From The Washington Post:

A 34-YEAR-OLD woman, the mother of a 12-year-old girl, has been locked up in a Virginia jail for three weeks and could remain there for at least another month. Her crime? Blogging about the police.

Essentially, Elisha Strom ran a blog, Iheartjade, and in it she identifies several members of the local anti-drug joint task force. She does this identification with publicly available records, but like so many crimes in this country, collecting together information that it is legal to have can suddenly become illegal.

Most of my close friends know that I’m a sucker for freedom of speech/freedom of press issues. They get at me in a way that they shouldn’t: I’m an anarchist, I know the government is messed up. What’s more, I hate when people cling tenaciously to the constitution or the bill of rights as some sort of god-granted hint of freedom. We’re people, we deserve to be truly free, and only enter into relationships of governance consensually. But still, somehow, this stuff makes me furious.

For example, the SHAC 7 were convicted of running a website, one that helped provide information against Huntington Life Sciences, a vivisector. The ethics of vivisection aside, what they did was provide information, which is ostensibly legal.

The whole “shouting fire in a crowded theater” thing, by the way, comes from World War 1, when the Supreme Court decided that it was illegal to distribute flyers against the draft.

So yeah, never let anyone tell you we have freedom of press or speech in this country, because if they do they are either lying to you or, well, wrong.