Exercising Your Free Speech Rights Despite Government Harassment

As a believer that nobody, including governments, has a right to engage in political persecution, violations of human rights, framing people for crimes, murdering political opponents, and other crimes typical of totalitarian nations, I’m a staunch proponent of freedom of speech. Without freedom of speech, tyrannical governments and malicious organizations and individuals can far more easily crush their opponents and subjugate the masses via ongoing repression.

The founders of the United States of America understood this threat well and enshrined free speech rights via the First Amendment to the United States Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Yet over the years, the United States government and the governments of its political subdivisions (e.g., states, counties, and cities) have violated this law and crushed the basic human rights of free thought and free speech. They have often done so by portraying people who express opinions government leaders dislike as being traitors, criminals, or morally reprehensible characters. This maliciousness has been used to justify laws, arrests, and imprisonment of people who have done nothing other than engage in speech the government did not like.

There has never been a time when people have truly had free speech rights, not even in the United States and certainly not in many more obviously repressive nations as North Korea and Iran.

Even the early American government, composed of many people who understood the need for freedom of speech, started to subvert and limit it during the infancy of the country. The Sedition Act of 1798, a law that was soundly opposed by US patriots and Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government or its officials. In today’s vernacular, that could mean writing about Bill Clinton’s philandering when he was President would have been a federal crime.

Today Common People Are At Risk of Free Speech Persecution

While Jefferson and Madison may not have called themselves human rights activists, they and other early US leaders are among the most influential proponents of human rights in history. They would be sad to see that today, in the very nation they helped create, many of the judges that are supposed to protect the rights of Americans via its courts have sided against free speech.

More disgustingly than even the Sedition Act passed on the eve of potential war with France, the reasons these modern judges are doing so often have nothing to do with a real security threat. This should be obvious given many of the worst American persecutors of political speech are civil, juvenile, and family court judges. They base their desire to suppress free speech not on the need to protect national security but instead because they want to hide their own abusive actions, misconduct, illegal acts, and bias. They believe in the use of threats against children and families and imprisonment without criminal charges to silence speech they do not like and use such tactics in outrageous displays of judicial abuse of power.

Richard Fine Imprisoned For Fighting Corrupt Los Angeles Court Payments

American judges guilty of persecution of free speech do not have the Sedition Act or similar unconstitutional laws to legitimize their abuse of opponents today, so they find other means. Often, they simply shroud their illegal actions as “contempt of court” jailing such as has been done to Los Angeles resident Richard I. Fine by Judge David Jaffe. Fine argued that payments by Los Angeles County to judges ruling on its cases were in violation of state law and created a severe bias. He wouldn’t shut up about it and repeatedly brought the problem back into court to try to force its correction. An appeals court in 2008 determined that the payments were in fact illegal as Fine had claimed they were. But yet the payments still were not stopped. Fine continued his crusade to stop the illegal payments and fight the bias he believes has thoroughly corrupted Los Angeles courts.

David Yaffe, as a judge benefiting from these illegal payments, had a financial interest in silencing Richard Fine. In 2009, Yaffe sent Fine to jail where he remains a year and a half later. Fine has never been charged with a crime, yet he will continue to waste away in prison because he angered an abusive and corrupt judge. Aside from a recent CNN story, there has been almost no mainstream media coverage of this abuse.

Juvenile and Family Court Judges Abuse Children As Retaliation For Free Speech

Other judges, particular those in family and juvenile courts, threaten parents with being banned from seeing their children if they continue to speak out about court misconduct and abuse, claiming that silence is “in the best interests of the children.” This is essentially extortion of silence via threatened and even actual violation of US law and basic human rights. Family law judges who do this are the type who abuse children for their own interests. Depriving a child of frequent and continuing contact with a parent simply because the parent vocally opposes the actions of the judge amounts to abuse against the child committed by the judge making such rulings. Obviously a judge would be keen on hiding his or her record of child abuse as it is an issue which, if the citizens knew about it, could cost the judge millions of dollars in pay and other income from the government as the judge could and should be removed from the bench for such crimes.

