Russian invasion and its military buildup in the Indo-Pacific region—has put China's leaders in an awkward position, as the Biden administration steps up pressure on Beijing to deny material aid to Russia and not allow the use of Chinese banks as conduits for Russian firms seeking to evade Western sanctions. During a teleconference on March 18th, President Biden reportedly warned President Xi Jinping of "the implications and consequences" for China if it "provides material support to Russia." Presumably, this could involve the imposition of "secondary sanctions" on Chinese firms accused of acting as agents for Russian companies or agencies. The fact that Biden felt able to issue such ultimatums to the Chinese leader reflects a potentially dangerous new-found sense of political clout in Washington based on Russia's apparent defenselessness in the face of Western-imposed sanctions.

Avoiding American Overreach

Today, the global correlation of forces looks positive indeed for the United States and that, in a strange sense, should worry us all. Its major allies have rallied to its side in response to Russian aggression or, on the other side of the planet, fears of China's rise. And the outlook for Washington's principal adversaries seems less than auspicious. Even if Vladimir Putin were to emerge from the present war with a larger slice of Ukrainian territory, he will certainly be presiding over a distinctly diminished Russia. Already a shaky petro-state before the invasion began, it is now largely cut off from the Western world and condemned to perpetual backwardness.

With Russia already diminished, China may experience a similar fate, having placed such high expectations on a major partnership with a faltering country. Under such circumstances, it will be tempting for the Biden administration to further exploit this unique moment by seeking even greater advantage over its rivals by, for instance, supporting "regime change" in Moscow or the further encirclement of China. President Biden's March 26th comment about Putin—"this man cannot remain in power"—certainly suggested a hankering for just such a future. (The White House did later attempt to walk his words back, claiming that he only meant Putin "cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors.") As for China, recent all-too-ominous comments by senior Pentagon officials to the effect that Taiwan is "critical to the defense of vital U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific" suggest an inclination to abandon America's "one China" policy and formally recognize Taiwan as an independent state, bringing it under U.S. military protection.

In the coming months, we can expect far more discussion about the merits of such moves. Washington pundits and politicians, still dreaming of the U.S. as the unparalleled power on planet Earth, will undoubtedly be arguing that this moment is the very one when the U.S. could truly smite its adversaries. Such overreach—involving fresh adventures that would exceed American capacities and lead to new disasters—is a genuine danger.

Seeking regime change in Russia (or anywhere else, for that matter) is certain to alienate many foreign governments now supportive of Washington's leadership. Likewise, a precipitous move to pull Taiwan into America's military orbit could trigger a U.S.-China war neither side wants, with catastrophic consequences. The correlation of forces may now seem to be in America's favor, but if there's one thing to be learned from the present moment, it's just how fickle such calculations can prove to be and how easily the global situation can turn against us if we behave capriciously.

Imagine, then, a world in which all three "great" powers have misconstrued the correlation of forces they may encounter.  As top Russian officials continue to speak of the use of nuclear weapons, anyone should be anxious about a future of ultimate overreach that will correlate with nothing good whatsoever.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Michael T. Klare.