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The Ethereum community has been divided over how to best respond to the threat of protocol-level transaction censorship in the wake of the United States government sanctions on Tornado Cash-linked addresses.

Over the last week, Ethereum community members have proposed social slashing or even a user-activated soft fork (UASF) as possible responses to transaction-level censorship on Ethereum, with some calling it a trap that will do more harm than good and others stating its necessary to provide credible neutrality and censorship resistance properties on Ethereum.

The heated debate comes after Ethereum miner Ethermine elected not to process transactions from the now U.S. sanctioned Ethereum-based privacy tool Tornado Cash, which has prompted members of the Ethereum community to worry about what would happen if other centralized validators did the same.

The Ethereum community is also debating the effectiveness of social slashing to combat censorship on the Ethereum network, as the strategy could lead to a chain split with some validators processing transactions on the censorship-less chain and the others validating only the OFAC-compliant chain.

Social slashing is the process whereby validators have a percentage of their stake slashed if they dont correctly validate the incoming transactions or otherwise act dishonestly.

This may become a significant issue if regulators require major centralized staking services like Coinbase and other major centralized pools, which together stake more than 50% of Ether (ETH) in the Ethereum Beacon 2.0 chain to only validate OFAC-compliant chains.

Founder of Cyber Capital Justin Bons argues thatslashing is a trap that represents a greater risk than the OFAC regulation and will not be a viable solution to tackle censorship at the protocol level.

In a 21-part Twitter thread on Monday, Bons said that social slashing exchanges may deprive innocent users of their deposits, which would violate their property rights.

Bons also said that too many validators complying with law enforcement on Ethereum would lead to a chain split, at the point at which censors start ignoring or do not attest blocks that contain OFAC violating TXs.

Founder of Ethereum podcast The Daily Gwei Anthony Sassano wrote on Twitter on Saturday that collateral damage is inevitable in social slashing [...] its worth it to protect Ethereums credible neutrality and censorship resistance properties.

Meanwhile, Geth developer Marius Van Der Wijgen shared a similar sentiment stating that preserving censorship on the Ethereum network should be the Ethereum communitys highest priority:

If we start allowing users to be censored on Ethereum then this whole thing doesnt make sense and I will be leaving the ecosystem. [...] I think censorship resistance is the highest goal of Ethereum and of the blockchain space in general, so if we compromise on that, theres not much else to do, in my opinion, he added.

Related: Tornado Cash ban could spell disaster for other privacy protocols Manta co-founder

Crypto researcher Eric Wall added that to date, censorship resistance has served as a core property on the Ethereum network and that while were seeing some censorship on the front end, itll only get bad if censorship starts happening side Ethereum itself.

The Tornado Cash sparked censorship debacle has plagued the Ethereum community for over a week now.

Read the original:
Ethereum community splits over solutions for transaction censorship - Cointelegraph

In response to the sanctions, advocacy groups such as Coin Center have come to the mixers defense arguing that the smart contract code is not a sanctionable entity.

With this new precedent, it is unclear if privacy coins such as Monero will face similar censorship. A hard fork update on Aug. 13 reportedly made Monero transactions harder to trace potentially closing any back doors law agencies used to track transactions.

The view that any cryptocurrency transaction is private by default is a common misconception. In fact, the opposite is true. Blockchain data is public and transactions are traceable. Crypto mixers and privacy coins were created to provide privacy for this open financial system. But both face different uphill battles. Before analyzing the likelihood of eithers success, we need to explain how they work, where they differ and the regulatory strategy game of financial censorship.

A crypto mixer, also known as a tumbler or blender, is a transaction mixing tool or service that anyone can use to obscure a crypto wallets source of funds. These tools were first created for bitcoin in 2013 but became a popular alternative to privacy coins once solutions like Tornado Cash made it available for a variety of cryptoassets.

There are two types of crypto mixers: custodial and non-custodial. Custodial blenders such as blender.io are central entities that take full custody of funds to mix transactions. Users pay a fee for the service and trust the entity to return their funds once the transactions are blended.

