First Amendment News

Plaintiffs from California and Rhode Island are suing Virginia saying that by denying them public records, the state is violating their constitutional rights. -DB The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Feb. 3, 2009 By Hannah Bergman Two plaintiffs are challenging Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act in federal court there because it requires requesters to be citizens of the state. The plaintiffs, residents of California and Rhode Island, represented by Georgetown’s Institute for Public

Open government advocates are charging that when state officials wiped out computer files of the ousted three-term speaker of the House, they may have destroyed state records that belong to the taxpaying public. –DB First Amendment Center Feb. 5, 2009 AUSTIN, Texas — Before Texas lawmakers voted their three-term speaker of the House out of his powerful job, state officials wiped his computers clean and deleted scores of electronic files, raising concerns that important public

Italian prosecutors are charging Google with privacy violations over a posting on Google’s Italian-language website of Italian youths teasing a student with learning disabilities. Google is arguing it is a search engine, not a newspaper and can’t possibly monitor everything on its site. -DB International Herald Tribune February 3, 2009 By Elisabetta Povoledo MILAN – Four executives of Google went on trial Tuesday, accused of crimes stemming from the posting of a video on its

A federal appeals court denied a consumer group’s request for records of Medicare claims filed by doctors. The group wanted to use the records to evaluate doctors, but the court ruled that the Freedom of Information Act was intended for government not private business. -DB Centre Daily Times Feb. 3, 2009 By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar WASHINGTON, D.C. — A consumer group seeking Medicare billing records to peek over the shoulders of doctors and grade them on

Kentucky’s effort to seize domain names to shut down online gambling sites could pose a threat to First Amendment freedoms by setting a precedent for denying access to particular Internet sites based on moral grounds determined by the government. -DB The National Law Journal Feb. 2, 2009 By Marcia Coyle WASHINGTON, D.C. — What if China seized the domain names of U.S. Web sites promoting religions that China bans? Or what if (horrors of horrors!)