Category Archives: First Amendment

First Amendment Rap

By: Jasmine Cooper

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First Amendment Rap - Video

LONDON, UK The attacks against French newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris last week have sparked a worldwide conversation about free speech.

Now the satirical paper is going to print again with its first post-attack edition, and the freedom of expression debate is raging on.

Whats on the cover? You guessed it a new cartoon of Prophet Muhammad. That's forbidden in Islam, but Charlie Hebdo and its fast-growing fan base insist the paper has the right to print it.

Some are wondering what that right is all about. Americans know something about their First Amendment. International law also protects freedom of expression and opinion its in the second sentence of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. In practice, it varies considerably by country, even within Europe.

Heres a brief explainer on the different legal interpretations of free speech in the United States, Britain and France.

The US has the First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.What First Amendment protections exist in say France or Britain?

None. The Bill of Rights applies only in the US.

Thats irritating.

Sorry. But both France and Britain are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights and theInternational Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which spell out countries obligation to protect citizens rights to free expression, even of controversial or inflammatory opinions. (The US has signed on to the ICCPR as well.) They have national laws protecting free speech as well.

And citizens here are serious about that freedom. When marchers mobbed the streets across France this weekend, many raising pens toward the sky, they were showing solidarity with the slain staff of Charlie Hebdo. But demonstrators were also taking a stand for the newspapers right to express itself through controversial cartoons.

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#FreedomOfSpeech: What that means in the US, Britain and France

"We have the right to make dumb jokes."

-- Tina Fey

I'm a free speech advocate. I've been arrested and I have served jail time for exercising my First Amendment rights. As a reporter, magazine editor and political cartoonist, I've received complaints (and a few rare death threats) for my work. So it goes without saying that I share the global outrage over the brutal murders of the cartoonists and staff at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. It chills the blood to imagine any American cartoonist being placed in the crosshairs of a Kalashnikov. No matter your race, religion, history or lifestyle, murder is a heinous crimefar worse than even the most wounding insult.

But after dwelling on the causes and effects of this tragedy, I find that I have some qualms about the argument that there should be no limits to the exercise of free speech.

My concerns begin with a question: "At what point does satire become bullying?" At what point does satire morph from a deftly wielded surgical tool into a blunt instrument of personal or cultural assault? As we have seen, a pen can draw a cartoon but a weaponized cartoon can draw blood. Does the cause of "free speech" bind us to defend slanders, lies and defamation?

Many advocates of free speech make a point of defending uncensored and fearless public expressionbut only so long as the speech does not veer into venomous and hateful rhetoric. When "free speech" devolves into racist or misogynistic invective, it can prove as devastating to public peace as yelling "Fire!" in the legendary "crowded auditorium." Such mean-spirited expressions are classified as "hate speech" and are characterized by content that "offends, threatens, or insults groups, based on race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, or other traits."

Unclothed Emperors Versus the Naked Masses

Satire, as a form of mockery, reads entirely differently depending on where and how it is directed. Ridicule directed against the powerfulwhether the target be a wealthy member of the elite or a multinational corporationis most easily recognized as the proper use of the satiric tool. However, ridicule directed against the powerless, the disenfranchised, or the disabled can be seen as inappropriate and coldhearted bullying.

Even hate speech can be nuanced by the interplay of social realities. It's one thing for the oppressed to call for the elimination of the ruling classes; it's another matter for the rulers to call for the elimination of masses. Regicide and genocide are both crimes but there is a vast difference in scale.

Satire, as defined by Wikipedia, is "a genre of literature, and sometimes graphic and performing arts, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, corporations, government or society itself, into improvement."

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Satire and Sanity: Where Do You Draw the Line? (News Analysis)

While not quite as momentous as the legal tussle over the Pentagon Papers, in the ongoing push-pull between the First Amendment and national security, Twitter is taking an important stand against government overreach.

Last year, thanks to pressure brought by tech companies such as Google, LinkedIn and Facebook, the government relaxed the gag rules associated with national security-related warrants and subpoenas. But it still dictated exactly how much the companies could disclose about these requests.

Twitter, which has probably been the most aggressive of the major tech companies in pushing against these limits, argues in a suit it filed in federal court in San Francisco that it should be able to publish more detailed information about the requests, citing its First Amendment right to free speech.

This fight may seem a small matter given past battles between speech rights and government's powers. The Twitter case does not raise the same grave matters as the Pentagon Papers, secret documents that described the history of American involvement in Vietnam, which were at the center of one of the most important free-speech cases in U.S. history. Nor is this as important as the current debates over the government's broad crackdown on journalists reporting on counterterrorism efforts.

But the principle is the same: how to strike the balance between the free-flow of information in a democracy versus the need to keep some secrets from our enemies. And it comes in this post-Snowden world of ours, whose disclosures of National Security Agency surveillance have raised profound questions about the government's efforts to monitor communications in its hunt for terror plots. In the wake of those disclosures, it seems to me that it's more important than ever for us to have a better understanding of just what the government is up to in our name.