Blender.io was the first mixer to be sanctioned by US Department of the Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). It did not receive the same attention as Tornado Cash because it fell under the pattern of previous sanctions made against persons and entities. A North Korean state-sponsored hacker collective known as the Lazarus Group reportedly used the service after a hack against Axie Infinity that resulted in a $620 million loss.

Tornado Cash is an Ethereum based crypto blender that uses non-custodial smart contracts to mix ETH and ERC-20 tokens. Users send funds to smart contract addresses that organize them by amount and effectively mix the deposits through a zero-knowledge proof contract.

For example, say you want to mix 11 ETH. Since deposits are organized by amount, you could deposit 10 ETH to the 10 ETH mixer and 1 ETH to the 1 ETH mixer. Once funds are sent to each blender, the zero-knowledge proof would verify you sent a deposit to each one without revealing which one was originally yours. This essentially gives you the equivalent of a withdrawal permission slip for each mixer.

So if you were to use the permission slips to withdraw both deposits, it would be close to impossible for any outside observer to identify the correct source of funds. They would see a myriad of potential options.

The tool provides pretty good financial privacy by breaking the link between the sender and receiver. But its not perfect; theoretically, third party blockchain intelligence could use outside data and behavior models in an attempt to deduce which transaction history belongs to the tokens on your new wallet address.

On Aug. 8, 2022, OFAC added a list of addresses associated with Tornado Cash to the same list of sanctioned addresses where Blender.io ended up. This was in response to news that the Lazarus Group used the tool to launder $455 million in stolen funds.

OFAC used the same messaging and reasoning as it did Blender.io, but it did not acknowledge the key custodial difference between the two. In Coin Centers full analysis, they argue that Tornado Cash has two separate elements: The decentralized group of governing members they call Tornado Cash Entity and the immutable smart contract coin mixers they call Tornado Cash Application.

The Tornado Cash Entity cannot update or change the Tornado Cash Application because the original creators destroyed their admin keys. The smart contracts will exist as long as the Ethereum blockchain continues to operate. So even though the Tornado Cash website is down, anyone can spin up a new front end or interface with the smart contracts directly that lets users access the same mixers.

The problem is that OFAC included these immutable smart contract addresses in the list of sanctions. So there are now innocent Americans with funds still in these mixers. If they attempt to move the funds, they will be breaking the law and subject to penalty. And because the application is not an entity, it has no means to petition OFAC for sanction removal.

Coin Center further argues that because the Tornado Cash Application is not an entity, OFAC did not cite the proper authority to add the smart contract addresses to the sanctions list. This marks an unprecedented move with potential constitutional issues.

In response to OFACs announcement, companies agreed to censor anyone connected to these addresses. The decentralized finance app Aave blocked any users that had Tornado Cash funds sent to them in a dust attack. The team behind Uniswap later followed suite by banning 253 wallet addresses connected to the mixer. Circle also censored users by freezing 75,000 usd coin stablecoins in the smart contracts. The Blockworks Empire podcast explains how that is possible in a Twitter thread.

Privacy coins are cryptocurrencies that use a variety of approaches to obscure IP addresses, wallet balances and the flow of funds from public view. They differ from crypto mixers in that they make financial privacy less of a feature and more of a product. As a result, they only provide privacy to transactions made in a specific currency.

The two most popular privacy coins are Z-cash and Monero. Z-cash is a cryptocurrency that relies primarily on zero-knowledge proofs to shield transaction info. In October 2018, Z-cash announced that they fixed an 8-month-old bug in proofs that could have permitted an infinite inflation of supply. Due to transaction privacy, it was unclear how much was actually inflated.

Since this early stumble, z-cash has never returned to the highs of the 2017 bull cycle and currently ranks second to Monero in total privacy coin market cap. While monero was able to once again reach similar prices of the 2017 market, it failed to break its all-time high in 2021.

Monero is a privacy coin that offers financial anonymity through layers of privacy-enhanced blockchain encryption. Every transaction utilizes single-use stealth addresses to prevent the visibility of public address balances. So only users with a wallets private key can map its balance back to a public address. It also uses ring signatures to obscure the source of funds in a transaction by including random addresses in the verification signature.