Removing Corrupt Judges From Office Requires Public Awareness

The public has a strong interest in seeing abusive and corrupt judges removed from office. The government actually does, too, as citizens who become convinced that the government and its courts violate their rights and the law are apt to eventually turn to violence to remedy the problems. Assassinations, attacks on government buildings and property, and even revolutions have been used in the past by aggrieved citizens to oppose despotic governments.

In the case of the United States, its governments are too polluted by the revolving door of legal professionals moving in and out of government posts and corrupted by the money and power associated with power elite government jobs to correct this problem. Further complicating the matter, many of these judges have friends throughout government, in legislatures, country governments, and law enforcement, and they exchange favors on a routine basis. As a result, governments will not act to shut out abusive judges except in the most extreme circumstances that become clearly evident to the public. That is because there is a circle of corruption and collusion in which these people protect each other from the scrutiny and accountability that should be routine but isn’t.

Obviously being able to vote out of office judges and politicians who support and hide such abuses and crimes is far preferable to violence. Yet in an era in which judges are very successfully silencing and marginalizing their opponents via illegal actions and the mainstream media isn’t doing its job to shine a spotlight on these abuses, victims of American judicial abuse may increasingly believe that the only option they have to fight the abuse is violence. Mainstream media may ignore several people being imprisoned illegally by an abusive judge, but it is not likely to ignore a bomb exploding in the court house, even if it doesn’t hurt anybody. Yet most of the people being abused by judges are not criminals and are not prone to act violently. The judges know this. It further emboldens them to engage in abuse and corruption because they know it is unlikely they will ever suffer any consequences for their actions.

Exercising Free Speech In An Era Of Judicial Abuse

In light of the ongoing judicial persecution of speech, how can people bring to light the crimes being committed by American judges today without probability of being further persecuted and without resorting to violence?

The answer lies at least in part in the free speech opportunities created by the Internet. While the government has become increasingly effective at using technology to illegally spy on its opponents, track their locations, frame them for crimes, and seize their property and deprive them of their freedoms, there are means to make it far more difficult for the government to do this even if one is intent on exposing government abuses.

Whether you call it “citizen media” or “blogging” or some other name, the Internet has enabled the average citizen to have access to millions of potential readers at very low cost. This means that issues the mainstream media would never cover can now be brought into the light of day by the parties who have seen abuse, corruption, and other wrongs up close and personal.

Protecting Yourself from Political Persecution

While many have focused on the risks of writing on the web, even reading web sites today can be risky in and of itself. Besides the obvious risk of malware infections, when you’re involved with a conflict with the government then you are at elevated risk of being falsely accused or even framed for a crime. If you are at odds with an abusive government official and the government can show you viewed a web site that discusses problems with that official, you may be falsely fingered as a suspect in a crime against that official and quickly discover that “innocent until proven guilty” is a lie designed to placate the naive American public in today’s United States. Thus it’s best to avoid leaving a trail of your IP address all over the place. Even if you never plan to write a thing, there is value in the following tools and techniques that can help protect your privacy and anonymity.

I’ve previously discussed measures for protecting your privacy on the Internet when web browsing in the article Reducing Search Engine Privacy Risks. Please take a look at that article for further ideas on how to protect your privacy, anonymity, and identity on the Internet after reading the remainder of this article.

As you are reading, keep in mind that all of these tools can be used for good and bad purposes. A pencil can be used to write poem, or it can be used to poke somebody’s eye out. Likewise, many of these tools have applications that are criminal in nature including violating copyright laws by spreading illegal copies, spreading child pornography, engaging in fraud, and other harmful activities.

We are encouraging the use of these tools for moral and ethical purposes, not to help true criminals.

