Chief Justice Roberts was joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor in upholding the mandate. Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his opinion that “the most straightforward reading of the individual mandate is that it commands individuals to purchase insurance. But, for the reasons explained, the Commerce Clause does not give Congress that power. It is therefore necessary to turn to the Government’s alternative argument: that the mandate may be upheld as within Congress’s power to “lay and collect Taxes.” Art. I, §8, cl. 1.”

To have Chief Justice Roberts take the side of the President was widely unexpected, as the only “wild card” as far as most people were concerned was Justice Kennedy.

There was one part of the law that was struck down. The vast expansion of Medicaid was voted down because the “federal government cannot penalize states for not participating in the new program by withholding existing Medicaid funds.”

This decision is sure to put the anti-Obamamcare camp into overdrive, and Mitt Romney is sure to use it as a rallying cry to get his camp firmly behind him. On the pro Obama side, he now has his signature piece of legislation validated, and he will go into the election on a high note.

The official opinion released by the Supreme Court is below:

Supreme Court

Twitter of course is having mixed reactions:

Follow @RubinReport

Dave Rubin
@RubinReport

Only in America would so many overweight, diabetic people with heart disease be upset that they’re gonna have healthcare. #SCOTUS#Obamacare

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41 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

Follow @SpeakerBoehner

Speaker John Boehner
@SpeakerBoehner

#fullrepeal#4jobs RT @GOPLeader: During the week of July 9th, the House of Representatives will once again repeal ObamaCare.

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7 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

Follow @Liz_Cheney

Liz Cheney
@Liz_Cheney

SCOTUS upholds Obamacare – It is up to us now. Only way to stop Obama is to defeat him in November. Time to stand and fight.

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16 minutes ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

Follow @TheHolyKaron

#HOLYLIFE
@TheHolyKaron

I bet you everybody who is going against #ObamaCare have Health insurance though? Funny.

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19 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

“Mobile phones and other devices are increasingly being used in all levels of criminal activity,” said Stephen Kavanagh, deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. “When a suspect is arrested and found with a mobile phone that we suspect may have been used in crime, traditionally we submit it to our digital forensic laboratory for analysis.”

The system will be used by “trained officers to examine devices and gives immediate access to the data in that handset.” The data extraction system will be available to around 300 Met officers. It is not clear at this stage as to what will happen to the extracted data off a suspect’s phone if he or she is not charged with an offense after being arrested.

Let us all hope tha this does not end up coming to the United States. I don’t think it will because we have much higher freedom of speech laws, and much more stringent laws in the due process system that we give police officers.

photo courtesy of ACESO

Researchers at Ohio State University found that the internet spurs pro-democratic attitudes most in countries that already have introduced some reforms in that direction.

“Instead of the internet promoting fundamental political change, it seems to reinforce political change in countries that already have at least some level of democratic freedoms,” said Erik Nisbet, lead author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.

“Internet use is a less effective means to mobilize citizens for democracy in extremely authoritarian countries.”

In addition, demand for democracy is highest in a country when more people are connected to the internet and, most importantly, when they spend more time online.

“Internet penetration in a country matters in terms of how much people want democratic reforms, but it is even more important that people are spending greater amounts of time on the internet and that they are connected to other people in their community,” said Elizabeth Stoycheff, a co-author of the study and doctoral student in communication at Ohio State.

Nisbet and Stoycheff conducted the study with Katy Pearce of the University of Washington. Their study appears in the April 2012 issue of the Journal of Communication, a special issue dedicated to social media and political change.

The researchers analyzed previously collected data on 28 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. This included surveys of 37,549 people who participated in the 2008 Afrobarometer and 2006-2008 Asian Barometer surveys. Included were questions that evaluated how much the citizens in each country demanded democracy and their frequency of internet use. In addition, the researchers looked at country-level data that measured how democratic each country was, and their levels of internet penetration, international bandwidth per internet user and other sociodemographic factors.

The results suggest that the internet is most likely to play a role in democratization in countries that have a moderate to high internet penetration and that have at least a partly democratic political regime. In countries ruled by authoritarian regimes, people may have access to the internet, but the rulers may control the content available, how users may interact with each other, and whether they may get information from outside their own country, Stoycheff said.

“The internet’s effect on citizen demand for democracy is somewhat contingent on both the technological context and the political context,” Stoycheff said.

Based on the results of the study, Nisbet said there are some countries that currently appear to have the right political and technological mix for the internet to play a role in social and political change. Those countries include Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, Singapore and Zambia. But countries in the survey that are run by highly authoritarian regimes, such as Vietnam and Zimbabwe, are not likely to see democracy flourishing anytime soon, regardless of use of the internet, the findings suggest. Other countries, like Mozambique and Tanzania, are partly free but have a low citizen demand for democracy and little internet penetration, Nisbet said. But if internet use grows in these countries, it has the potential to encourage people there to challenge their autocratic regimes.

“Our results suggest that the internet can’t plant the seed of democracy in a country,” Nisbet said. “However, the internet may help democracy flourish if it has already started to grow.”

“The Internet has transformed society in so many ways, and that’s bound to continue,” says Google Policy Analyst Katharine Wang. “The aim of our Big Tent events is to bring together people with diverse views to debate some of the hot-button issues that transformation raises.”

“This week we hosted our first Big Tent event stateside at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif,” she notes. “The theme was Digital Citizenship, and over the course of the day we discussed child safety online, the most effective ways to incorporate technology with education and what governments and civil society can do to maintain a responsible and innovative web.”

The entire channel is worth checking out. To save you some time, here are the currently available videos of the discussions that are related to freedom of expression and free speech:

The speech begins with quaint greetings and an invitation to friendship with the Iranian people, but quickly segues into harsh criticism of Iran’s internet and nuclear policies.