The Monero protocol was upgraded on Aug. 13. While the previous version of Monero offered a layer of privacy, its complete untraceability was debatable. In 2018, critics claimed that inputs in a signature ring could be deduced through a process of elimination. And in 2021, CipherTracer reportedly patented a method that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) uses to trace transactions.

Even if CipherTracer discovered real vulnerabilities, the extent of their impact is unclear. They didnt disclose their methods or success rate. This previous version still provided a degree of financial privacy in the sense that it blocked anyone not willing to pay CipherTracer.

But this disincentive is less resistant to state sanctions and censorship. Theoretically, the state is more willing to spend resources in an attempt to trace addresses especially if they suspect a connection to crime, or in some countries, political opposition.

In Canada, an effort was made to trace financial contributions to the trucker freedom convoy. The government ended up sanctioning 34 crypto wallets in connection to the movement, and Monero addresses were included in that list.

The Monero developers hope this update will close any potential vulnerability by increasing the number of transactions in a ring signature. But in response to the update, CipherTracer stated, While Moneros upcoming chain improvements are significant, the fundamentals of our approach to tracing probable source of funds will still apply after the fork.

If the upgrade does succeed in closing these back doors, there is concern that OFAC may take similar actions against Monero. In an interview with CoinDesk, a Monero contributor said that, at the moment, Im not concerned about immediate legal action.

There is no direct financial incentivefor developers, unlike [the situation with] the Tornado Cash developer, he said.

These comments seem to infer that the potential ability for the developer to profit from the use of these smart contracts makes him liable. Dutch financial crimes agency FIOD arrested a Tornado Cash developer on suspicion of laundering money through the tool. But it is unclear if that arrest was for his specific attempts to launder money or for his connection to others using it for that purpose.

Even though top privacy coins such as monero and z-cash are actively working to increase the privacy of transactions, they have not seen the same degree of adoption as leading layer-1 blockchains such as Ethereum. Many competitors, including Secret Network and Oasis Network, argue that the reason for this lag is that privacy coins do not offer a base layer of privacy that can be used to build Web3.

In 2020 Secret Network was the first privacy based blockchain to enable smart contract programmability. It lives in the Cosmos ecosystem and is working toward a vision of Web3 privacy. It has launched multiple apps such as the decentralized messaging service Altermail, and decentralized exchange SiennaSwap.

But Secret Network and its competitors face the classic challenge of an overcrowded sector. They still have a long way in overcoming the market dominance of Monero and Z-Cash. The threat of sanctions have motivated many in the Z-Cash community to explore creating their own smart contract programmability.

The battle against financial privacy feels like a game of whack-a-mole. So far, the state has tried two different tools. With crypto mixers, they used the regulatory sanctions hammer. And for privacy coins, they tried blockchain intelligence sleuths.

Their approach may be, if one financial privacy method is too popular with criminals or too hard to trace, they will just shut it down with the hammer.

Advocacy groups such as Coin Center may respond by challenging such actions in court, but that process will take years. The sanctions are very likely hurting innocent Americans in the meantime.

For other privacy solutions, they may use investigations to continue in their cat and mouse chase with developer upgrades.

User adoption, though, is a key element to this game. As more people are drawn to either mixers or privacy coins, the chance of tracing transactions becomes exponentially difficult. Switching analogies, its like the classic police chase down a narrow alley. If the suspect reaches a bustling parade, they can dust off and subtly slip away into the crowd.

If a privacy coin, mixer or base-layer privacy solution gains mainstream adoption, it could have greater resistance to censorship. State officials would struggle to find the political backing for sweeping sanctions or technology needed to crack privacy measures. And the potential Tornado Cash sanctions fallout for Ethereum validators may pull millions more into this conversation.

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Blockworks

Editor, Evergreen Content

John is the Editor of Evergreen Content at Blockworks. He manages the production of explainers, guides and all educational content for anything crypto related. Before Blockworks, he was the producer and founder of an explainer studio called Best Explained.

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Crypto Mixers and Privacy Coins: Can They Resist Censorship? - Blockworks

Russia's failure to secure a quick victory against Ukraine forced Vladimir Putin to adapt.

Over the past six months, Russia has been fighting an information war alongside its military campaign.