Tor: The Onion Router

One of the best tools for Internet anonymity was developed with sponsorship from the US Naval Research Laboratory. Tor, an abbreviation for The Onion Router, is free software that helps provide anonymity on the Internet. It was originally developed in part to help government employees have secure communications networks even when overseas. The Electronic Frontier Foundation later sponsored continuing development due to its beliefs that privacy and freedom must be preserved in electronic media.

Tor provides for anonymity by encrypting communications and routing it through a network of Internet hosts that hide the user’s IP address. What this means is that a web site being visited by a user intent on posting a comment about a corrupt or abusive government official will not see the IP address of the user. It will see IP addresses for Tor end-nodes that are often located in some other country and are used by dozens, even hundreds or thousands, of other users at any one time. This means a cop who is in the pocket of the dirty judge abusing your children may be able to strong-arm the web site operator to get the IP address of your posting revealing the judge’s crimes, but that IP address will be nearly useless and certainly won’t identify you. They may suspect you wrote it due to the content, but the IP address won’t even remotely prove it.

Tor is free software so doesn’t cost a thing to try except for your time. Many web sites, including ours, work fine with Tor and Tor-connected web browsers both for viewing content and writing comments. While it is technically possible for a web site to filter out and ignore traffic coming from Tor end-nodes, it is not common today.

Tor isn’t without disadvantages. The biggest disadvantages is that it significantly slows down communications. Therefore it works best for low-bandwidth uses. Streaming videos, for instance, probably will work poorly if at all. But visiting a site such as ours that uses mostly text along with a mixture of graphics should work fine. Many politically oriented web sites including mainstream news media, blogs, and political organizations fall into this group of sites that don’t require a lot of bandwidth and will work acceptably via Tor.

Sites that use Flash, Java, ActiveX, and other tools that can reveal IP addresses are risky, so Tor includes “TorButton” which plugs into the Firefox browser and blocks these tools as well as adding an easy way to turn the browser’s usage of Tor on and off.

Another disadvantage of Tor involves sites that are programmed to detect the physical location of IP addresses and modify the content accordingly. For instance, it is common for Tor end-nodes to be located in countries other than the United States. If a US user uses Tor to visit a web site, he or she may find the site coming up in some foreign language. If you are literate in multiple languages, this may not be an obstacle at all.

A further disadvantage is that web sites which are programmed to throttle high numbers of requests coming from a particular IP address may be more difficult to use via Tor. That’s because those sites may be seeing dozens or more requests from a particular Tor end-node at a time and therefore interpret the requests as an attack on their services. You may find yourself forced to answer CAPTCHA questions or otherwise slowed down because of safeguards designed to suppress denial of service attacks coming from a particular IP address.

Tor is usually used with tools such as Privoxy (with which Tor is usually bundled) that help hide browser information such as cookies. This can prevent some web sites from working well, yet is essential to providing anonymity.

Tor doesn’t protect you against unsafe sites or routers. If a Tor router node is hacked or run by a treacherous operator, it could deliver malware to your computer just as may happen with any other corrupted router or site.

Corrupted Tor nodes could also strip other encryption from the communications session. For instance, the article Hacker pokes new hole in secure sockets layer details how the SSLstrip tool can be used via a man-in-the-middle attack to disable SSL encryption used for HTTPS addresses and fool an unsuspecting user into thinking the encryption is still active. This can lead to usernames, passwords, and other personal information such as account numbers and social security numbers being obtained by whomever corrupted the Tor node.

This man-in-the-middle SSLstrip attack is not unique to Tor, it could happen even if you don’t use Tor and don’t have it installed. EFF and The Tor Project have collaborated to develop a tool they are calling HTTPS Everywhere which plugs in to Firefox to force more sites to use HTTPS at all times. This helps reduce the risk of SSLstrip attacks because SSLstrip depends upon sites using a mixture of HTTP and HTTPS to do its dirty-work.

