In a disturbing development that directly threatens the freedom to imagine, rap lyrics are being brought in as evidence in criminal trials (New York Times story). An amicus brief (below) filed by the New Jersey chapter of NCAC participating organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, argues That a rap artist wrote lyrics seemingly embracing the world of violence is no [...]
Mark your calendars! On April 4th NCAC will be celebrating 404 Day, a day dedicated to the issue of internet censorship in public schools and libraries. Along with 404 Day partners the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the MIT Center for Civic Media, we are spreading the word and calling on You to share your stories!
Tomorrow is opening night for Trumbull High School students and for a performance of the musical Rent that almost wasn't.
In celebration of Sunshine Week, we're dipping into our files of our many open records requests from censorship incidents around the country.
This week is Sunshine week, a nation-wide celebration of open access in government. Sunshine week was started in 2002 by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors in response to proposed legislation that would have severely undermined the state's open records law. We at NCAC are frequent users of state records requests, particularly to bolster our work on individual censorship cases. [...]
With by now predictable regularity, student activism - and even academic debate - on the conflict in the Middle East is met with punitive sanctions and attempts at silencing. Such attempts exist on both sides, but disproportionately punish students and speakers critical of Israeli politics. The latest episode took place this March on the Campus of Northeastern University, where a [...]
In 2012 we honored author Phyllis Reynolds Naylor as a Free Speech Defender for her groundbreaking Alice series and Shiloh. Shelf Awareness reports that Phyllis was one over 20 authors celebrated last week at the inaugural NoVa Teen Book Festival, founded by an Arlington, VA bookstore in partnership with local schools and libraries. Here's a video of Phyllis speaking (at 1:17) with other [...]
Kennesaw State finally formally announced the reinstatement of Ruth Stanford's “A Walk in the Valley” to the opening exhibition at the new Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art. The piece, a commissioned work about Georgia author Corra Harris' homestead, was taken down two weeks ago, shortly before the formal opening on Saturday, March 1st.
Join NCAC for a day at the movies as we screen the winners of our teen film contest, feed you with free popcorn, and celebrate free expression on the big screen. 3/29 @ New York Film Academy.
In advance of the release of the wildly-anticipated video game South Park: The Stick of Truth, CBLDF reported that some versions of the game were being censored in countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and in Australia. Now that the game is...
Two recent legislative proposals in Maryland and New York - drafted in retaliation against academic organzations' support of academic boycotts against Israel - seek to penalize professional associations and their members for engaging in protected political activity.
Welcome to Using Graphic Novels in Education, an ongoing feature from CBLDF that is designed to allay confusion around the content of graphic novels and to help parents and teachers raise readers. In this column, we examine graphic novels, including th...
Rowan University student newspaper The Whit reported late last month on a student petition urging the school to revise its free speech policy in order to address “recent hate speech from non-student organizations on campus.” Assistant Vice Presiden...
Last month, South Carolina’s House Ways and Means Committee voted in favor of budget cuts to the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina Upstate by amounts matching the money each school spent on required reading programs that incl...
Lawmakers in the Kansas Senate are considering a draconian new bill that would make it easier to prosecute educators and other school officials for using “offensive” materials in classrooms and libraries. Senate Bill 401 was proposed in res...
Last month here on The Torch, I wrote about a misguided and dangerous bill presented in the New York State Legislature. The bill would have effectively denied funding to state universities that support academic groups that boycott Israel, as the Americ...
The U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas today filed a motion to dismiss 11 charges against Barrett Brown in a criminal prosecution that would have had massive implications for journalism and the right of ordinary people to share links. EF...
Open debate, the right to dissent, and freedom of association are core First Amendment values that are directly threatened by legislative efforts to penalize organizations like ASA for their political positions.
The results are in! The winner of this year’s Youth Free Expression Project Film Contest, addressing the theme Video Games in the Crosshairs, is “Future Warfare III” by Ani Akpan of the Bronx, NY.
The the oft-delayed and highly anticipated role-playing video game South Park: The Stick of Truth is finally hitting the shelves next week. However, a leaked reviewer’s guide for European journalists has revealed that the version of the game that pub...
This piece by NCAC Executive Director Joan Bertin appeared in the February 24, 2014 CQ Researcher as part of a "point-counterpoint" section on media violence. Violence has always been a fact of life and remains a reality for many people. It also has occupied a central place in art and literature, including children’s stories (“Hansel and Gretel”), classic texts (“The [...]
Alarmist watchdog group the Parents Television Council has turned its focus toward Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim after an announcement that as of March 31, the programming block would begin an hour earlier. The PTC is a “non-partisan education organ...
People, super serious question: what ever would we do without Judy Blume? Judy's books helped many of us navigate the troubled seas of adulthood (you former young ladies of the world know what I'm talking about). They entertained us, emboldened us, held our hands and assured us we were not alone. And her brave and tireless advocacy on behalf of [...]