How Moscow rerouted the internet

On 30 May the internet connection in occupied Kherson dropped. It returned within hours, but people could no longer access sites like Facebook, Twitter and Ukrainian news.

The internet had been rerouted to Russia. The online activity of those in Kherson was now visible to Moscow and was subject to censorship.

Internet traffic in Kherson was originally routed from network hubs elsewhere in the country and passed through Kyiv.

These connections remained in place during the first three months of the invasion before it was rerouted.

As Russia gained strength in southern Ukraine, reports emerged that it was taking over control of local internet providers in Kherson either through cooperation or by force.

Once in control, Russia could reroute the internet to Moscow via a state-owned internet provider in Crimea.

This briefly happened on 1 May, before Ukrainian officials managed to reverse it. But on 30 May, with Russia now in control of more infrastructure, it happened again. It now appears permanent.

With the people of Kherson now forced to use Russian internet if they want to go online, they are subject to Moscow's censorship.

For three months they have been unable to access Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Some Ukrainian news websites are also blocked.

Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, an internet monitoring company, says the rerouting has "effectively placed Ukrainian citizens under the purview and surveillance of the Russian state at the flick of a switch."

Internet operators and monitors report internet access in large areas of Kherson is censored to a similar level as experienced in Russia. Some smaller areas are experiencing even tougher censorship, with some Google services blocked.

Ukrainians in Kherson are finding ways to evade Russia's efforts to monitor and censor their online activity.

When Ivanna (not her real name) leaves her home, she deletes social media and messaging apps like Instagram and Telegram in case she is stopped by a soldier who may search her phone.

"You need to be careful," she tells Sky News, using an online messaging app.

She goes online using a VPN (virtual private network) which hides the user's location and allows them to bypass Russian censorship.

Searches for the software spiked in Kherson when internet controls tightened.

Russia has also shut down the mobile phone network in Kherson and new SIM cards are being sold for locals to use.

Ivanna told Sky News a passport is needed to buy the sim cards, prompting fears their use may be tracked.

Cautious, she paid a stranger to buy a SIM under his name.

TV and phone communications targeted

In the unoccupied parts of Ukraine, Moscow has sought to destroy the communication infrastructure - such as TV towers and communication centres.

It's a tactic Russia initially wanted to avoid as it did not want to damage resources that would be useful as an occupying force, explains William Alberque, director of strategy, technology, and arms control for the Institute for Strategic Studies.

"Russia thought they were going to win so fast [so wouldn't] destroy infrastructure as it was going to own that infrastructure," he tells Sky News.

Subscribe to the Ukraine War Diaries on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify and Spreaker

But by keeping the lines open, Ukrainians were able to communicate with one another and the wider world.

Ultimately Russia moved to destroy what it was unable to quickly seize.

Examples of the attacks on communication infrastructure have been logged by the Centre for Information Resilience, which has been tracking and verifying attacks like these using open-source information.

One incident logged by the group was a communication centre in southern Ukraine.

Russia's attempt to control information has also included targeting TV towers.

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Power cuts in Ukraine have also caused the nation's biggest broadband and mobile internet providers to lose connectivity.

Disinformation has doubled since the war began

Russia has used disinformation during the war to influence those in Ukraine, the country's allies, as well as its own population at home.

Examples of pro-Russian fake news include a clumsily faked video of the Ukrainian president telling people to surrender (known as a deepfake video) and social media posts accusing bombing victims of being actors.

Some of Russia's efforts have been effective. Moscow claimed the invasion was in part to tackle nazism in the Ukrainian government. Searches for "nazi" in both Russia and worldwide spiked in the first week of the war.

The number of disinformation sites has more than doubled since the Russian invasion in February, according to Newsguard, which provides credibility rankings for news and information sites.

In March, its researchers found 116 sites publishing Russia-Ukraine war-related disinformation. By August, that number had risen to 250.

It's not possible to show that all of those sites are run on the orders of Russia, however, Moscow has allocated a boosted pot of funds for its propaganda arm.

The independent Russian-language news site The Moscow Times reported the government had "drastically increased funding for state-run media amid the war with Ukraine".

