Inner City Press -- Investigative Reporting From the United Nations to Wall Street to the Inner City

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, May 3 -- The ritual of US President Barack Obama's stand-up comedy routine at this year's bloated White House Correspondents Dinner had some UN resonance, amid the Rand Paul and Obamacare jokes.

   Team Obama photo-shopped a picture of him and Ted Cruz signing a bill with an alien, in front of ice and a sign saying "Hell." But the two did come together: on legislation banning Iran's nomined ambassador to the UN. Hell did freeze over, then: if only on the issue of Iran.

     With the rah-rah for the White House Correspondents Association whose one-year president Steve Thomma said it is all about access, it was worth comparing it to the wannabe UNCA at the UN. This group is NOT about access: it withheld even from its members a transcript of a Q&A with Ban Ki-moon that some its board members wrote stories about.

  Worse, UNCA's executive committee has shown itself willing to try to get the investigative Press thrown out of the UN for reporting on conflicts of interest and Sri Lanka. Since on April 15, 2014 a dues paying member was attacked by France's ambassador as "not a journalist.. but an agent," UNCA's president Pam Falk has done nothing.

  But UNCA, working around Inner City Press before it quit the UNCA board in disgust, issued a faux unanimous letter about another Ambassador. It has become a Gulf and Western group, not worthy of the name of a "correspondents association." The only similarity is overpriced and over-long once year dinners.

  This is why the new Free UN Coalition for Access has been formed, and with press forward: for access.

  This year's Washington nerd-prom fell this year on World Press Freedom Day was perhaps an irony.

  Bloggers locked up in Ethiopia before and after Secretary of State John Kerry's upbeat visit; insider scribes eating blue cheese and roasted pear and tweeting photographs of the IMF's Lagarde.

   This last was from Reuters' UN bureau chief Lou Charbonneau, who after trying to get the investigative Press thrown out of the UN tried through censorship or copyright to cover his tracks. Here via EFF's Chilling Effects project is the Reuters bureau chief's complaint to Google to get them to remove his "for the record" complaint from Google's Search, (mis) using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

   Reuters has been aware of all of this, the spurious complaint, the censorship, and did nothing. Last year they bragged they had Mark Carney of the Bank of England at their table. This year it's stalker cell phone photos of the IMF's Lagarde. What's next? Well, tweeting the table menu and menu, of course. Censor that. Watch this site.

  After Turkey's Erdogan shut down Twitter and YouTube, back on April 18 US Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Doug Frantz advised to go after leakers, like the US has after Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, and not after the technology: lessons in censorship? Kinder and gentler censorship? From the US transcript:

  Or one can just try to remove from or block particular things on the Internet. Frantz's advise  follows Turkey's Erdogan, after using copyright law to censor, moving on to tax law. Twitter has been told it is a tax evader in Turkey.

  Tax law was good enough to take down Al Capone, so why not use it in the service of censorship? Likewise, to Google's YouTube Erdoban cited the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, allow for take-down or banning from Search of material that is copyrighted.

   But can phone calls be copyrighted? As detailed below on Reuters' specious claim, can "for the record" complaints to the UN against other media later be called copyrighted, and Banned from Google's search?

  Turkey banned all of YouTube, after its foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu declared, "a cyber attack has been carried out against the Turkish Republic, our state and our valued nation."

  Actually, the leaked call concerned plans to intervene in Syria, ostensibly to protect the tomb of Suleyman Shah, grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire, including the proposed creation of a false rocket incident.

  Intelligence chief Hakam Fidan says, "if there is to be justification, the justification is, I send four men to the other side. I get them to fire eight missiles into empty land. That's not a problem. Justification can be created."

  The national security argument for banning YouTube, by the country sponsoring the Press-less "Turkish Lounge" right next to the UN Security Council, follows Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan claiming he could copyright his leaked telephone calls, like Reuters at the UN claimed of its e-mail to the UN, sketched below and shown here.

   This use of copyright to try to censor has echoes in the UN -- and in Ukraine, where the Svoboda Party tried to get videos of its Members of Parliament beating up a news executive taken down as violations of copyright.

 On the Guardian website on March 21, where the video had been was a notice that "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim."

   This is a growing trend. As set forth below, an anti-Press complaint to the UN's Stephane Dujarric, now Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's spokesperson, has been banned from Google's Search by an invocation of copyright similar to Erdogan's.

  On March 21, Dujarric from Kyiv told Inner City Press neither he nor, he assuumed, Ban had seen the Svoboda beat-down video. This seems noteworthy, given its prominence in Ukraine. Now we can add: perhaps Ban and Dujarric didn't see it due to the same censorship by copyright that has for now banned an anti Press complaint to them from Google's Search.

