Category Archives: Free Speech

Claremont McKenna College recently suspended three students for a year and two others for a semester for their protest of Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather MacDonald, author of The War on Cops and vocal critic of Black Lives Matter.

Claremont McKenna has taken a very harsh approach. This administrative action could have a chilling effect on future protests. Every student should have the ability to counter offensive, reprehensible speech with their own criticism.

But the school is not rebuking all students who exercise their First Amendment rightsonly those who choose to prevent others from assembling and speaking. And they're not denying students the ability to appeal or subjecting them to an arbitrary process: sanctions are decided by a three-person panel, and students may have as little or as much participation in the investigation process as they want.

And besides, how should a college clarify its commitment to free speech?

In early April, protesters blocked entrances to the auditorium where MacDonald was slated to speak. Since nobody could get through to the event, she spoke to an empty room and livestreamed her speech as students pounded on doors and windows, shouting and chanting.

MacDonald's academic conclusions are controversial. In a Fox segment following the protests, she summarized the core ideas in her book. "There is no epidemic of racially-biased police shootings, the Black Lives Matter narrative is completely false, and there are thousands of law-abiding residents of minority communities who are desperate for more police protection."

In her livestreamed speech, she challenged Black Lives Matter's premise "that the police are the greatest threat facing young black men today," while clarifying that "every police shooting of an unarmed civilian is a stomach-churning tragedy."

With its disciplinary action, Claremont administrators have sent a message that illiberal shutdown tactics are not tolerated on campus. In an official statement, college officials concluded "the blockade breached institutional values of freedom of expression and assembly. Furthermore, this action violated policies...that prohibit material disruption of college programs and created unsafe conditions in disregard of state law."

Several of the students who received suspensions graduated in May, so their degrees are being withdrawn for one year. Fellow students and activists criticized the decision because of the impact it might have on the students' job prospects. Attorney Nana Gyamfi, who is representing the suspended students, called Claremont's decision "cruel and unusual punishment."

Physically blocking people from hearing the ideas of otherseven those viewed as apologists for copscreates an environment where free speech simply can't thrive. Heather MacDonald is an academic, not a professional provocateur. Her intellectual value must be considered stronger someone like a Milo Yiannopoulos. And she concedes in her speeches there are major issues with policing in the United States, and that a legacy of racial animosity toward law enforcement lingers on.

Claremont is right to make it abundantly clear that even disagreeable speech deserves to be heard and debated. And while student protests of this kind do not compare to outright government censorship of speech, it's startling to see these millennials barricading doors so their views won't be challenged.

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Claremont McKenna Disciplines Students in the Name of Free Speech - Reason

Every profession has its standards. Doctors who maim people lose their jobs, and teachers who abuse their students won't be licensed for long. But for lawyers, the list of unforgivable sins may be expanding to the heinous act of expressing personal opinions in social settings.

The American Bar Association is an organization that models rules for the legal profession. Different state bars are welcome to adopt their rules, and states overwhelmingly follow their lead. So when the ABA proposed an amendment to their misconduct standards, it was no small deal.

The problem is that the amendment is a violation of free speech. The relevant text states, "It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to ... engage in conduct that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law."

For clarity, the ABA also released comments, noting that, "Such discrimination includes harmful verbal or physical conduct that manifests bias or prejudice towards others" in activities including not just actually practicing law, but also "participating in bar association, business or social activities in connection with the practice of law."

This is incredibly broad language. Verbal conduct that manifests bias? Social activities in connection with legal practice?

Lawyers may often discuss controversial topics in forums like Continuing Legal Education events or a local bar dinner. What substantive conversation could lawyers hold that didn't violate a rule with such massive scope? Anyone actually expressing an opinion could run the risk of breaking the rule, which has already received plenty of criticism for "vague and uncertain" application doomed to be "fraught with difficulties" as well as its overbroad language and content discrimination.

But no one actually has to be thrown out of the legal profession for the rule to do its harm. As National Review writer David French points out, "actual enforcement isn't the point. It's about the fear of enforcement the chilling effect ... A mere allegation can ruin a career, and defending yourself from ethics boards can be painful and expensive even if your law practice remains intact. The safest course is always silence." The ultimate effect of rules like this is to reduce healthy debate to fearful compliance.

This rule is not alone in chilling speech in the name of workplace harassment.

For example, in 2006, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ordered further investigation in the case of an employee who complained that his co-worker's "Don't Tread on Me" hat constituted racial harassment. As UCLA Law professor Eugene Volokh notes, no sane person ignores the risk of massive liability when dealing with speech and harassment claims. It's easier and safer to steer clear of the line, even if that means curtailing legitimate speech. And it's not far-fetched to anticipate this kind of broad prohibition applying to strictly political speech that is construed as racially-motivated criticism or endorsement of a sexist viewpoint.

Proponents of the rule cite sexism as the reason the rule is necessary. And Bloomberg View contributor Noah Feldman warns that "harassing words are prohibited because they are the mechanism whereby discrimination occurs."

But, as many sources have noted (including the Disciplinary Board of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, The South Carolina Bar's Professional Responsibility Committee, the Texas Attorney General's Office, and the Illinois State Bar Association), this rule isn't necessary in the overwhelming majority of jurisdictions that already have anti-harassment rules.