The article cited figures provided by the Russian government. It said 17.4bn rubles (244m) had been allocated for "mass media" compared to 5.4bn rubles (76m) the year before.

It said in March, once the war was underway, some 11.9bn rubles (167m) were spent. This is more than twice as much as the combined spend of the two months before, which was 5bn rubles (70m).

The research comes as no surprise to Mr Alberque, who says Russia's disinformation campaign has been "constant".

"As they shift into war mode, [Russia] has to go to directly paying salaries and no longer hoping that people will echo its messages but paying them to send a certain number of messages per day," he told Sky News.

Looking forward, Mr Alberque believes the death of the daughter of an ally of Vladimir Putin will be a distraction for those directing Russia's disinformation efforts.

Russia has pointed the finger at Ukraine for carrying out the fatal car bombing in Moscow but Kyiv denies any involvement.

An apparent high-profile assassination in the capital has sparked a number of conspiracy theories, including claims the responsibility may lie with a Russian group looking to influence the war.

"The Russian government is going to have to try to control this narrative," Mr Alberque explains.

He adds that propaganda resources that would be focused on Ukraine may now be drawn into the fallout of the death, saying: "I think it's going to be a huge information sink for them because it's going to take up time and attention."

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

Why data journalism matters to Sky News

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How Putin used internet censorship and fake news for six months to push the Ukraine war agenda - Sky News

Fiction writer Anthony Marra joins Fiction/Non/Fiction hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss how his new historical novel, Mercury Pictures Presents, echoes the rights current embrace of authoritarianism in the U.S. and globally. By looking at censorship in 1940s Hollywood and the fascist regime of Italy during that same period, Marra teases out truths about conservatives current interest in controlling popular opinion.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHubs Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fictions YouTube Channel, and our website. This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

*From the episode:

Anthony Marra: Mercury Pictures Presents is, shall we say, a long-awaited novel. It was during the run-up to the 2016 election when I first began to really see the parallels between so much of what these characters are struggling with and what many people in the U.S. in 2016 were in terms of trying to understand this rising threat.

Whitney Terrell: One of the ways that your book works, and I was very impressed by, is by resurrecting stories about life under actual fascism, particularly in Italy. It helped me imagine how such a regime might happen here in the United States. I was particularly interested in the character of Giuseppe Lagana, whos a lawyer, and who gets caught up, sort of at odds with, Mussolinis regime. Could you talk a little bit about him and how he gets into trouble?

AM: Yeah, absolutely. So, Giuseppe is the father of the novels central character, Maria Lagana, and he works as a defense attorney in Rome, primarily defending socialists and anarchists prosecuted by the state. And to me, he is this heartbreaking figure in that he continues to believe in the rule of law and the impartiality of the court and the nobility of defending the accused, even as Mussolinis regime chips and chips and chips away at the underpinnings of the justice system, eventually instituting these tribunals that pass sentences without trials altogether.

And Giuseppes way of trying to quietly resist that is simply to document the lawlessness of these tribunals, which eventually leads to his own arrest. And he is sentenced to

Its one of those things where you can see sort of through Giuseppe, through his gradual realization that the world that he believed he was living in had slipped away much earlier than he had thought, and I always felt as I was working on that during the Trump years, just just seeing how much of things that I believed in about America turned out to be empty, and how many aspects of my own relationship to my country were built on this sort of false mythologythat was certainly something that Giuseppes character helped illuminate for me in my own personal life.

V.V Ganeshananthan: Giuseppe is also one of my favorite characters. I was reminded actually of conversations Id had with lawyers who would tell me that they were documenting for precisely the reason that Giuseppe documents, which made it feel very alive to me. Theres a remarkable early scene where Giuseppe and Maria, who you spoke of, are attending a showing of the movie

In LA after Maria has fled Italy, she and her boss Artie Feldman, battle U.S. censors who consider Arties films decadent and too critical of fascism. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the role of censorship coming from different actors in the novel.

AM: The forces of reactionary conservatism have obviously long embraced censorship as a way to mold society to their liking. And the great irony in all of it, of course, is that its the very people waving around pocket-sized Constitutions who are the first to ban books. In the period covered by this novel, all movies were censored by an organization called the Production Code Administration.

