The Demise of Academic Freedom in the US

Watchtower

Press TV (2017)

Film Review

This documentary concerns three extremely popular and effective college professors who were denied tenure and/or fired after being targeted by the Jewish Anti-Discrimination League (ADL) for their views on Palestine. Two of the professors targeted (Dr Norman Finkelstein) and Dr Joel Kovel) were accused by the ADL of being “self-hating Jews,” owing to their support for justice for Palestine. The third, Dr Joseph Massad, a Jordanian whose family fled Palestine in 1948, was accused of being an “anti-Semite” who made Jewish students uncomfortable.

None of the above accusations were ever supported by the facts. In each case, the school that employed them (DePaul, Brooklyn College and Columbia) failed to follow their own established processes. Instead they were more concerned about bad publicity interfering with their ability to fundraise.  .

In 2008 Massad, who Columbia improperly denied tenure, sought the assistance of the the ACLU for the clear violation of his First Amendment rights. With their support, he finally won tenure in 2009.

One of the most ominous aspects of these three cases is the clear monitoring/surveillance role the ADL* is playing in all US institutions of higher learning. In Finkelstein’s case, this monitoring entailed dispatching outside non-student agitators to disrupt his classes.

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*The ADL has a long history of collaborating with the FBI to spy on progressive groups. In the mid-eighties they were involved in spying on a group I belonged to The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES): https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2000/12/27/12071.php

Citizens as Journalists in a Corrupt World

The Whole World is Watching celebrates the vital importance of citizen journalism (and the Internet) in a time of growing corruption and repression on the part of governments who serve corporate paymasters rather than the people they’re supposed to represent.

Highlighting growing police attacks on journalists and photographers, the filmmakers outline the laws regulating filming and taking photos in public places. In essence, a person standing on public property has an absolute right to film anything within their line of vision – provided it doesn’t violate another person’s reasonable expectation of private (eg if they’re undressing). The police are behaving unlawfully by demanding to see a photographer’s identification, deleting their photos or confiscating their photos, videos or equipment.

The documentary features Will Potter, independent journalist and author of Green is the New Red, about the ongoing US effort to criminalize environmental activists. See his blog at  Green is the New Red

 

Barrett Brown: Standing Up for Journalistic Freedom

Field of Vision – Relatively Free

Alex Winter (2016)

Field of Vision is the first media interview journalist Barrett Brown gave (in November 2016) after spending four years in federal prison. He was originally arrested for publishing (on his website) publicly available material that had been hacked from private intelligence/security contractor Stratfor. When these charges were eventually dropped, he pled guilty to making threats against an FBI office, obstruction of justice and being an accessory to cyber threats.

While in federal prison, he spent six months in solitary confinement.

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The link below is a Democracy Now clip from a May 2017 interview from Brown’s halfway house. It delves more deeply into ongoing federal harassment again him, owing to his role in publicizing illegal collusion between the FBI, Stratfor and other private security contractors. Among others, Brown published emails in about private corporations who received Department of Justice assistance in discrediting activists who tried to expose their various criminal activities.

One particular email revealed a request by Bank of America to discredit Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald, based on fears they were about to publish leaked documents about their illegal BoA activities.

During the interview, Brown reveals the FBI re-arrested him in April to prevent him from appearing in a PBS documentary. The FBI claims (erroneously) that he’s prohibited from speaking to the media as a condition of his probation. He was only released after a first amendment lawyer threatened to sue the Department of Justice for violating federal law.

Brown is thinking strongly of immigrating after he completes his probation.

Democracy Now: Jailed Reporter Barrett Brown

Anonymous – The Hacker Wars

Anonymous – The Hacker Wars

Vivien Lesnik Weisman (2014)

Film Review

The Hacker Wars is a riveting documentary about members of Anonymous – the leaderless international hacking community – who have made their identity public. It focuses on four individuals: Andrew (Weev) Auernheimer, Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond and a hacker turned FBI informant who went by the screen name SABU.

The first two men made their identify public as a form of civil disobedience – directed at government surveillance, secrecy and suppression of civil liberties. Hammond’s name became public after an FBI informant named SABU entrapped him into hacking into Stratfor, the infamous private intelligence/security contractor.

Weev was arrested in 2013 – not for hacking – but for downloading over 100,000 government email addresses from an unscecure AT&T website and sharing the security glitch with journalists. He served 13 months in jail before his conviction was overturned on appeal.

Barrett Brown, a non-hacker, was a journalist who reported on Anonymous activities. He was arrested for allegedly copying a publicly available Stratfor link to his Project PM website, a clear violation of his first amendment rights. He was sentenced to 63 months in Federal prison. He was released to a halfway house (on house arrest) in November 2016.

SABU was arrested in June 2011 and released after one day after agreeing to infiltrate Anonymous on behalf of the FBI. Eight days later (at the behest of the FBI), he formed the splinter group Antisec, which in September 2011 aggressively promoted Occupy Wall Street to other Anonymous members. In December 2011, he persuaded Jeremy Hammond to assist him with the infamous Stratfor Christmas Hack. This was the operation in which scores of ex-CIA and ex-military operatives who worked for Stratfor woke up on Christmas to discover they had donated $50,000 each to various charities.

Hammond pled guilty and was sentenced to ten years.

The FBI was an active member of Anonymous for nine months in all. SABU’s role as an informant came out at his trial in April 2012. Owing to his invaluable service to the FBI, he walked away a free man.