“Technologies that should empower citizens, are being used to repress them,” said Obama. “And from Facebook to Twitter, from cell phones to the internet, our people use the same tools to talk to one another and to enrich our lives. Yet, increasingly, the Iranian people are denied the basic freedom to access the information that they want.”

A post on the White House blog by Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes details the administration’s criticisms of Iran. Among those criticisms are the claims that the Iranian government routinely blocks social sites including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube; that Iran slows internet speeds during elections or times of public unrest; and that SSL connections have been banned in the country. The blog post goes on to say that Iran has created a “Cyber Army” of internet “enforcers” who sometimes police the social network accounts of Iranian citizens who arrive at Tehran International Airport.

“…an electronic curtain has fallen around Iran. A barrier that stops the free flow of information and ideas into the country and denies the rest of the world the benefit of interacting with the Iranian people, who have so much to offer,” Obama said. The President went to to say the U.S. is now using the Farsi language on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

The blog post went even further into how the U.S. government is reaching out to Iranians. The U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Control issued guidelines today making it clear that the transfer of most communications and social networking software to Iranians is legal, and is, in fact, encouraged.

Are you Iranian or know someone in Iran? Leave a comment and let me know how Iranian citizens might respond to such a message.

BookStrand.com and eXcessica were also given the same ultimatum.

A PayPal spokesman confirmed that the company sent such notifications to companies but declined to identify specific recipients.

PayPal said that it had to restrict certain content to appease banks and credit-card companies. The following statements were made in an e-mail from PayPal to SmashWords on February 14th:

“Our banking partners and credit-card associations have taken a very strict stance on this subject matter.”

“Our relationships with the banking partners are absolutely critical in order to provide the online and mobile services we [offer] . . . to our customers. Therefore, we have to remain in compliance with their rules, which prohibit content involving rape, bestiality or incest.”

Spokespeople at American Express, MasterCard, Visa and big card-issuing banks JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo did not respond to requests for comment but it is important to reflect on how bank policies are bleeding into other industries.

Policy makers that regulate card-issuing banks are essentially gaining a bigger piece of the pie and could ultimately gain inexorable power.

Could banks eventually dictate what books get published? Will retailers like Barnes and Noble need to force customers to pay in cash if they want to offer books that have been branded as obscene?

Twitter posted a handy FAQ about their new “country withheld content” guidelines. In it, it lays out what the format of censored tweets and accounts will look like. The policy seems to affect countries that have rules about offensive content like the example of pro-Nazi tweets in Germany. Even in those cases, Twitter will inform users that the tweet has been censored instead of removing it with no explanation.

The final part of the FAQ is where things get interesting. In the section titled, “How do you know where I am? What is Twitter has misidentified my country?,” they say that your IP address is what determines your country. You can, however, change your country if Twitter gets it wrong.

The Next Web is reporting that changing the country in your account settings to a “free” country like the U.S. or U.K. will bypass the censorship tool. Users were able to select worldwide to bypass the the censoring, but it reverts back to your IP selected country when chosen now.

As you can see here, I have changed my country to the U.K. and Twitter does not change my country back to the U.S. even though it did when I tried changing it to Worldwide.

It remains to be seen if Twitter will change this loophole. The Next Web speculates that Twitter is well aware of this loophole, but is letting it slide to allow Twitter to remain the tool of change in many countries where it was used in revolutions last year.

At this moment China’s Internet users cannot view YouTube. The Chinese government claims that it had nothing to do with the outage but its timing with the airing of footage on YouTube of detained Tibetan protesters being beaten seems a bit more than a coincidence to the rest of the thinking world.

Google’s take on this is

Google spokesman Scott Rubin told InternetNews.com that it is still working to bring its video-sharing site back online and identify the cause of the outage.

The Internet News article goes into the specifics of this incident very well. Some highlights include:

• According to the Global Network Initiative at least a dozen countries with less than pristine human rights records have blocked YouTube access since 2007

• The Chinese government calls the videos fraudulent and does not say that the outage is due to government activity

• The CTA (Central Tibetan Administration) is accused of a propaganda campaign that coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan national uprising

All of this interesting in the context of how most of us view the Internet. With Internet access comes the freedom to do and please with it however you want. I can watch videos and interviews that are anti US government all day long if I choose to waste my time doing that. How many more police brutality videos can you see as well. No one is stopping us from doing any of this. What’s China afraid of? Is it fearful that the rest of the world will discover their human rights violations? News alert – That cat’s been out of the bag for a long time.

So back to the Internet marketing part of this. It ties back to us ever being able to truly engage in Internet commerce with a country that will shut down access to whatever it is threatened by. Do we want to do business with them? Of course, for many the allure of a billion or so potential customers may override any human rights concerns. Many companies (US government included) still do business with countries that are blatantly in violation of human rights.

So does this even mean anything at all to the rest of the world? If Google and YouTube can’t work in China will Google just abandon their efforts there? Not likely. There are too many people there.

Comments

According to a Reuters article, Dmitry Medvedev said, "There is news from the main channels, regional channels, there is news from foreign channels and finally there is news produced, so to say, on media sites which hold opposition views against the authorities.  They can post all their clips and all their speeches there, generally they say unpleasant things about the authorities."

Medvedev then continued, "This guarantees the independence of the mass media, in my opinion."

Medvedev’s statement came less than a month after his official website launched, and even closer to reports highlighting the size of Russia’s online population and advertising market.  The timing of these things could be coincidental, but if they’re not, we’re looking at an encouraging growth trend in a rather huge country.

On the other hand, some less than encouraging events have also taken place; towards the end of January, there were reports of Russian journalists being beaten and an opposition website being shut down.