Many countries around the world block or filter Internet content, denying access to information that they deem too sensitive for ordinary citizens -- most often about politics, but sometimes relating to sexuality, culture, or religion. Access Denied documents and analyzes Internet filtering practices in more than three dozen countries, offering the first rigorously conducted study of an accelerating trend.

Internet filtering takes place in more than three dozen states worldwide, including many countries in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Related Internet...

This book is about people whose beliefs and affiliations have opposed powerful interests in the present-day United States. This eclectic group of people and controversial issues, from climate-change scientists who have been censored by the Bush administration to Muslims accused of terrorism, have one thing in common. All of them straddle the limits of what Noam Chomsky has called permissible debate as defined by dominant political and economic institutions and individuals. The central thesis is that restriction of free inquiry is harmful to our culture because it inhibits the search for...

Between 1949 and 1955 Britain was swept by a rising tide of panic about -American-style- or -horror- comics. The British press cried out in alarm: -Now Ban This Filth That Poisons Our Children, - -Drive Out the Horror Comics.- As one frenzied columnist protested: -I feel as though I have been trudging through a sewer. Here is a terrible twilight zone between sanity and madness . . . peopled by monsters, grave robbers, human flesh eaters.- A campaign against ghoulish comic books climaxed in an Act of Parliament making it illegal to publish or sell any material in comic form deemed to be...

Ever since the Bill of Rights became the cornerstone on which individual Americans' rights and liberties rest, the practical realities of honoring the grand principles of the First Amendment have been hotly contested, and none more so than freedom of expression. From governmental limits on robust, even vicious, colonial- and Federal-era newspaper attacks to the USA PATRIOT Act to efforts to rein in the vast and anarchic Internet, the First Amendment protection of free expression has been virtually under siege by various forms of censorship, some clearly pernicious and others evidently...

"Censorship in America" discusses why many objects of art, literature, and popular culture are considered controversial, and examines the arguments of both sides. It explores the current wave of censorship in the form of political correctness and covers groundbreaking litigation and proposed legislation.