Similar legislation has been introduced in 12 states. From Truthout.org: On Tuesday, January 28th, a transpartisan group of four Vermont state representatives introduced legislation that would block some of the practical effects of mass data collection by the National Security Agency (NSA). Rep. Teo Zagar (D-Windsor-4-1), along with co-sponsor Reps. Susan Davis (P/D-Orange-1), Patricia Komline (R-Bennington-Rutland) and William Stevens (I-Addison-Rutland) [...]
From Center for Constitutional Rights: Synopsis Blum v. Holder is a federal lawsuit challenging the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) as an unconstitutional infringement on free speech. The plaintiffs are five longtime animal rights activists whose advocacy work has been chilled due to fear of being prosecuted as a terrorist under the AETA. ... Pushed through Congress by a powerful lobby [...]
Iconic American musician Pete Seeger was censored by CBS over an anti-war song he wanted to perform on the Smother Brothers TV show.
NCAC participating organizations the Dramatists Guild and the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund have sent a letter (PDF embed below) to Theater J in Washington DC in support of the venue's staging of Motti Lerner's The Admission. A group called Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art has waged a smear campaign to vilify the play as anti-Israel. The reason we dramatists feel so strongly about this [...]
Responses to recent disclosures about official surveillance of private communications and activities are rolling in. The most recent is from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which today released a Report on the Telephone Records Program Conducted under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and on the Operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The PCLOB is an independent [...]
ProPublica has published an analysis of the four most often cited rationales offered to justify mass surveillance and collection of metadata, describing why they are “questionable claims.” It is instructive reading for anyone who is concerned about claims that security cannot be achieved without sacrificing constitutional principles. Whatever the right answer to that dilemma, official dissembling does little to advance [...]
Last night, Al Jazeera America's The Stream dedicated its show to a topic near and dear to NCAC's work and hearts: book challenges and bans in the U.S. Joining the show was author Carolyn Mackler, whose works NCAC has defended throughout the years, as well as partners-in-activism Isaiah Zukowski and Lynn Bruno. Isaiah spoke out as a high school senior when [...]
In a 2-1 ruling today, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals effectively ended net neutrality, striking down the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order. The FCC's order was intended to keep broadband providers from interfering with traffic on the Web. The issue of who should regulate internet access has been the subject of much debate in the last decade. NCAC believes net neutrality allows [...]
This is a good, concise history of abuses by the intelligence community and offers a great argument against warrantless surveillance. Without that break-in by the Media 8, J. Edgar Hoover’s “shadow FBI,” a criminal conspiracy at the heart of a developing national security state, might never have been revealed. (The CIA, officially banned from domestic spying on Americans, turned out [...]
After cries of censorship, an eviction and a lawsuit, The Central Utah Art Center (CUAC) will receive a $60,000 in a settlement with the city of Ephraim, it was announced Friday. The lawsuit was filed in early 2013 after the CUAC was evicted from the space they had inhabited for 20 years. The city alleged the CUAC hadn't fulfilled its [...]
Paul Carter/The Register-Guard As a dues-paying member of the Emerald Art Center in Springfield, OR, Linda Cunningham prepared a piece of work for the monthly members' show. The "pastoral" works of other members were accepted without incident, but Cunningham's three-dimensional piece was deemed "too controversial" and rejected by the executive board of the Art Center, according to The [...]
Fifty-four civil liberties and public interest groups sent a letter to Congressional leadership today opposing S. 1631, the FISA Improvements Act. The bill, promoted by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), seeks to legalize and extend NSA mass surveillance programs, including the classified phone records surveillance program confirmed by documents released by Edward Snowden this summer. From EFF’s blog post on the [...]
On Monday, NCAC joined with other organizations on an friend of the court brief (.pdf) to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Barnes v. Zaccari, an important case involving the speech rights of college students. The case began in 2007, when Hayden Barnes was expelled from Valdosta State University in Georgia over his vocal criticism of [...]
Updates are coming in on the threat to academic freedom at the University of Colorado Boulder. According to the Daily Camera (via the Chronicle of Higher Ed's Ticker blog), CU professor Patricia Adler might still have a chance to teach her "Deviance in U.S. Society" course as early as the Spring 2014 semester–if the class clears a review of Sociology faculty, [...]
Why is it that every time sex enters the conversation in academia, harassment always appears to shadow it? How perverse - and unfair to real victims of harassment - that this serious charge is used against a professor for nothing else than creatively doing her job. In a lecture on prostitution, a highlight of her regular course on deviance, University [...]
Yesterday, a federal judge issued an order holding that the National Security Agency's tracking and collecting cellphone "metadata" without a warrant is "almost certainly" unconstitutional under the 4th Amendment. The court issued a preliminary injunction against the NSA's tracking cellphone information of the named plaintiffs. This is the first serious legal fallout from the disclosures by Edward Snowden last summer [...]
Court settlement extends San Bernardino County Government Center exhibit, to compensate for time during which paintings had been removed. Today NCAC and and the ACLU of Southern California were please to see the final court settlement that extends the exhibition time of three recently restored paintings at the San Bernardino County Government Center. The extended display period will compensate for [...]
