First Amendment News

Animal rights and food safety activists filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging Iowa’s latest ag-gag law making it a crime to conduct undercover investigations of livestock facilities. A previous ag-gag law was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge in January. (Courthouse News Service, April 22, 2019, by Rox Laird) The ACLU brought the lawsuit on behalf of the activists, and the legal director of Iowa ACLU said in outlawing deception, the new law targets

The city council of Peachtree City, Georgia found themselves at the wrong side of a controversy in considering a resolution to charge citizens when city officials filed lawsuits against citizens for defaming them in the social media.  In picking up the tab for the lawsuits, the city would be using taxpayer money to sue taxpayers. Facing scorching citizen response at a city council meeting, the council backed off, distancing themselves from their unadvised proposal. (The

U.S. companies like Facebook are struggling with how to deal with hate speech, complying with restrictive foreign laws while upholding the traditions of free speech in America guaranteed by the First Amendment. Even though Facebook and Google allocate personnel to stamp out hate speech and phony information, some want even more restrictions just as American conservatives fear that would silence conservative voices. (The New York Times, April 21, 2019, by Cecilia Kang) Daphne Keller of the Stanford

The Mueller report shows that despite President Donald Trump’s bombast and ridicule of the press and fastening the term “fake news” on any unfavorable story, the press got it right on numerous occasions. To take one instance, the New York Times reported in June 2017 that Trump ordered White House Counsel Donald McGahn to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Trump called this fake news, but the Mueller report not only confirmed the order but also

In an extensive analysis, Gabe Rottman of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, addresses the U.S. government’s indictment of WikiLeaks Julian Assange for conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law criminalizing hacking. In Part I, Rottman writes that the government is hinging the case on password cracking to avoid a freedom of information focus, yet the language of the indictment addresses the publication of classified information. “For instance, writes Rottman,