King Henry VIII was the first Monarch to take legal action to control the press in pre-Enlightenment England. His methods were simple enough: he required all printers to pay licensing fees in order to be allowed to print anything. This concept became known as ‘prior restraint’: preventing the distribution of controversial materials before they are even published.

By requiring printers to be licensed, the Crown was granting them permission to print things on the condition they didn’t criticize the monarchy, the church, or the government.

Keeping the social order intact by suppressing criticism was of the utmost importance. Through the creation of Privy Councils and Star Chambers, these restrictions were brutally enforced until the Civil war in the 1640s.

Then the Enlightenment came along with its philosophical emphasis placed on the importance of the informed citizen, the desirability of free and open exchange of ideas, the right to criticize government and freedom from government restrictions. With the Enlightenment came the quest for human knowledge and dignity. Common people became empowered through literacy, and they were encouraged to get involved in politics and community and religious matters. The free flow of information became a threat to the stability of the state. A variety of measures have been taken to curb leaks of potentially damaging information to the corporate state.

The Pentagon Papers case in 1971 is a more recent example of the government’s continuing attempts at Prior Restraint. The US government tried to prevent The New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing highly-secret documents outlining the shockingly bad situation in Vietnam. The papers counter-sued, and the case was ultimately decided in their favor by the Supreme Court.

The Court determined that a citizen’s right to know about the government’s crimes out-weighed the government’s need to conceal them.

This was arguably the most important Supreme Court case ever on freedom of the press. Sadly, those days are long gone. All of the MSM outlets in America are currently owned and controlled by multinational conglomerates which have a vested interest in deceiving the public and maintaining the status quo of the corporate state at all costs.

There is no need for legal action when the current level of self-censorship is so high, however. Defense contractors GE and Westinghouse own NBC and ABC, respectively. There is no way those networks would jeopardize their commercial status by criticizing their masters. And then there’s FOX News Channel – the blatantly partisan propaganda network owned by former Nixon logograph Roger Ailes. The only place where a true free press still exists today is online, or in small university newspapers like the Daily Lobo and free local weeklies like the Alibi and Albuquerque Free Press.

As part of a major effort to promote national unity accompanied by America’s involvement in World War I, Congress enacted a number of laws severely restricting 1st Amendment freedoms in order to curb antiwar dissent. In 1917 Congress passed the infamous Espionage Act, which mandated stiff penalties for circulating “false statements intended to interfere with the war effort.” Any effort to cause unrest in the military forces or to interfere with the newly-instituted draft was forbidden.

Charles Schenck was a member of the Socialist Party of America. Socialists believed that America’s entering the war would only benefit the rich while causing misery and death for thousands of poor and working-class soldiers who would do the actual fighting.

Ya think?

Schenck participated in antiwar activities, including mailing thousands of leaflets urging draftees and soldiers to resist the draft. He was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison for violating the Espionage Act, and he appealed his case to the Supreme Court. The Court upheld the conviction. The government argued that a nation at war is justified in taking steps to insure “the success of its effort to defend itself.”

The actions and utterances of the Socialist party were considered a danger to the nation. The Justices decided that reasonable limits can be imposed on the 1st Amendment’s guarantees of free speech: no person can use free speech to put others in danger. The Schenck vs. United States case was the first significant test of the limits of the 1st Amendment’s free speech provisions by the Supreme Court.

Then came the Gulf War crime of 1991. Following the public humiliation of the Vietnam war and several military disasters like the Beirut embassy bombing in 1982 and the ‘Black Hawk Down’ debacle in Somalia, the government instituted a system of “embedded” news reporting requirements covering all news media in future conflicts.

This sort of overt censorship of news amounted to a modern-day ‘prior restraint’ and added a new dimension to the control of information from a war zone. The implied threat was that if you tried to work in the field without being embedded you would get no protection – and indeed many ‘rogue’ reporters were killed by both enemy and “friendly” fire. This was literally an assault on freedom of the press.

Julian Assange is the Australian-born journalist, activist and publisher of the infamous website WikiLeaks. He’s been holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in London for several years now, living in diplomatic limbo. The stately redbrick embassy complex located in London’s fashionable Knightsbridge district has been the site of an international standoff since Assange sought refuge there, appealing for asylum on the grounds of political persecution.

Assange is still under house arrest three years later. He is unable to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy because if he steps outside the complex he’ll be arrested by British SAS. His finances have been frozen and his operation has been targeted.

In the future, American servers must comply with government demands to terminate service to anyone they designate. US cyber-warriors are now able to track down all but the most highly-encrypted sources.

A leaked Pentagon memo described how WikiLeaks should be destroyed with a smear campaign, eventually leading to “criminal prosecution.” A few months later the Sydney Morning Herald disclosed that the U.S. is conducting an “unprecedented” legal pursuit of Assange.

The sex crime allegations against Assange are a smokescreen behind which the US government is trying to shut down WikiLeaks for exposing their secret plans for war, occupation and destruction. The excuse of “national security” is used to withhold critical information from American citizens.

If the evidence that WikiLeaks seeks to provide was more readily available for public scrutiny and widely disseminated, many of the unlawful and immoral decisions made behind closed doors by our leaders could be avoided.

Predictably, the mainstream U.S. news media – owned by military contractors with a vested interest in keeping their crimes from public exposure – continue to defame Assange and Edward Snowden as “high-tech terrorists” and traitors, even though some, like the New York Times, profited directly from information provided by WikiLeaks.

Freedom of the press is under serious threat in America. According to the 2015 World Press Freedom Index, monitored by Reporters Without Borders, America’s ranking fell once again. The USA ranked only 49^th on the annual survey this year.

Finland and Norway were one and two, BTW…

In a recent interview on Venezuelan television, Julian Assange argued that democracy in Western countries is an illusion, and that the constant surveillance of citizens is leading to the creation of a “transnational totalitarian state.”

He said, “This is an international phenomenon that isn’t just happening in the US…it’s bigger than the US., and it’s taking us to a dark place.” He said that basic human rights in the West are being quietly eroded, and that the public is being negatively influenced by “massive press manipulation.”

This episode proves that the internet isn’t as free and anonymous as we’ve all been led to believe. We live in a highly-regimented surveillance society and there really is no escape – not even in cyberspace.