Snooping on mortgage lenders

New Hampshire's top court has upheld Implode's right to disseminate information about mortgage lenders, ruling that Implode qualifies as a newsgatherer even though it isn't a traditional news organization.

The court rejected Mortgage Specialists argument that Implode doesn't qualify for press protection, according to the Media Law Professors Blog.


Not really Reds? Here's an advertisement in the May 12, 2010, Epoch Times:

To the Chinese embassy of New York:

My wife, Song Mei, was arrested by Suzhou Canglang security bureau on November 5th, 2009 because she contacted the printing house to publish a religious cartoon. The religious cartoon was created by me for children. It contains no content which disturbs the society or destroys the Chinese government.

Every citizen has the right to freedom of speech. I want the Suzhou Canglang security bureau to release my wife, Song Mei, as soon as possible.

New York Performing Artists
Gospel Fellowship
Pang Xue Lin

Reporters without Borders is calling on both protesters and Thai authorities to ensure that reporters rights are safeguarded. The group cited gunshot wounds received by a France 24 reporter and a photographer for a Thai newspaper in recent weeks. The group also demanded that an investigation be undertaken to discover who ordered the murder of a dissident Thai general as he was being interviewed by journalists.

Censorship by glitches? It may well be that the National Institute of Standards and Technology Computer Resource Center is jammed up.

I tried to sign up for computer security emails. On the first try, I got only so far, then was frozen out with an "error" return. On another try about a half hour later, my attempts were rejected with a notice that the site wasn't functioning, perhaps because of excessive usage. A third attempt was answered with boxes from Mozilla, saying it had encountered a problem.

Well, here's my unprovable suspicion. As a dissident journalist, my computer moves are tracked continuously by security people and when they face an unexpected maneuver by me, they temporarily block, until there has been a chance to change the rules so as to limit my access, or at least to give time for higher level discussion of how to respond.

The screen return to my third attempt, which was made following an earlier version of this post, was, I suggest, ginned up to give the security people cover.

********

About an hour later I signed up for NIST's cybersecurity emails on another computer system, and was successful using both the Mozilla and Explorer browsers.

So maybe my suspicions are nutso, you think. However, in my years as a journalist, I have run into numerous instances of "secret police" stalling tactics. Sometimes all they want to do is to buy an hour, or even a few minutes. This gives time for the control unit to decide how to handle the attempt to gain information. To securocrats, dissident journalists represent a threat to information control.
 
Even if one could prove illegal meddling, the securocrats would find a way to block -- as when the feds stalled a lawsuit against communications companies which had illegally cooperated with NSA wiretaps, by saying that critical documents were classified and had been released to plaintiffs in error. The incriminating documents were seized by the feds, who then argued that the plaintiffs lacked evidence to proceed with the suit.