Freedom in Cyberspace

I spent all day last Monday at the Windjammer conference center in South Burlington with a TV crew recording a conference put on by the ACLU of Vermont called Thought and Expression in a Changing World. It brought together a bunch of lawyers who specialize in civil liberties case law to talk about how our civil liberties are being both expanded and threatened by rapid technological progression.

It turns out that Vermont is front and center for some of the more fascinating Constitutional legal questions currently being discussed. Sexting, border crossings and laptop seizures, Al Jazeera-English on Burlington Telecom cable TV, Burton snowboards featuring “indecent” art — these have all been specific issues here in Vermont, though not all of them have invoked actual litigation.

I’ve edited and uploaded the entire conference onto the Vermont ACLU’s blip.tv channel. It’s in seven parts and each part is labeled with the specific issue that’s discussed. I’m embedding my personal favorite segment here. It’s Catherine Crump, a staff attorney for the National ACLU in NYC, talking about privacy and free speech issues surrounding global, instant, digital communications tools. It’s worth your time…

3 Comments

Subscribe to the Comments

On July 3, 2009, casey said:

Interesting stuff…
On July 3, 2009, casey said:

This is my life, BTW.
On July 4, 2009, Rob said:

I watched about 30 minutes of the stream on Monday, and caught most of the snowboard discussion. It blew my mind when the ultimate solution seemed to be “If you don’t like it, don’t look at it”. I totally agree with this, but living in Florida I never, ever, hear stuff like that. If that art was on the side of a Sea-Doo, people would go into a frenzy.

Get a Trackback link

Welcome...

Since 2004 Candleblog has been the online journal of Vermont filmmaker, Bill Simmon. Bill and his wife, Emily, use Candleblog as a repository of pop culture ephemera, amusing anecdotes, occasional deep thoughts and anything else they think is web-worthy.

Bill will be presenting a brief talk on the importance of community media at the 2010 SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. The presentation is called Hyperlocal Focus: Growing a Vibrant Community Media Ecosystem.

Candleblog has received the Seven Days "Daysie" Award for Best Vermont Blog (non-political) in 2005, 2007 and 2008.

Candleblog