Under Spanish law, anybody who insults the royal family can face up to two years in prison.

Spain in uproar after royal sex cartoon banned
New Zealand Herald
July 22, 2007

Madrid – Spanish media poured scorn at a judge’s decision to pull a satirical magazine that published a cartoon of the heir to the throne having sex, saying it trampled freedom of expression in a first world democracy.

On Friday, Juan del Olmo ordered police to round up copies of El Jueves, whose front page carried a drawing of Crown Prince Felipe having sex with his wife and commenting on a government plan to give parents 2,500 euros ($NZ4423.99) for each child born.

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By Sheldon Rampton, PR Watch, June 25, 2007 about artist-activist Steve Kurtz:

I happened to meet Steve Kurtz in December 2002 at a “World Information Organization” conference in Amsterdam, where we were both speakers. Kurtz spoke on the topic of The Spectre of Intellectual Property Rights and described his work as a performance art provocateur. To challenge corporate control of biotechnology, for example, his Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) produced an exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. called Molecular Invasion. It consisted of a “live public experiment” that attempted to “reverse engineer genetically modified cash crops” by developing a chemical that can be applied to the Monsanto company’s genetically-engineered Roundup Ready crops to make them vulnerable again to “the crippling effects of RoundUp herbicide.” Another CAE project, Free Range Grain, consisted of a mobile lab that invited the public to test foods for genetic modification. Another, more whimsical project that Kurtz showcased at the conference in Amsterdam was called Cult of the New Eve (CONE). It consisted of a mock religion that practiced “molecular cannibalism” by inviting people to eat bread and drink beer containing human DNA.

At the end of the conference, I had dinner with Steve Kurtz and some of the other participants. He told some funny stories, and I told a few myself. Neither of us knew at the time that his life was soon to take a strange turn that would lead to the FBI accusing him of terrorism. (more…)

The NYPD decided not to appeal a judge’s decision that the NYPD should declassify its surveillance documents from the 2004 RNC, so it has set up a special NYPD RNC Documents website with the documents. Of course, you have to scroll down to the very bottom for a zip file of the 600 pages of documents. And what’s above the documents is the NYPD’s rather thorough explanation/ defense justifying why it did such extensive surveillance of disparate groups and people, listing various terror incidents between 2001 and the convention as well as other incidents of protest. Here is Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s statement:

“I think a close examination of the documents is going to show that the New York City Police Department did an outstanding job in protecting the City during the Republican National Convention. People wanted to come here and shut down the City, to replicate what happened in Seattle, Montreal and Genoa. We simply didn’t let that happen, and I think it’ll just underscore the outstanding work of the men and women of the Department. In terms of gathering information, the vast majority of information that was gathered was open-source information. It was gathered from the Internet; these groups that were coming here were advertising what they were going to do — bragging about what they were going to do. It wasn’t particularly difficult to get the vast majority of this information.”

Good to know that the NYPD is watching all of us, including MSNBC and the Sierra Club. The NY Times has all the documents plus highlights which people and/or groups were mentioned in the documents. Here are but a few:

ACT UP, Sierra Club, City Council members (Charles Barron, David Weprin, Bill Perkins), Sept. 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Johnny Cash Bloc, MSNBC, A31 Coalition, NYCLU, NOW, Planned Parenthood, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, Stuyvesant High School Students, Westboro Baptist Church, Indymedia, Democratic National Committee, Coalition of Fire and Police Unions, Grandmothers Against War, Falun Gong, Arab Muslim American Foundation, Time’s Up, Billionaires For Bush, United for Peace and Justice, The Surveillance Camera Players, ACLU, Hip Hop Summit Action Network, The Federation of East Village Artists, Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, Restaurant Opportunity Center of New York

The NYCLU’s executive director Donna Lieberman said, “These documents paint a picture of a surveillance program that was broad, clumsy, and often unlawful. The NYPD failed to differentiate between unlawful behavior and behavior that is not only lawful but should in fact be cherished and protected. Today the public can finally bear witness to that failure.” The NYCLU also offers an index of the groups monitored as well as the documents released yesterday, plus others previously released.

And City Councilman Charles Barron told the NY Times’ Sewell Chan, “First of all, I’m going to be getting some legal advice. I’m not going to let this go. This is ridiculous that you would spy on democratic, legal, political activity. This smacks of former fascism. It certainly is selective spying. It is absurd that people in this city can’t exercise their constitutional right to protest without being spied on by the police.”

Photograph by ireallylovecake on Flickr

   Originally by Jen Chung from Gothamist on May 17, 2007

News Analysis: Boston Bomb Hoax Scares Up More Guerrilla Business
May 14, 2007
By Becky Ebenkamp
Brandweek

A $2 million fine and Senate bill can’t cage envelope-pushing efforts.

“Now more than ever!” is the rallying cry for guerrilla marketers three months after a misunderstanding over a stealthy street stunt promoting Cartoon Network’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force brewed a Boston bomb scare.

Some marketing agencies say the headline-making hoax has actually increased business despite a bill making its way through the Senate that would impose harsher punishments should such a hoax happen again.

Early reports after the Jan. 31 hysteria had many speculating marketers would steer clear of this big-bang/small bucks school of buzz building. After all, Cartoon Network gm/evp Jim Samples resigned; parent company Turner Broadcasting and guerrilla agency Interference agreed to pay $1 million in compensation to Massachusetts and another $1 million to support federal homeland security.

“The smarter clients I spoke to [realized] that a $2 million fine equals $120 million in publicity,” said Peter Shankman, president of New York-based pr/marketing agency The Geek Factory. “They said, ‘Just get the damn permits first!’” (more…)

Massachusetts won’t prosecute men in hoax bomb scare
By Svea Herbst
May 11, 2007

BOSTON (Reuters) – Massachusetts will not prosecute two men who planted blinking electronic signs in a “guerrilla” advertising campaign that sparked a terrorism scare in central Boston, the state’s attorney general said on Friday.

In return for public apologies and 140 hours of community service, prosecutors dropped criminal charges in a case state Attorney General Martha Coakley said her office would have lost.

The men were charged with placing a hoax device and disorderly conduct. “That charge would not have been successful,” Coakley said.

She said there was no evidence Sean Stevens, 28, and Peter Berdovsky, 27, intended to cause panic on January 31 when police mistook the small battery-powered electronic billboards for possible bombs. Read the full story.

Here’s video documentation by Zebbler of the original action: Glitchcrew’s guerilla graffiti light installation in Boston on January 31, 2007, done on behalf of Aqua Teen Hunger Force on the Cartoon Network.

Here’s more information about the original action from boston.com and more video including the breaking news coverage (from Fox News) of the incident from robotspiratesninjas: (more…)