First Amendment News

A Virginia federal district court judge ruled against Special Counsel Robert Mueller on his request for secrecy for information gathered during discover in the trial of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Judge T.S. Ellis III called the request “excessively broad” and said he would be more receptive if Mueller would describe in detail information deemed too sensitive for the public. Ellis also said Manfort’s alleged conspiracies began in 2005 and ended in 2014 so

Scientists are criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to only consider research if the underlying raw data can be made public for other scientists and industry. Many key studies of the links of air pollution to premature deaths or impact of pesticides use would then be off record owing to privacy agreements with persons in the studies who want confidentiality in exchange for their participation. (The New York Times, March 27, 2018, by Lisa Friedman)

The budget bill signed by President Donald Trump on Friday, March 23 will update a federal law allowing government officials with a warrant to obtain e-mails from tech companies storing the data overseas. The U.S. Supreme Court was considering the case brought by Microsoft who contested a government order to cough up e-mails wanted in a drug trafficking investigation. Part of the budget bill, the Cloud Act updates a 1986 law on searches of stored

Hundreds of thousands of students and adults across the country took part in rallies and marches on Saturday, March 24 to fight for reductions in  gun violence after the latest horrendous school shooting, this one in Parkland, Florida. It was a rare instance of a nationwide student-organized event and the first student mass protest of gun violence. In Washington, D.C. it was mostly students who spoke to over a half million protestors. The NRA released

Good intentions can sometimes make for bad law as critics express their dismay at the U.S. Congress for enacting SESTA/FOSTA to curtail online sex trafficking, laws that makes platforms such as Google and Facebook liable for certain types of user speech. Section 230 protected platforms form lawsuits involving third party content, but the new laws will hold platforms liable retroactively and liable even when they are unaware that their sites are used for trafficking. (Electronic