TheAgitator.com
Memphis Blue
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008I believe this is the third case like of a police official using his position to bully a critical blog in just the last year or so:
Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin and the city of Memphis have filed a lawsuit to learn who operates a blog harshly critical of Godwin and his department.
The lawsuit asks AOL to produce all information related to the identity of an e-mail address linked to MPD Enforcer 2.0, a blog popular with police officers that has been extremely critical of police leadership at 201 Poplar.
[...]
The bloggers, who operate under the name of Dirk Diggler — the name of the porn star in “Boogie Nights” — say their site provides an important service to officers and citizens.
“This is another attempt at disrupting an outlet for officers to gather and complain about the administration,” they said on the site.
“Further, this allows us unrestricted communication with the citizens of Memphis. The citizens should be made aware of the scandals that rock the administration and shudder the rocky foundation in which they operate today.”
The bloggers also said city attorneys earlier this year wrote a threatening letter on city letterhead to a company that produced T-shirts for the bloggers.
So police officials respond to a blog that accuses them of abusing their power by….abusing their power to go after the blog.
Some fine police work there, Lou.
I think it’s only a matter of time before bloggers face restrictions of some kind. It’s too seditious a medium for governments not to feel threatened. Bloggers are not politically organized and don’t wield the institutional authority of the mainstream media, so they are vulnerable. In fact, the mainstream media will be more than willing to assist in reining them in, because “those amateurs” are stealing their market share. And it’s not like the First Amendment protects anything anymore. All you need to get past Constitutional constraints these days is the ability to spell the phrase “compelling need”.
Every blogger should probably be donating heavily to the ACLU. It’s the only organization with enough public and legal clout to protect them.
Don’t forget the Institute for Justice
Dave, in sick way, I hope you’re correct. Open journalistic war between the MSM and establishment and the blogosphere will be quite a sight to behold.
Dave: You’re assuming that restrictions could even work. The internet is an interesting technology in that it is fairly resistant to government intervention when used by anyone with a decent grasp on it. Local regulations won’t simply can’t work because anything on the internet involves people in a variety of jurisdictions. Federal regulations face the problem of data traveling across international borders and being unable to really know if the sender or receiver are within their country. Even international regulations would be difficult to enforce because they would require the cooperation of every single country with access to the web.
China has one of the world’s most aggressive and sophisticated internet control bureaucracies and it still really manages to only restrict people without much technical knowledge. Theres a reason terrorists, drug dealers, and child porn peddlers have turned to the internet in order to communicate: because no one has yet managed to figure out how to catch anyone but the absolutely stupid or careless. Right now, for free, I could route my data traffic through a half dozen proxies on 6 continents with a click of a button. I could change those proxies every fifteen minutes and not repeat for decades. I could make a sterile e-mail address to use to get past requirements for blog comments. Even if my technique is imperfect, I would additionally shielded by the sheer volume of background noise. My computer came stock with the kind of data destruction software that would require an electron microscope to retrieve anything I deleted.
The thing is, I’m not an expert. I’m not even that good with computers. Hell, I’m a Mac user.
Sorry fi I missed it, but is there a link to this website? I would like to go there and support it.
From Fight Club:
“The people you’re after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us.”
It does not take extreme technical knowledge to skirt their efforts as described above. The backlash from something like this would be enormous, and I welcome it.
Nick,
The link is in the article, though like Radley’s links, it’s not visible until you mouse over it. The URL is
http://mpdenforcer20.blogspot.com/
William, I’m in China right now. Let me tell you – the great firewall of China is at best, an inconvenience. It’s hardly an effective means of censorship, though right now they’re working overtime to change that. Olympic fever has fostered Olympic paranoia.
William,
I don’t think for a minute that the government will never succeed in closing down all dissent on the internet. But, they can put a huge damper on it with some fairly simple laws.
If there’s anything I’ve learned in my lifetime, it’s that government, when it feels threatened, always responds with repression and it is very persistent. There will always be some people willing to pay the cost of speaking their mind, but not everyone wants to martyr themselves for a cause. Raising the cost of dissent will, therefore, reduce the numbers of people willing to protest government actions. Democracy is all about numbers. You never have to suppress the opposition completely. You only have to make them look like a small minority.
I strongly suspect that any sort of concerted effort by the government to seriously stifle bloggers would bring about a wave of electronic retribution that would make Anonymous’ efforts against the Church of Scientology look like a minor packetstorm.
The fact that the ACLU does defend stuff like this is what makes me so sad that their post-Heller 2A position still sucks so bad. I really want to give them money, but they have made it ethically impossible for me to do so.
In case anyone missed it:
“The ACLU disagrees with the Supreme Court’s conclusion about the nature of the right protected by the Second Amendment. We do not, however, take a position on gun control itself. In our view, neither the possession of guns nor the regulation of guns raises a civil liberties issue.”
I have heard that the basic difference between liberals and conservatives is which books they want to burn…maybe this could be extended to which constitutional amendments the seek to ignore.
mike
I wish MPD the very best!
The internet as we know it is too great a threat to the Powers That Be to be left as it is.
Internet 2 is planned http://www.infowars.com/?p=2640
This is worth keeping a close eye on.
As an anonymous blogger from Memphis, I find the police director’s gestapo tactics troubling yet unsurprising, given the culture of corruption at the MPD. I personally know officers who are overt rascists, and I know others who use marijuana regularly. It’s not hard to get a MPD officer to share war stories of brutality over a few beers. The worst part is, the corruption rises through the ranks.
The Memphis Flyer (weekly tabloid) has a great interview with Dirk Diggler.