And a lot of this resulted in truly ridiculous forms of censorship as the production code strove to make movies gratuitously inoffensive. For decades, you couldnt show a pregnant woman on screen because it might raise uncomfortable questions about where babies really come from. You couldnt show a couple on the same bed unless both of their feet were planted on the ground. If you remember the movie Psycho, it was chiefly scandalous for the fact that it was the first movie in about 30 years to show a toilet bowl. In the bathroom scene, theres a toilet bowl, and a toilet bowl had not been seen on screen since the early 30s.

Of course, much more insidious than this priggish sense of morality was the production codes prohibition on politics. If you only received your news in the 1930s from your local picture house, you would have thought that the American South was untouched by Jim Crow, and that Europe was untouched by fascism. By the late 30s, filmmakers were beginning to push back against this censorship often by very convoluted means. For instance, there was a movie made in the late 30s, about the Spanish Civil War.

But the only way that the filmmakers could get past the censors was to make it an absurdly unfaithful depiction of the conflict. So they actually brought experts in who had participated in the Spanish Civil War in order to make sure that the movie was meticulously inaccurate. They made sure that the uniforms were all wrong, that the settings were incorrect. And so the only way to make a movie about a true and contentious subject was to turn it into pure fantasy.

In September 1941, there were enough of these anti-fascist movies that isolationists in the U.S. Senate began to hold hearings to investigate so-called Hollywood war propaganda. The heads of the major studios all testified there, and they really acquitted themselves brilliantly. They more or less used the opportunity to reveal the hypocrisy behind the investigations themselves. And three months later, following Pearl Harbor, those filmmakers and executives were fully vindicated.

VVG: One of the ways the different kinds of censorship intersect across borders here is in the figure of Maria, who corresponds with her father, who is confined in the manner that you described earlier. Theyre corresponding and his letters are censored, and then she uses her knowledge of how things are censored or how to get things past censors in the film industry, which I thought was so interesting. There are characters who are in really quiet ways censoring themselves or by strategizing about censorship or who, behaving in response to censorship, are altering what they might say in ways that they almost dont recognize.

AM: I feel like we have a certain number of themes that we keep returning to, a certain number of ideas that kind of animate our work. And for whatever reason, censorship is one that Ive returned to in several of my books. Do you all find that in your own work that youre kind of almost like reshuffling the same deck of cards in each new project?

WT: Yeah, I have themes that I go back to you all the time. Sure, absolutely. I think thats true for everyone. I wanted to point out, back to the lawyer thing, when Trump was appointing so many judges, thats when the way that the legal system in Italy changed in the 30s, to cease to be really a legal system and be like an authoritarian legal system that doesnt apply rule of law any more I started realizing, Oh, that was kind of the idea. Thats why it was so important to him to get judges. If you can end the way the court system works, you get around that, then you start moving toward authoritarianism.

Similarly, when you start controlling information and you start leaning on calling things decadent, you can use decadence, like the kiss in the recent Buzz Lightyear movie, or whatever it is you want to call decadent, to suppress political content that you dont like. And thats what youre also talking about here is that the real reason that censorship was going on in the 30s and 40s, and in your novel, the head censor is a Catholic, surely not an accident, and he is really concerned about not hearing a lot of criticism for fascism. So he uses sex as an excuse to basically censor that political side. And I feel like thats exactly whats happening today.

AM: Yeah, absolutely. Criticisms toward changes in culture are camouflage for these very specific and intense political ideologies and agendas. Im curious what you all think about the changes in censorship over time, because one of the things that I was thinking about over the last several months, just reading the news and seeing, talking about, book bannings and all of that is just how much less effective censorship is today.

Im not sure if its a result of technology, just giving us so much access to information that if your local library bans a particular book, there are just so many more venues for you to find it in. Maybe its also that in the present day, weve just become hopefully somewhat more educated about the intentions and motivations behind the censorship But I could be talking complete bullshit. So Id love to hear your thoughts, Sugi.

