October 2013

[Commentary] Everybody in public life in the US and UK claims to believe in freedom of expression and a free press. Strange, then, that a growing number of people should now choose to exercise that freedom in order to declare that it should be limited—at least for others.

On both sides of the Atlantic, attention focuses on the overt threats to freedom of expression posed by state interference, as illustrated by the scandals over the National Security Agency spying revelations and the Justice Department secretly seizing AP journalists’ phone records. In Britain, we still labor under the worst defamation laws in the civilized world. These laws, under which truth is no defense and the defendant is assumed guilty until proven otherwise, attract powerful ‘libel tourists’ from around the world, seeking to use the London courts to silence their critics. US courts have rightly refused to enforce judgments imposed by UK libel courts. Even in the Land of the Free and the First Amendment, the “Free Speech, BUT” group has been gaining ground.

[Commentary] In July, the US House of Representatives came within 12 votes of defunding National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance in a sweeping amendment vote that caught much of Washington by surprise. More than two months later, a pair of more modest bills have entered the Senate and House, sponsored by Sen Al Franken (D-MN) and Rep Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) respectively. The bills are aimed at transparency rather than broad-stroke defunding, something companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft have lobbied and sued for, but this would be a chance to make those transparency principles the law of the land.

To get it through, advocates will have to navigate a dysfunctional Congress and a President who has staunchly defended executive secrecy. So how much of a chance do these bills have? The bills' biggest assets are their powerful friends. The tech industry is lobbying hard, with nearly every major American tech company signing an open letter in support of the bills, including Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox, and AOL. Just as important, the Senate bill also has powerful friends in the legislature. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is listed as a co-sponsor of the bill, which means it will likely get a chance at a floor vote in the Senate. So far, all the co-sponsors are Democrats, raising concerns over whether it will gain bipartisan support, but Senate Republicans like Rand Paul (R-KY) have co-sponsored NSA reform bills in the past, and dozens of House Republicans signed on to the previous NSA-defunding push. In light of the government shutdown, the odds seem slim for any legislation in the short term, but the transparency bills have as good a chance as any.

[Commentary] The Landsat program has collected satellite data about the surface of the Earth since 1972. Landsat 7 and 8, the two satellites still operational, will “continue mission-essential operations,” the US Geological Survey announced. This means they’ll sense the Earth — which, since they’re already up in orbit, is relatively cheap for the government — and beam those data down to Earth. Once on Earth, the data will be archived by the United States Geological Survey. It won’t be processed into the kind of data that scientists and businesses are used to working with, though, until after the government restarts. The data may also not be available at all online until then, too. The Landsat program is the oldest continuously-operated program of its type, anywhere. Its satellites have created a precious and irreplaceable archive, and to sever the continuity of that archive would be a tremendous loss for science.

Many parts of the Broadcasting Board of Governors have had to shut down due to a lapse in appropriations for the US federal government, but BBG-supported media are still bringing news and information programs to audiences around the world. US international media activities under the BBG that are deemed “foreign relations essential to national security,” such as news programming and distribution, are exempted from the shutdown and will continue.