Tag: Free speech

The high cost of Cambridge police records

The Cambridge Police Department has adopted a restrictive policy that would force the Cambridge Chronicle to pay more than $1,200 to obtain public records of police activity for most of July, according to a story by Chronicle reporter Erin Smith. What’s more, the policy may be in violation of the Massachusetts public-records law.

Like all Massachusetts police departments, Cambridge’s makes a bare-bones incident log freely available to members of the public; it is, in fact, online. But state law exempts police departments from having to release detailed information about incidents that are under investigation.

What is and isn’t public information, and when it must be made public, are complicated matters that I’m not going to get into here. But the law does require that the public log — also known as the police blotter — contain the “names and addresses of persons arrested and charges against such persons.”

According to the Chronicle, though:

The Cambridge Police Department already keeps a daily police log online maintained by a student intern, but over the past several months, the Chronicle noticed that previously available information — such as the ages and addresses of arrested people, the addresses where crimes occurred and the description of suspects — was being withheld from the public.

In quickly scanning through a few days’ worth of the Cambridge log, I found several examples of arrestees whose addresses (and ages) were listed. I couldn’t find any whose address was not listed. I have no reason to doubt the Chronicle’s reporting, but it’s important to point that out.

The fees are another matter. Charging $1,215 for public records is an outrageous breach of the public’s right to know. The police department’s lawyer, Kelly Downes, cites the cost of compiling and copying those records. But the standard practice with many police departments is to allow reporters to view the originals at the police station, at no cost to anyone.

Given the embarrassment over the department’s recent arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates in his own home, you’d think that everyone would be on his or her best behavior these days. Well, think again.

And by the way — we’re still waiting to hear how Sgt. James Crowley, who arrested Gates, managed to incorporate information into his report from a woman who insists she never talked with Crowley. Maybe Downes hasn’t had a chance to work out a price for that particular piece of information.

Media should keep pushing on Crowley

Even many of us who think the Cambridge Police overreacted by arresting Henry Louis Gates in his own home have assumed — for the sake of argument if nothing else — that Sgt. James Crowley’s report was accurate.

I’ve contended from the beginning that Crowley’s mistake was in failing to recognize why Gates would think he’d been racially profiled. Friend of Media Nation Harvey Silverglate and Slate columnist Christopher Hitchens have both written that the issue wasn’t race, but Gates’ constitutional right to throw a nutty in his own home. I agree.

But with Crowley, Gates and President Obama settling in for an awkward beer later today, let’s not forget that there is an enormous discrepancy between Crowley’s report and the statements of Lucia Whalen, the woman who called 911 and then waited at the scene until police had arrived.

Using very specific, descriptive language, Crowley wrote that Whalen told him she’d seen “two black males with backpacks on the porch.” And when the Boston Herald pointed out the discrepancy to Crowley, he replied, “Obviously, I stand behind everything that’s in the police report. It wouldn’t be in there if it wasn’t true.”

Yet Whalen, at first through her lawyer, Wendy Murphy, and yesterday in her own appearance before the media (Boston Globe story here; Herald story here; Cambridge Chronicle story here), has insisted that she and Crowley never spoke.

The media need to keep pushing. If Crowley’s report turns out to be wrong in some fundamental way, then it calls everything else into question as well.

Creative Commons photo (cc) via Wikimedia.

An update on Kazakhstan’s Internet crackdown

The partly free republic of Kazakhstan has taken a step toward greater repression, as President Nursultan Nazarbayev (photo) recently signed a bill aimed at cracking down on the Internet.

According to David Stern, writing for GlobalPost, the new law subjects all Internet communications to Kazakhstan’s “already punitive mass media and libel laws.” The law will also make it easier for the Kazakh government to block foreign Web sites.

The bill was the subject of a protest last April during the Eurasian Media Forum, held in the country’s largest city, Almaty. I was at the forum and covered the story here and here. At the time, people like Almaty resident Adil Nurmakov, Central Asia editor for Global Voices Online, were hopeful that Nurmakov might veto the legislation.

Unfortunately, that was not to be. As Stern’s story makes clear, the authorities have decided not to risk any sort of Twitter revolution spreading to Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan is an important country — a vast, lightly populated former Soviet republic with considerable oil and gas resources. It’s a shame that Nazarbayev’s interest in opening up to the West does not extend to greater liberties for his own people.

Fighting censorship at his old school paper

A summer intern at the Cape Cod Times named Henry Rome was such an outstanding journalist at his high-school paper in Pennsylvania that he was named the National High School Journalist of the Year.

Now, before he heads off to Princeton University this fall, he’s fighting a proposal that could result in his old paper being censored by school officials before publication.

George Brennan reports.

A new threat to the Internet

In my latest for the Guardian, I consider the implications of an idea put forth recently by influential U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner: making it illegal to link to copyrighted content without permission. Not only would Posner’s proposal do enormous damage to the Internet, but it would destroy the doctrine of “fair use” as well.

Some background on Rhode Island’s A.G.

Hey, Joe Dwinell: You should see what people talk about on the phone. Sex, drugs — all manner of illegal activity. Maybe it’s time we brought Verizon to heel, eh?

My friend and former employer Stephen Mindich, publisher of the Phoenix newspapers, is doing a perfectly fine job of defending himself. I just thought I’d point out that Rhode Island attorney general Patrick Lynch, who wants to crack down on adult advertising on Craigslist and in the Phoenix following a recent murder linked to a Craigslist ad, was the proud recipient of a 2004 Phoenix Muzzle Award.

