Deeplinks Blog posts about Free Speech
The Supreme Court already has a list of digital civil liberties issues to consider in the near future, and that list is likely to grow.
If confirmed, President Donald Trump’s nominee to fill the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court—Judge Neil Gorsuch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit—will be in a position to make crucial decisions affecting our basic rights to privacy, free expression, and innovation.
Privacy
The Supreme Court is being asked to consider a pair of cases dealing with law enforcement obtaining cell phone location records: the U.S. v. Graham ruling out of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. v. Carpenter out of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. In both cases, the courts ruled that law enforcement did not need a warrant to obtain long-term, historical cell phone location data pinpointing a suspect’s location and movement.
Online harassment is a serious problem. But censorship is not the solution. Thus, EFF has long opposed anti-harassment rules that would chill and punish lawful online speech. And courts have long struck down such laws for violating the First Amendment.
The Republic of Kazakhstan’s harassing U.S. court case that it used to target the independent newspaper Respublika, and other fierce critics of the ruling regime, has finally come to an end. Kazakhstan employed the deeply flawed U.S. hacking statute called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to mount a two-year campaign of harassment, censorship, and retaliation against the publication in courts around the world. The clock ran out on Kazakhstan’s lawsuit and the government finally dismissed it, but not before real damage was done to the free speech rights of the newspaper, which was forced to shut down, and other parties.
EFF filed a brief in federal court arguing that a lower court’s ruling jeopardizes the online platforms that make the Internet a robust platform for users’ free speech.
The brief, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, argues that 47 U.S.C. § 230, enacted as part of the Communications Decency Act (known simply as “Section 230”) broadly protects online platforms, including review websites, when they aggregate or otherwise edit users’ posts.
Generally, Section 230 provides legal immunity for online intermediaries that host or republish speech by protecting them against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do.
California is trying to gag websites from sharing true, publicly available information about actors in the name of age discrimination. But one online service, IMDb, is fighting back. EFF and four other public interest organizations have filed in a friend of the court brief in the case, urging the court not to allow celebrities to wipe truthful information about them from the Internet.
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