Hiding Behind Unprotected Wi-Fi Networks

Tor works best if the data flow between the user and the entry nodes is not being monitored by a sophisticated attacker such as a government agency. If it is being monitored, the spies may be able to do timing analysis to correlate the traffic with that hitting the web site being used and demonstrate who is probably behind the usage.

If you are writing about something that may tend to identify you, it is possible that an abusive government agency may decide to try to track you down even if you are not doing anything illegal. Since it is common for judges and local law enforcement officials to have inappropriate relationships that may aggravate the risk of government harassment, you may find that it is best to never, ever write from your home or work about the corruption and abuse you are reporting. Instead, you can hunt for unprotected Wi-Fi networks to use and make use of Tor through them. This makes it far more difficult for anybody to monitor your end of the connection and perform timing analysis.

We’ve cautioned our readers about the risks of running unsecured wireless networks because people are falsely accused of committing crimes because their unsecured wireless network was used by somebody else to pirate movies, spread child pornography, or commit banking fraud. Yet there are still many unsecured wireless networks operated by wireless service providers in restaurants, stores, libraries, and other public locations. Participants in the battle against corrupt government can take advantage of these to help hide their identities while enabling them to read about and discuss problems they are facing due to government abuse.

Turning off your cell phone by removing the battery before arriving near a location where you will be using an unsecured wireless network may help you avoid detection by goons out to suppress your rights to free speech. That’s because the government is increasingly using wireless phones to track and monitor the location of people, doing so even without a search warrant or other court order. In a recent bank robbery case, they monitored the locations and usage of 180 cell phones to develop evidence to accuse suspects of the crimes. As two people were eventually accused, that means even if the government is right about who the bank robbers were, they violated the privacy rights of 178 other people without a search warrant or other court order.

To be extra-safe, don’t reuse the same network twice to write about government misconduct that you want to report. This will make it harder for them to determine or prove it is you. Even if they somehow manage to identify which unprotected wireless network you used to post about a judge who took bribes or committed another crime, they realistically won’t be able to prove it is you if you use Tor, hide your MAC address (see below), and don’t reuse the same network again, thus evading any tapping or spying they may do on that network.

Hiding Your MAC Address

Simply being one of many users of an unsecured wireless network is not enough to protect you. It is possible, even likely, that the wireless access point you are using will retain a log that shows your computer’s MAC address and the associated IP address along with other identifying information. Thus a key to safely using an unsecured wireless network is to ensure that this log doesn’t contain information that can be traced back to you. The most important point is to ensure that you do not share your computer’s real MAC address with the access point. To do this, you must use tools that allow you to replace your network interface’s real MAC address with a fake one used when communicating with a network on which you don’t want your presence tracked.

Modern computer network adapters use a 48-bit number known as the MAC (Media Access Control) address. Every network adapter has a unique address that is different from every other adapter. This is accomplished by the IEEE licensing 24 bits of the MAC address to particular companies or organizations. The licensees can use the remaining 24 bits to provide unique MAC addresses on the network interfaces they produce, sell, or control. In the case of large vendors like IBM, Cisco, HP, Dell, and others, they may license many blocks of MAC addresses to keep up with the demand. For example, Dell Computer Corporation at the time of this writing has licensed four blocks of addresses.

It is not only companies that license these blocks of address. For example, the University of California at Berkeley and other universities have licensed address blocks they use.

While it may be tempting to reuse the same fake MAC address, this allows agents who have knowledge of the access point logs to correlate your usage. They may not be able to deduce who was using MAC address 00:02:55:13:d3:fe, but if they see that address showing up in a pattern on an access point then they could stake out the location. They then wait for it to appear again. When it does, they can stop and interrogate everybody there or even seize the computers of all people in the proximity until they find the one using that MAC address.

Similarly, if they can find multiple access points that have that MAC address stored in them, they may be able to determine what web sites that computer is visiting and from that be able to surmise things about the user that could risk the user’s identity being revealed. For instance, if they find a geographic proximity is common to this MAC address out to nail a corrupt judge, they may make a guess that the target lives or works in the area.