VVG: I dont think youre talking complete bullshit, but I guess I wonder who are the we who know how censorship operates? Because theres obviously a whole set of people who are buying whats being sold. Theres this list of books that have been banned in, I think, Utah, thats going around, and it has a huge number of LGBTQIA-associated books, and then some of them are bestsellers.

And so theres this increased surveillance, but then theres also these increased ways to get around it and a population that maybe is better at getting around some of the things that we might expect to be censorship. But then it does seem like theres this other set of people who are whos the audience for the propaganda? Someones putting out the propaganda movies and someone sits in the audience and cheers and feels good about watching it. There are parts of me that like a good montage and a movie with a rousing Hans Zimmer score; I cant pretend that that part of me is not there. How has censorship changed over time? I think that my wariness of the American government has certainly increased. Im curious what you would say about this, Whitney.

WT: We did a couple episodes on book banning earlier on. And one of the things that came out is that when youre in a conservative state or a state thats run by conservatives like Florida, the teachers start getting really worried about what they can and cannot teach. So when youre dealing with public school teachers, or even public university professors, professors are a little bit more protected than school teachers. But I do think that censorship and state rules on what you can and cannot teach really will start to affect what high school and middle school and elementary school teachers feel comfortable teaching. And that actually can change how the kids are educated. I think thats why conservatives are concerned with that.

*

Selected Readings:

Anthony Marra Mercury Pictures Presents The Tsar of Love and Techno A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Others:

Frankenstein Psycho Lightyear S5 Episode 13: Farah Jasmine Griffin: Censoring the American Canon S5 Episode 12: Intimate Contact: Garth Greenwell on Book Bans and Writing About Sex Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann Billy Wilder Three Days of the Condor Jason Bourne franchise Ban on 52 Books in Largest Utah School District is a Worrisome Escalation of Censorship PEN America

__________________________________

Transcribed by https://otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Anne Kniggendorf.

Visit link:
Fascism Past and Present: Anthony Marra on What the Censorship of 1940s Hollywood and Italy Can Teach Us - Literary Hub

Former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo defended his interview with a former Trump campaign chairman Tuesday after receiving backlash from a social media user.

Cuomo interviewed Paul Manafort on his podcast, The Chris Cuomo Project, to discuss the FBI raid in Mar-a-Lago, Trumps potential presidential run in 2024, and the Mueller investigation following the 2016 presidential election. One social media user called the interview pathetic.

So you didnt listen. Didnt watch. And already know what you think, Cuomo responded. Thats why there is no progress. Change the game. Listen to who and what you oppose. You will sharpen your own arguments. Censoring is not the answer.

Cuomo has made an effort to cross partisan lines in his comeback to the media since CNN fired him over his involvement in his brothers sexual assault allegation case. The former anchor questioned Manafort on him being too generous to the former president regarding his storage of classified documents in Mar-a-Lago. (RELATED: Egregious And Insulting: Don Lemon Battles With Chris Cuomo For Bringing Rick Santorum On His Show)

I think your analysis is a little too generous, no? Cuomo asked.

No, I dont agree, Manafort said. Theres more to come out as there always is in instances like this. I think the affidavit redacted to keep names of things protected that would explain what the motivations were. You can say its such an egregious act that there has to be something there. But after going through five years of Russian collusion has to be real, I dont know whats real anymorethis sends a terrible example around the world.

In 2018, a federal jury found Manafort guilty of eight counts of tax evasion and bank fraud surrounding accusations that he hid income as part of his consulting work for former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. The government alleged that he hid money in companies located overseas.

Trump pardoned Manafort in late December 2020, while he served his sentence at home due to COVID-19 protocols.

During his podcast in early August, Cuomo accused the January 6 Select Committee of playing the gotcha game since they know those investigated will not face criminal charges.

Fomenting tension, lying to inflame just to create more outrage, wanting to watch a run on the Capitol, ignoring violent intentions, these are all terrible, he said. But treason? You wind up undercutting your purpose when you exaggerate the desired outcome or consequence the January 6 hearings lose their impact on consensus because of the intended consequences pursued.

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'Censoring Is Not The Answer': Chris Cuomo Defends Interview With Paul Manafort - Daily Caller