The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation

beth — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Saul Levmore, Martha C. Nussbaum

The Offensive Internet is a collection of essays that focus on abuses made possible by the freedoms provided by the Internet. The essays deal with the issues of privacy, free speech, cyber-bullying, misogyny, and anonymity. Each essay focuses on one issue to discuss and concludes with what can and cannot be done legally at this time to solve a particular Internet issue.

The book is broken into four parts and each of these parts is comprised of multiple essays on a specific topic. The first is titled “The Internet and Its Problems” and features essays that explore how anonymity on the Internet has lead to widespread cyber-bullying and civil rights abuse. These essays focus on the objectification and abuse women suffer due to these issues (according to one study cited, between the years 2000 and 2007, 72.5% of cyber-harassment victims were women) and what effect this has not only on the victims of these abuses but on society as well. While the authors of these essays are mainly concerned with women's rights, they do also acknowledge that other minority groups (homosexuals, racial minorities, religious minorities) are often targeted by cyber-mobs, signaling a violation of civil rights all around. The real life examples of harassment and slander that these authors reference are disturbing and appalling, and as a reader, one begins to wonder why there are not more laws to regulate and punish cyber-harassment.

The second section of the book is “Reputation.” As the title suggests, these essays deal with how people's reputations can be damaged by the Internet through social networks, Googling, and rumor spreading. These essays address not only the issues we are having currently (for example, people getting fired for things they post on a Facebook page), but also how these issues will shape our society in the future.

The third section, “Speech,” is probably the one topic that is the most controversial. It deals with free speech, a topic that is as debated in the real world as it is in the cyber one. How much free speech should there be on the Internet? What constitutes as free speech and what is slander? Should people be allowed to use foul language or should some censoring be done? And if there is censoring done, who should be responsible for it? These questions and more are posed and discussed throughout the three well thought out essays on speech.

The last section, “Privacy,” concentrated on what information should be considered private, how that privacy should be protected, and what effect the Internet is having on our social norms in terms of privacy. I found the essay on social networks to be the most interesting. The fact that many people consider the information they post onto a social network page to be private, despite being displayed on the very public Internet, is an intriguing phenomenon in our society and this section explores the reasoning and consequences of this train of thought.

While I found many of the topics and issues discussed in this collection to be fascinating and intellectually stimulating, my favorite thing about it was that it didn't so much offer answers as questions that society needs to be asking. Whether you agree with the opinions expressed in it or not, this a book that makes you think, making it a worthwhile read for anyone.

Written by: Victoria Granado, March 28th 2011

Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:23:00 +0000

By Liz Garbus

HBO Documentary Films

"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire

Tonight at 9 p.m. (ET/PT) you should turn the channel to HBO to watch the television debut of Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech, a documentary about the evolution of freedom of speech in America. At eighty minutes, this film by Emmy Award-winning director Liz Garbus packs an intellectual and emotional punch that is sure to stimulate conversation amongst its viewers, whatever their political leanings. The daughter of civil rights lawyer Martin Garbus, Liz made this film in order to explore the many ways our most fundamental of rights is under attack in the United States.

Beginning with the post-9/11 "patriotic" crackdown on free speech, Garbus makes the case that America is now in an era of Neo-McCarthyism. She walks us through some of the prominent and lesser-known cases in US history, including the ACLU's defense of neo-Nazi protest rallies in Skokie, IL in 1977 and Ward Churchill's termination from the University of Colorado-Boulder thirty years later. The way Garbus sees it, "Free speech is free speech. And free speech means protecting even the ideas you hate"—a sentiment that is repeated often throughout the film.

I appreciated Garbus' attempt to live up to her own ideals, as public figures of many stripes are widely represented in Shouting Fire. Twenty-two interviewees—including former Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth Star, gender historian and academic Joan Wallach Scott, United for Peace and Justice co-founder Leslie Cagan, and conservative writer David Horowitz—grapple with challenging questions of where the line should be drawn between academic integrity and academic freedom, when speech becomes a tool of oppressive marginalization, and are limits on speech necessary?

Perhaps because I was working in the New York City public schools at the time, I was particularly moved by the story of Debbie Almontaser, the founding principal of Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA), an English-Arabic public school in Brooklyn, New York. KGIA is one of sixty-eight dual language schools intended to assist new immigrants with assimilating to their new home and foster an appreciation for the study of Arabic language and culture. Just one month before the school was slated to open, Almontaser was forced to resign as a result of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim fire that was sparked by Rightwing group Stop the Madrassa, fanned by Fox News, and finally made into an inferno by New York Post journalist Chuck Bennett, who took Almontaser's solicited explanation of the word intifada vastly out of context in order to write a sensationalistic story. The injustice done to Almontaser is devastating, though completely legal according to free speech laws.

From the Pentagon Papers to the Patriot Act, freedom of speech is a complicated issue. Shouting Fire makes a compelling case for why, as Martin Garbus says, if you value the right to speak freely, you must fight for it every day.

Written by: Mandy Van Deven, June 29th 2009