It is best to pick random MAC addresses and to change them frequently. Some tools have the ability to generate random MAC addresses, others do not.

Hiding your real MAC address by replacing it with a fake address is often called “MAC spoofing” and you may find more information by searching for that term.

For computers running Windows, many network interfaces allow their MAC address (also called the network address) to be overridden via the properties for the network interface. This is free and relatively easy to do if you have some experience with configuring your networking interfaces. See Manual Methods for Overriding MAC Address on Windows for more information.

A few MAC address control tools and articles to check out include:

SMAC by KLC Consulting, Inc. (for Windows)
Technitium MAC Address Changer (for Windows)
Wikipedia article on MAC spoofing, mentions tools for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X

Checking Your Privacy

Once you’ve got your tools installed and configured, you should check to see if they are actually working before you rush online to fight corrupt and abusive governments. The Privacy.Net Analyzer is a free site that shows you information on what a web site can see about your personal computer including its IP address, operating system, web browser version, and more. You should visit this and scour it for personally identifying information before assuming that everything is set up safely and potentially inadvertently exposing yourself to identification.

Applying What You’ve Learned

Hopefully this article has given you some ideas why citizen writers may want to maintain anonymity in the face of government oppression and given you information on how to do so. There are many other groups on the web with similar intentions of protecting and promoting free speech and they have produced some very helpful content.

Global Voices is another organization focused on promoting and protecting free speech on the Internet. They are emphasizing citizen participation in Internet media around the world:

Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.

They have put together a guide to educate the public on how to use Tor with WordPress, the software we use on FreeJabber. The aim is to help more people to write about topics the mainstream media does not cover around the world, especially topics the government and others may want to suppress while maintaining improved protections from censorship and persecution.

WikiLeaks is another organization that is focused on putting all sorts of typically censored and hidden information on the web. They have put together a fantastic system with mirrored servers running in multiple countries and made it very difficult for governments to track them down and serve them with subpoenas and search warrants. This is probably the premier system for disclosing very sensitive information, the kind that might get somebody killed if it were tracked back to them. WikiLeaks has been so successful that the US government reputedly targeted it for extermination via a campaign to marginalize the organization but has failed to shut them down for years. In the meantime, WikiLeaks continues to bring into public view information that mainstream media hasn’t been able to get including videos of US military attacks, government plans to violate civil rights via warrantless wiretapping, corruption investigations into judges, censorship instigated by Microsoft, and other hot topics.

We’d suggest that those of you who are seriously focused on outing corruption and abuse avail yourselves of the multiple resources that are available today for getting your message out. WikiLeaks is a great choice for publishing information likely to subject you to legal attack or worse if you post it on your own website. They have been able to keep information available even when the US federal courts, Microsoft, and the vast intelligence and military resources like those of the United States have wanted to silence them at all costs. If you are trying to share such sensitive information with the world, you simply must be using tools like Tor, unsecured wireless networks, and MAC spoofing to protect yourself.

If you think you might find your kind of writing in a newspaper or magazine if only they were willing to pay attention to your issue, sites like Global Voices and WordPress are suitable choices for expressing yourself. If you combine them with tools we’ve mentioned in this article, you get something very capable at maintaining anonymity while getting your message out.

At FreeJabber, we welcome hosting your writing about topics that concern you and are dedicated to what we would describe as ethical free speech. So long as you avoid ethically problematic activities, for instance pornography and fraud, you are welcome to sign up and launch a sub-site on which you can write about topics that interest you. Whether it is exposing corruption in your local courts, outing criminal activities of a government official, or simply airing dirty laundry of the power elite in your community, we support your rights to free speech.

To help keep you aware of the IP address tracking potential of the Internet, we show your IP address as we see it in the upper right corner of our web page. We hope that little features such as this along with the references to software and techniques to help you express yourself freely without persecution will enable you to help get your message out to make the world a better place.