Facebook Censors Author Naomi Wolf On Gaza

Counter Current

Jews, Muslims and citizens of the world in general have been following author Naomi Wolf and her comments about the War on Gaza. Since she walked out of her synagogue recently, when they refused to denounce the killing of civilians in Gaza, as a result of recent IDF operations, she has gained a lot of support from fellow dissidents who want to hear what she has to say.

Today, Naomi revealed that Facebook sent her a warning, suggesting her account could be removed, and explaining that they had censored images she posted from her sources in Gaza.

“We received a warning from [Facebook],” she explains. “Probably due to the graphic nature of the images that were posted by contributors and citizen journalists, of wounded and dying in Gaza.”

Facebook, for their part, did not tell her which specific terms of service her post had violated. She continued, reflecting, “I think of how many horrific Holocaust images I have sat through….”

This act of censorship, she explains, “seems a journalistic/editorial double standard to me. I wrote in a piece in 1995 about abortion, Our Bodies, Our Souls that made the case that ‘the argument that the truth is in poor taste is the very definition of hypocrisy.’”

What do you think? Have you been following Naomi Wolf? Does it seem like her posts violate Facebook terms of service to you?

You can visit our Gaza article archive here.    Poll:  Does the United States' support of Israel make Americans less safe?

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Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'

The Chronicle

Daniel J. Solove

When the government gathers or analyzes personal information, many people say they're not worried. "I've got nothing to hide," they declare. "Only if you're doing something wrong should you worry, and then you don't deserve to keep it private."

The nothing-to-hide argument pervades discussions about privacy. The data-security expert Bruce Schneier calls it the "most common retort against privacy advocates." The legal scholar Geoffrey Stone refers to it as an "all-too-common refrain." In its most compelling form, it is an argument that the privacy interest is generally minimal, thus making the contest with security concerns a foreordained victory for security.

The nothing-to-hide argument is everywhere. In Britain, for example, the government has installed millions of public-surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via closed-circuit television. In a campaign slogan for the program, the government declares: "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear." Variations of nothing-to-hide arguments frequently appear in blogs, letters to the editor, television news interviews, and other forums. One blogger in the United States, in reference to profiling people for national-security purposes, declares: "I don't mind people wanting to find out things about me, I've got nothing to hide! Which is why I support [the government's] efforts to find terrorists by monitoring our phone calls!"

The argument is not of recent vintage. One of the characters in Henry James's 1888 novel, The Reverberator, muses: "If these people had done bad things they ought to be ashamed of themselves and he couldn't pity them, and if they hadn't done them there was no need of making such a rumpus about other people knowing."

I encountered the nothing-to-hide argument so frequently in news interviews, discussions, and the like that I decided to probe the issue. I asked the readers of my blog, Concurring Opinions, whether there are good responses to the nothing-to-hide argument. I received a torrent of comments:  

Read Full Article

Daniel J. Solove is a professor of law at George Washington University. This essay is an excerpt from his new book, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security, published this month by Yale University Press.

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