According to Internet guru, John Gilmore, “The net treats censorship as damage and routes around it.”
The technologies that provide anonymity to the paedophile and the terrorist also protect the political dissident and the whistle-blower. In that sense, Internet open records is analogous to free speech. In order to be certain of hearing the […]
Sixty years after the fall of the Third Reich, the secret Nazi archive with millions of files on concentration camps and their victims is still being kept secret.
Two benefits of the open records process are:
- Changing human behavior and
- Building community trust.
Embarrassment and shame very effectively change individual’s behavior. The Nazi archives […]
Kai Chen wants to establish a free speech corner in a city park in Alhambra, California, even though last month he demanded that a piece of art in a City Hall exhibit be taken down.
Societies that support free speech and open records must understanding that sometimes the speech is hurtful and sometimes the records embarrassing. […]
A federal judge has ruled that The Child Online Protection Act is unconstitional.
Open Records Project activism against sex offenders dates nearly to the dawn of the Internet. However, trying to write a law limiting Internet publishing in any way is extremely difficult to do:
- In the United States, any such law must not violate […]
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his Argentine counterpart Nestor Kirchner, facing the fastest price increases in Latin America, are employing a new tool to bring down their inflation rates: control the data collectors.
Governments often mislead their citizens as a means to quiet discontent. Citizen discontent is the fuel that changes government behavior. Those […]
Oakland Circuit Judge Wendy Potts sentenced Matthew Grundy and Jared Foote, both 17, to two years probation and ordered them to pay $23,000 in restitution Wednesday for their role in vandalism Dec. 20 that left dozens of schools buses with flat tires, forcing school officials to cancel classes for the day. The incident sparked a […]
A Waterford Township man arrested last month for operating under the influence of liquor and driving on a suspended/revoked license has eight prior suspensions and nine drunken driving convictions.
In any given year, about 300,000 of Michigan’s 7.2 million licensed drivers have their driving privileges suspended. Studies show that about 70 percent continue to drive anyway.
An […]
Europe’s citizens must be on their guard against political correctness and moralising politicians, says the European Commission President José Manuel Barroso in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.
The former Portuguese premier and centre-Right politician is concerned that freedom can be the loser in European culture wars over climate change, cheap air travel, Islam and free […]
Today a Wall Street Journal editorial describes the personal devastation caused by online postings to a college WEB blog autoadmit.com
The Open Records defense of public posting of information is that blog posting is free speech. The argument becomes a little weak for anonymous postings. An anonymous user can libel another user such that […]
Brushing aside a veto threat, the House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to overturn a 2001 order by President George W. Bush that lets former presidents keep their papers secret indefinitely.
The House bill would give current and former presidents 40 business days to object to requests to view their papers, allow a sitting president to […]