First Amendment News

After denying  in June that it was investigating the reporting of deceased Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings, the FBI released redacted documents revealing that they had in fact were looking into Hastings’ “controversial reporting” as part of a criminal investigation. The FBI gave the documents to Al Jazeera and a Ph.D student at MIT who had jointly filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit requesting the information. The FBI denied that Hastings had ever been

ProPublica and The New York Times explained their decisions to publish stories about the U.S. and British government’s defeating the encryption of information on the Internet the public thought was private. The publications said they thought the public interest in revealing the news outweighed government arguments to hold back the sensitive information. The Guardian, The New York Times and ProPublica formed a partnership to publish the stories based on documents from Edward Snowden, the former

A federal appeals court ruled that a Tennessee hotel owner could not sue TripAdvisor for defamation for listing his hotel at the top of the America’s “dirtiest hotels” in 2011. For the three judge panel, Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote, “Placement on the ‘2011 Dirtiest Hotels’ list constitutes protected opinion because the list employs loose, hyperbolic language and its general tenor undermines any assertion by Seaton that the list communicates anything more than the opinions

A federal judge put a gag order on jailed journalist Barrett Brown and his lawyers to stop his articles and criticism of the “cyber-industrial complex. ” Brown is charged with threatening an FBI agent, obstructing justice and trafficking in stolen card information. He was arrested last September after an investigation into his reports about e-mails hacked by Anonymous from the private security firm HB Gary and published on Wikileaks. It was the U.S. attorney’s contention

A federal appeals court ruled that the Secret Service could withhold logs of visitors cleared to see President Barack Obama or his advisers. The court held that the files established to conduct background checks and admit visitors were not covered by the Freedom of Information Act. (Politico, September 2, 2013, by Josh Gerstein) Some feel that ruling based on a technicality is a serious blow to transparency. The chief judge argued that a 2006 “Memorandum