"Twitter's efforts go to the core of informing the public what type of surveillance state we live in," said Alex Abdo, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. "The government wants to have it both ways. It wants to conscript the tech companies to spy on their customers. But it won't let them inform the public."

The battle this time is in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, with the most recent development coming late last week when the government filed a motion to dismiss much of the Twitter case.

Like a lot of lawsuits, Twitter's struck me at first as splitting hairs.

For example, when it comes to National Security Letters, an administrative subpoena that gives the FBI broad search powers, the government demands that Twitter disclose only how many it receives in increments of thousands; Twitter wants to disclose them in a more narrow range, by the one-hundreds. Likewise, when describing all national security requests, Twitter wants to talk about requests in groups of 25, not 250, as the government prescribes.

For its part, the government argues that there isn't a free speech constitutional issue, and that it needs "to maintain the secrecy of information that could reveal sensitive investigative techniques and sources and methods of intelligence collection."

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Quinn: Twitter takes a free speech stand against U.S. government

Washington State Ferry personnel assault photographer
On 10 JAN 2015, I was conducting a follow up First Amendment Audit of the Washington State Ferry Terminal when I was assaulted by staff. Evidently, if you wear a high visibility jacket, you...

By: Rogue Reflections

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Washington State Ferry personnel assault photographer - Video

Justice || Spoken Word By Diamond Cash
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DiamondCashRich IG: http://instagram.com/diamondcashrich/ I begin to feel like most Americans don #39;t understand the First Amendment, don #39;t understand the idea of...

By: Diamond Cash

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Justice || Spoken Word By Diamond Cash - Video

Washington State Ferry employee assaults photographer
On 10 JAN 2015, I was conducting a follow up First Amendment Audit of the Washington State Ferry Terminal when I was assaulted by staff. Evidently, if you wear a high visibility jacket, you....

By: happyc tatta

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Washington State Ferry employee assaults photographer - Video

The First Amendment and How It Affects Us Today
The first amendment to the bill of rights and how it pertains to 2015.

By: 2019NortonJ

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The First Amendment and How It Affects Us Today - Video

Jacqueline Smetak, Guest opinion 9:36 a.m. CST January 12, 2015

We the People of these Dis-United States are at war with ourselves. The divisions of race and class are playing out in the streets and in increasing numbers of people killed or injured in confrontations with police.

Perhaps these levels of distrust have always been there and we are only now forced to acknowledge them. Or maybe it's worse than it's been since television brought the ugliness of racism and the surrealism of the War against the War in a country most of us had never heard of into our homes half a century ago.

Played against the backdrop of the worst economic downturn in eight decades, the distrust is overwhelming another division. We're also divided along religious lines. But those battles have been fought in the courts rather than the streets.

At issue is the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

This nation was established as a secular republic. There can be no official church. People are free to worship, or not, as they please. That had not been so prior to the Revolution, but by 1789, the former British colonies had no state church and therefore the First Amendment simply stated what already was. However, it wouldn't be until 1925 (Gitlow v. New York) that the First Amendment was applied to the states, and not until 1947 (Everson v. Board of Education) that the separation of church and state was ruled absolute.

And here is the problem. A significant number of Christians believe that spreading the Gospel is an essential aspect of their faith. These people tend to be conservative and fundamentalist. The more activist believe that salvation must be universal, that Christians must not just spread the word, but must remake the world as they want it to be.

Their role in politics has been substantial, alternating between high profile and working behind the scenes. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) brought them to the forefront again. It also highlighted a curious aspect of conservative beliefs. These people are convinced that not only must they not engage in sinful behavior, but they must actively prevent sin in others. We see this in their response to the expansion of LGBT rights and in their efforts to ban abortion and limit access to contraception.

That we know. What we haven't noticed is that an executive order (2001) establishing the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives allowed religious organizations to use public money to impose their religion on others. The executive order was grounded in two things: the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993) and the "Thousand Points of Light" speech that George W. H. Bush delivered in 1988.

The Restoration Act provided for exemptions from otherwise generally applicable laws if those laws imposed an undue burden on religious practices. Bush's speech promoted the idea that private charities could better provide for the poor than could the government. The order did ensure that people seeking help could not be discriminated against. The order, however, forgot employees.

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Fighting for our First Amendment rights

People were tweeting about everything from education to Ebola on Election Day. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File) more >

The Justice Department wants a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit by Twitter that claims the social media companys First Amendment rights were violated, The Hill reported Monday.

Twitter said it tried to publicly release information on the number of orders it gets from the government to turn over customer information, but it was blocked by the government from doing so.

The DOJ argued that the department acted on national security concerns.

The additional material that Twitter seeks to publish is information that the Government has judged is properly protected classified national security information, the disclosure of which would risk serious harm to national security, the agency wrote in a brief.

But Twitter said its rights are being violated by not being able to publish the information and announced in October that it would sue the federal government.

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Justice Dept. wants Twitter's First Amendment lawsuit tossed