Some activists hold a banner for Bradley Manning at the Pride Disability March in Chicago.

Although it has become popular to sound the death knell for protest movements, especially the antiwar movement, in the United States, Medea Benjamin argues on presstv.com that the movement has not been buried just yet; it has simply shifted into a different form. The public outcry over Bradley Manning’s treatment, for instance, led to his being transferred from Quantico Penitentiary to better conditions at Fort Leavenworth. Since Manning has been charged with releasing information that was detrimental to the war effort, the article implies that people who spoke out against the treatment he received must believe that the war effort itself is wrong or misguided. The drive to release Manning is only part of a new antiwar movement that, while not as visually striking as the protests that took to the streets in the 1960s, is slowly becoming a force the government must reckon with. Read more here.

Manning supporter and Reddit founder Aaron Schwartz was arrested last week for downloading files from academic database JStor on MIT’s campus. JStor provides downloadable articles from academic journals to colleges and universities across the U.S. The institutions pay a fee, after which it is free for their students to download. Aaron Schwartz, a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, and a staunch freedom-of-information advocate, was not intending to profit from the information. While JStor was not interested in pursuing a prosecution after their files had been returned without distribution, the government has decided to prosecute anyway. More information here.