I know the U.S. is big on their "freedom of speech" since it's one of the few things all citizens agree on, an All American Shibboleth, so to speak, but National Security trumps everything.
There are plenty of things you can say at the border that will get you on the next plane back home.
There may or may not be people being held in captivity without access to a lawyer for their speech. We don't know because the proceedings are secret.
Someone who practiced his freedom of speech is currently in hiding in liberty-loving Russia of all places. That's about treason, you might say, but with enough restrictions any speech can be classified as treason.
Speech in the U.S. only seems to be free when it doesn't matter. If it matters there are a lot of restrictions and there can be dire consequences.
This comment seems like an entirely disingenuous argument for me. I'm sorry if it's not, truly, but it's an argument fit for a Fox News editorial.
> There are plenty of things you can say at the border that will get you on the next plane back home.
Do you mean there are things that non-citizens can say at the border of entry to the US that might prohibit entry into the US? That does not seem like a limitation of free speech within the US to US citizens to me.
> There may or may not be people being held in captivity without access to a lawyer for their speech. We don't know because the proceedings are secret.
What a convenient, non-falsifiable "rebuttal" that takes no position on the matter.
> Someone who practiced his freedom of speech is currently in hiding in liberty-loving Russia of all places.
I'm a defender of Edward Snowden and think it's sad that he has to live in Russia to avoid prosecution. And yet, this doesn't seem like an argument about "free speech" made in good faith, particularly the relative merits of free speech. Which country permits their citizens to disclose highly classified information with not repercussions, however unjust those repercussions may ultimately be?
>> Which country permits their citizens to disclose highly classified information with not repercussions, however unjust those repercussions may ultimately be?
Yeah, its free speech, as long as it doesn't fall under some bullshit definition of "classified" (how convenient that the classified information also includes unilateral infringement of another country's rights, e.g. the downright creepy snooping on the phones of world leaders who are supposed allies). And of course, you should also understand that you _might_ die saying certain things, but hey, otherwise its free speech. And finally, as long as you understand the "relative" merits of the case (i.e. one rule for me, another for you), we can all agree that free speech is what is being practiced in the USA.
> There are plenty of things you can say at the border that will get you on the next plane back home.
Which is not really the same thing as being fined or imprisoned.
> There may or may not be people being held in captivity without access to a lawyer for their speech. We don't know because the proceedings are secret.
And there's a fair argument that doing so is unconstitutional and will be found as such once the ongoing challenges to it have concluded.
The law doesn't protect you from criminals, even when they work for the government. At best it punishes them after the fact and allows you to recover damages. And some people never get justice, but that only means they were the victims of a crime that the perpetrator got away with, not that they weren't entitled to it under the law.
> Someone who practiced his freedom of speech is currently in hiding in liberty-loving Russia of all places.
What Snowden would be charged with is the government equivalent of violating an NDA. The main reason that law is messed up is that with a normal NDA (i.e. a contract), contracts covering criminal activity are generally unenforceable, but the security clearance system doesn't work like that -- which is problematic when it's then used to cover up criminal activity.
But the reason he can be charged is that he agreed to those terms to begin with. It's a matter of contracts being [too] enforceable, not a matter of punishment for speech. Notice that the newspapers that published the Snowden documents weren't convicted of a crime, because they never agreed not to.
As a rule of law or constitutional principle freedom of speech in the US just is a lot more protected than it is in the EU countries I am familiar with. The limits of freedom of speech are a lot bigger in EU countries than in the US-limits mentioned.
> There are plenty of things you can say at the border that will get you on the next plane back home.
That's a really bad example. If you get send home you are not an US citizen and you might not have the rights US citizens enjoy, which is what they are talking about when freedom of speech is referenced.
> Someone who practiced his freedom of speech is currently in hiding in liberty-loving Russia of all places
Snowden leaked secrets. The USA is very bad in protecting that, right. But it's not a simple question of freedom of speech, it has a a lot more with how authoritarian the government is. It's not surprising that a war mongering USA that tries to achieve complete surveillance, tortures prisoners and and kidnaps citizens of other and allied countries to put them without trial for forever into the hellhole that is Guantanamo might have a limit on what dissident actions it accepts. But that does not mean that the protection of freedom of speech in a general area is stronger than elsewhere.
> If it matters there are a lot of restrictions and there can be dire consequences.
That's blatantly incorrect. Name a bunch of examples of that please. It's the very rare exception that you can't publish something in the US.
You mention Snowden: he was able to publish the documents in the US. Numerous US media outlets published documents from the Snowden cache. It got non-stop coverage for most of that year in the US as the reveals rolled on. That the media can publish such doesn't mean the action of stealing classified documents from the government should be legal, that would be absurd.
The US Government is almost entirely powerless to prevent very embarrassing things from coming out, such as Abu Ghraib as one dramatic example. If they could do what you're claiming they can, they would have shut all of that down immediately and it would have never been published across basically all media in the US for a year.
Nixon, watergate and the pentagon papers is another obvious example where the substantial US protections for the press won out.
COINTELPRO and the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI is another example. The US media was able to publish the stolen documents.
We're got a President that is at 'war' with the press on a daily basis. They hate him, he hates them. He's almost entirely powerless to do anything about them. It's clear that Trump would heavily restrict the media if he could, what greater proof could one possibly need of just how potent the protections for speech / press / expression are? Trump's administration has been leaking like crazy since day one, and the media has been publishing those leaks at will. The government can't do anything about it. They have no power to stop the Washington Post or NY Times from publishing such leaks.
The US is the only country on earth that can support a Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Wordpress or Hacker News, precisely because we're free to say all sorts of disagreeable or hateful things on most of those platforms. And if not, I can always build my own new site or platform. Even the most liberal speech supporting nations in Europe don't allow what the US does when it comes to speech areas that involve things such as religion, government and politics.
I can insult the police in the US on HN, and I won't be arrested for it. That isn't true in the UK as one example. They put people in jail for insulting the police on social media there.
I can insult the US President in any number of various ways across countless US platforms. Snoop Dogg killed him in a music video; they made his wife a stripper in another music video. You can mock-up his chopped off head and put it on the cover of a magazine, you won't go to jail for that. There are very few countries that afford you such expression luxury, even when it's detestable expression (the most important kind to protect).
Online in the US I can disagree with Islam, Christianity, Judaism, their followers, their practices, and so on, at will, in almost any manner I see fit. There are few countries where that remains true other than the US. Most of Europe now categories such as hate speech, or otherwise restricted speech, and will arrest you for it.
The reason the US dominates online platforms, is precisely because the US is the sole country where they can thrive when it comes to aggressively enshrined freedom of speech & expression. You can't build a Reddit in Europe and will never be able to. With the draconian copyright laws the EU is passing, it's only going to get that much worse.
I know the U.S. is big on their "freedom of speech" since it's one of the few things all citizens agree on, an All American Shibboleth, so to speak, but National Security trumps everything.
There are plenty of things you can say at the border that will get you on the next plane back home.
There may or may not be people being held in captivity without access to a lawyer for their speech. We don't know because the proceedings are secret.
Someone who practiced his freedom of speech is currently in hiding in liberty-loving Russia of all places. That's about treason, you might say, but with enough restrictions any speech can be classified as treason.
Speech in the U.S. only seems to be free when it doesn't matter. If it matters there are a lot of restrictions and there can be dire consequences.