William K. Black — Prosecutors for the Petrocrats Try to Imprison the Media

Sheriff Bill is on North Dakota's case.

New Economic Perspectives
Prosecutors for the Petrocrats Try to Imprison the Media
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC
See also

Doug Krejci’s effort to use the University of Iowa’s 2008 flood footage for an upcoming documentary is being blocked by state officials who say copyright overrides public records.
The rare argument, if successful, could not only impede Krejci’s effort to raise public awareness of the disaster but also dismantle the state’s public records law, government transparency experts claim.

“It’s just bizarre,” said Adam Marshall, an attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a First Amendment advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. “It can’t be the case that copyright law enables every state entity to withhold every single record they generate. That would totally eviscerate the public records laws.”

DesMoines Register
University of Iowa claims copyright law to block use of flood video
Jason Claywort

Robert Mackey — Ecuador Cuts Internet Access for Julian Assange to Preserve Neutrality in U.S. Election

Correa is not neutral himself. "I want Hillary to win."

The Intercept
Ecuador Cuts Internet Access for Julian Assange to Preserve Neutrality in U.S. Election
Robert Mackey

Zero Hedge
Ecuador Admits Censoring Assange Over "U.S. Election"; Denies "Yielding To Pressure From Other States"

Free Thought Project — BREAKING: RT’s Bank Accounts Frozen, Assange’s Internet Cut In Apparent Move to Silence West’s Critics

Desperation takes hold. The sunshine is too much.

Free Thought Project
BREAKING: RT’s Bank Accounts Frozen, Assange’s Internet Cut In Apparent Move to Silence West’s Critics

The "state actor" that cut off Assange's internet access was apparently Ecuador. Speculation is that the US pressured President Correa. Ecuador uses the USD and is a currency user in the dollar zone.

Zero Hedge
Wikileaks Provides An Update On The Assange Internet Outage

Norman Solomon — Assange and Democracy’s Future

Democracy rests on citizens getting real facts and applying rational analysis. The ability of governments, including the U.S. government, to suppress facts and thus manage perceptions represents the opposite, a power over the people that WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange threatened, says Norman Solomon.

Why Assange, Snowden, Manning and other investigative journalists and government whistleblowers like them are patriotic heroes rather than the traitors and criminals the US government makes them out to be. It was people like this that dared to confront the King of England and his army in declaring independence

Consortium News
Assange and Democracy’s FutureNorman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy

Bill Mitchell — Information is dangerous for neo-liberals

Chiefly about the situation in Australia but applicable pretty across the board in Neoliberal Land, where the play book is essentially the same. In the US it's even worse, where certain advocacy within the right of free expression can get one on a no-fly list, or labeled as a suspected terrorist for intelligence to surveil. This extends to whistleblowers and the press. As communications channels expand with technological innovation, so do governments' attempts to control and even subvert them.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Information is dangerous for neo-liberalsBill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at the Charles Darwin University, Northern Territory, Australia