In brief, here’s what happened: a man died in the custody of the North Kingstown police. Local officials refused to release public records pertaining to the case. And Lynch, whose duties include enforcing the state’s open-records law, not only refused to order the release of those records, but coached local authorities on how to keep them private.

Here’s what Providence Journal columnist Edward Achorn wrote at the time about Lynch’s behavior:

He would have served the public much better had he acted immediately to get the facts out, and let the investigation proceed. It is hard to see and no one has explained how sharing basic information with citizens would have impeded such an investigation. And it presents a clear conflict for the attorney general to join police in keeping records secret, when he is the government official charged with enforcing the Open Records Law.

With regard to Craigslist and the Phoenix, Lynch should concentrate on punishing illegal behavior, not speech. Prostitution and the dangers accompanying it, after all, have been with us forever.

More on the Kazakhstan Internet

Yevgeniya Plakhina reports that those proposed amendments cracking down on the Internet continue to wend their way through Kazakhstan’s parliament.

In an e-mail to Media Nation, she writes: “Lower House of Parliament passed the amendments in the first reading. Of course, there’s an oppurtunity to call them back — senate and the president can. but it might not happen.”

Free the Kazakhstan Internet

Yevgeniya Plakhina

The InterContinental Hotel in Almaty, Kazakhstan, is about as isolating an experience as you can imagine. The luxurious surroundings — and the ever-present security guards — effectively separated the several hundred journalists attending last week’s Eurasian Media Forum from whatever was going on outside.

So it was something of a surprise when that separation was breached last Friday afternoon. Between a panel on the global media crisis, which I moderated, and a panel on blogging, in which I participated, several people approached us with handouts, warning of proposed laws that would crack down on Kazakhstan’s burgeoning blogosphere. We exchanged pleasantries, and that seemed to be that.

Then, during the blogging panel, one of them — an audacious 24-year-old woman named Yevgeniya Plakhina, wearing a shirt that proclaimed “SHHH!” — got up and demanded to know why six of her friends had been arrested for demonstrating against the proposals.

The moderator, Vladimir Rerikh, a Kazakh journalist, clearly wanted the issue, and Plakhina, to go away. But Danny Schechter, a well-known American progressive journalist, spoke up on Plakhina’s behalf, and she was able to continue pressing her case. (Here is Schechter’s account.) The organizer of the conference, Dariga Nazarbayeva, the daughter of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, could be seen talking on her cell phone, leaving the hall and returning several times.

Afterward, Plakhina, a reporter for the newspaper Respublika, was hanging around in the lobby. I approached her for an interview and asked to take her picture. I explained that I would be posting her picture on my blog, and asked if that would create any problems for her. She said it would not, and posed willingly.

According to the materials Plakhina gave me, the Kazakh government proposes to regulate all online media — forums, chatrooms, blogs and social networks — by the same laws that currently govern mass-media outlets, which are not exactly based on the principles of the First Amendment. The legislation, if passed, could result in the blocking of foreign mass-media Web sites as well. In addition, the mass media would be prohibited from calling for peaceful demonstrations, according to the materials.

Plakhina told me that her group, For a Free Internet, began on March 2 by leaving comments on the prime minister’s blog — more than 70 on the first day, and 400 within a week. The comments were all expunged, she added, and moderation was turned on, making it impossible to leave any further messages.

On March 7, the campaign staged a flash-mob event in front of the office of the national Internet provider, she said. She gave me a DVD of the event.

I asked her whether she was surprised that she was allowed to speak. “Well, yeah, that was surprise. Maybe because they don’t know my face yet,” she said, laughing. She added that she may have been allowed to go on because Rerikh, the moderator, didn’t know what she was saying: “Well, thank God the moderator doesn’t speak English.”

Her friends were quickly released from jail. In an e-mail exchange yesterday, Plakhina told me:

Yes, my friends were released shortly after the session finished. I guess, the authorities were scared of international scandal, and released my friends. An advisor to the president on mass media Yermukhamet Yertysbayev has taken an active participation in releasing my friends. He came up to me at media forum and asked what happend with my friends, made a call and they’ve been released. They haven’t been charged with anything because we didn’t even start the demonstration (well, it was supposed to be a flash mob, not even a demonstration). Policemen had nothing to charge us with.

Kazakhstan is not North Korea, but neither is it a country where press freedom is firmly established. Several days ago, according to the Associated Press, an opposition newspaper publisher was imprisoned because he had not paid damages in a libel suit that, according to his supporters, was politically motivated.

Reporters Without Borders ranks Kazakhstan as 125th out of 169 countries in terms of press freedom. In addition, as Adil Nurmakov of Global Voices Online (one of numerous signers of Plakhina’s letter) has reported, the blogging platform LiveJournal has been censored by the government. (Not to get too self-righteous: the United States ranks only 36th in the Reporters Without Borders report, and 119th in its “extraterritorial” practices, including its imprisonment of an Al-Jazeera videographer at Guantánamo for six years.)

Plakhina’s group is trying to take advantage of the fact that Kazakhstan is about to assume the chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, arguing that the proposed laws are contrary to the democratic spirit of the OSCE.

EurasiaNet has a thorough account of the proposed legislation.

During my brief time in Kazakhstan, I got the impression that the government is trying to move beyond its repressive past. The country, a former Soviet republic, also seems to be an island of stability in a volatile part of the world. It would send a strong and encouraging message if the government drops its proposal to censor speech online.

For more information, you can contact For a Free Internet at blokirovke {dot} net {at} gmail {dot} com.