  But, as Inner City Press first reported on March 23, Ban while in Kyiv DID meet with the leader of the Svoboda Party. The UN has for now refused to answer whether Ban knew in advance who would be present.

  As to Twitter, Dujarric in his previous post in charge of UN Media Accreditation grilled Inner City Press about a tweet mentioning World War Two - the basis for example of France's veto power in the Security Council, which it parlayed into essentially permanent ownership of the top post in UN Peacekeeping, now though Herve Ladsous (coverage of whom Dujarric tried to dictate, or advise, Inner City Press about.)

   Dujarric's now bipolar tweeting has intersected with a recently revived anonymous trolling campaign which originated in the UN Correspondents Association, in support of the Sri Lankan government, alleging that any coverage of the abuse of Tamils must be funded by the now defunct Tamil Tigers.

  These outright attempts to censor are echoed, more genteelly, even as part of the UN press briefings these days. When Dujarric took eight questions on March 20 on Ban's essentially failed trip to Moscow, fully half went to representatives of UNCA's 15 member executive committee, including state media from Turkey, France and the United States. Other questions -- by Twitter -- were not answered, except those from explicitly pro-UN sources. These are the UN's circles.

   Google has accepted and acted on DMCA complaints about leaked e-mails, for example from Reuters to the United Nations seeking to get the investigative Press thrown out, and has then blocked access to the leaked documents from its search.

  In this case, copyright is being (mis) claimed for an email from Reuters' Louis Charbonneau to the UN's chief Media Accreditation official Stephane Dujarric -- since March 10 Ban Ki-moon's new spokesperson -- seeking to get Inner City Press thrown out of the UN. 

  Access to the document has been blocked from Google's search based on a cursory take-down request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

 If this remains precedent, what else could come down?

  Why not an email from Iran, for example, to the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency? Why not a sanctions filing by a country? Here is Reuters logic, accepted if only automatically by Google:

The copyrighted material is a private email I wrote in April 2012 and for which I never gave permission to be published. It has been published on a blog and appears in on the first page of search results for my name and the firm I work for, Reuters. It can be seen here: http://www.innercitypress.com/reutersLC3unmalu.pdf

  But this is true of ANY leaked document: it can be said that the entity or person exposed "never gave permission [for it] to be published." Does that mean Google can or should block search access to it?

  Can a complaint to a Media Accreditation official against a competitor legitimately be considered "private"? In any event, the DMCA is not about protecting privacy.

  Iran or North Korea could say a filing or status report they make with the IAEA is "private" and was not intended to be published. Would Google, receiving a DMCA filing, block access to the information on, say, Reuters.com?

  Charbonneau's bad-faith argument says his complaint to the UN was "published on a blog." Is THAT what Reuters claims makes it different that publication in some other media?

  The logic of Reuters' and Charbonneau's August 14, 2013 filing with Google, put online via the ChillingEffects.org project, is profoundly anti free press.

  The fact that Google accepts or didn't check, to remain in the DMCA Safe Harbor, the filing makes it even worse. The request to take-down wasn't made to InnerCityPress.com or its server -- it would have been rejected. But banning a page from Search has the same censoring effect.

  The US has a regime to protect freedom of the press, and against prior restraint. But this is a loophole, exploited cynically by Reuters. What if a media conducted a long investigation of a mayor, fueled by a leaked email. When the story was published, could the Mayor make a Reuters-like filing with Google and get it blocked?

  Here is the text of Charbonneau's communication to the UN's top Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit official Stephane Dujarric and MALU's manager, to which he claimed "copyright" and for now has banned from Google's Search:

Hi Isabelle and Stephane,

I just wanted to pass on for the record that I was just confronted by Matt Lee in the DHL auditorium in very hostile fashion a short while ago (there were several witnesses, including Giampaolo). He's obviously gotten wind that there's a movement afoot to expel him from the UNCA executive committee, though he doesn't know the details yet. But he was going out of his way to be as intimidating and aggressive as possible towards me, told me I "disgust" him, etc.

In all my 20+ years of reporting I've never been approached like that by a follow journalist in any press corps, no matter how stressful things got. He's become someone who's making it very hard for me and others in the UN press to do our jobs. His harassment of fellow reporters is reaching a new fever pitch.

I just thought you should know this.

Cheers,

Lou
Louis Charbonneau
Bureau Chief. United Nations
Reuters News Thomson Reuters reuters. com

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