Regardless, addressing sexism wouldn't require adopting a rule that, as a recent Montana Joint Resolution stated, "would unlawfully attempt to prohibit attorneys from engaging in conduct that neither adversely affects the attorney's fitness to practice law nor seriously interferes with the proper and efficient operation of the judicial system."

Various states and organizations have analyzed the proposed rule and rejected it, including those listed above, as well as the Professional Responsibility Committee of the ABA Business Law Section. States that do not adopt the proposed rule simply abide by their current anti-discrimination rules or adopt amended versions of the misconduct standards.

The bottom line is that lawyers don't sign away their free speech rights by virtue of their profession. Opposing harassment is not synonymous with regulating private speech. And when it comes to respecting free speech, this proposed rule simply crosses the line.

Jana Minich graduated from Cedarville University with a degree in political science. She is an incoming law student at the University of Virginia School of Law.

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The American Bar Association's chilling efforts to suppress free speech - Washington Examiner

The Detroit News Published 11:15 p.m. ET July 26, 2017

State lawmakers are right to be concerned about campus discourse but new bills could hurt, not help(Photo: David Guralnick / Detroit News)

Bad behavior on college campuses is plentiful, and the negative impact of these protests and assaults on free speech is real. While its understandable that some Michigan lawmakers want to take action, additional legislation could have the unintended effect of hampering students First Amendment rights.

Sen. Patrick Colbeck, R-Canton, introduced two bills earlier this year to address the growing concerns over free speech on campus. Most often it is conservative students and invited speakers who are silenced or deterred, and Colbeck says the states 15 publicly-funded universities are not doing enough to protect the constitutional rights of all students.

People are getting shouted down right now in our schools, Colbeck says. The people who are trying to express their free speech are the ones who are being penalized not the ones who are trying to infringe on those free speech rights. If people are saying that we dont need these laws then theyre tacitly approving of the infringement of the free speech rights of our citizens, and thats not acceptable.

The bills would seek to protect free expression on campus in several ways. For example, speech could only be restricted when it serves a compelling government interest, and administrators would need to provide ample alternative opportunities for the free expression.

The legislation also calls for colleges to craft a pro-free speech policy that would be emphasized during freshman orientation. The bills also punish students who violate the free speech rights of others. Repeat offenders would be punished more harshly. Currently, students who disrupt campus events and speeches they dislike face little repercussions.

Colbecks bills are modeled after legislation developed by the Goldwater Institute, which decided to tackle this issue after students at Paradise Valley Community College in Arizona were disciplined by the administration for passing out copies of the Constitution outside of certain free speech zones, according to senior attorney Jim Manley. A similar incident happened last fall at Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek.

Virginia, Wisconsin, California, North Carolina and Louisiana, in addition to Michigan, are pursuing the legislation.

Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, dubbed the 2016-17 academic year the Year of the Shout-Down, cataloging in National Review the many instances of anti-free speech activity.

In addition, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has found that Michigans public universities all have problematic free speech codes and at least five schools, including the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan, have policies that substantially restrict free speech.

Still there are concerns about the legislations potential negative impact. The ACLU of Michigan has said the bills could chill free speech through harsher penalties for protesting students. Government attempts to choke off political protest would surely be deemed unconstitutional.

To Colbecks credit, hes working with the ACLU to modify language in his bills. Rana Elmir, the groups deputy director, says that shes confident that the concerns that we raised will be addressed and some have already been addressed.

Lawmakers also must guard against usurping the ability of universities to maintain order on their campuses.

Michigans universities must do a better job of keeping speech free for all students. But any changes to existing law must err on the side of protecting the free speech rights of all, even those who are protesting other speakers.

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Our Editorial: Fight for robust speech on the quad - The Detroit News

Imagine if radical campus activists had to face the consequences of their actions. Imagine if they could no longer suppress and shut down speakers with impunity. Imagine if a college administrator grew a backbone and defended his institution from the barbarians at the gates.

Were not there yet. But Claremont McKenna College, a prominent liberal-arts school in Southern California, is at least taking action. The school has suspended five students who led attempts to shut down a college-sponsored lecture by Heather Mac Donald, the pro-police conservative commentator, in April. Three will be suspended for a full year, while two will be suspended for a semester. Two more will be placed on conduct probation.

The students, along with many others from the Claremont colleges and outside the university, blockaded the lecture hall where Mac Donald was set to speak, forcing the event to be moved and livestreamed from a secret location. In a statement, Claremont McKenna explained that the blockade breached institutional values of freedom of expression and assembly and deprived many of the opportunity to gather, hear the speaker, and engage with questions and comments.

Claremont McKenna should be applauded, first for inviting Mac Donald to speak, and second for taking a stand in defense of the idea of the university. It could have taken the easy way out, slapping all the protest leaders on the wrists with a mandatory course or probation to put an end to the story. Thats what Middlebury College did when its students shut down an event featuring Charles Murray, the libertarian social scientist, and in the process assaulted Professor Allison Stranger, who ended up with a concussion.

In fact, nobody ever seems to get punished for preventing the free exchange of ideas on a college campus. Unwilling to anger student radicals and their defenders in the media, college administrators routinely back down. They appease the crocodile, hoping that he will be grateful for the schools leniency and perhaps eat it last.

But appeasement has not worked. All across the country, student activists have become emboldened, trusting that they can do whatever they want, so long as they claim the moral high ground. After all, they only have to label a conservative as a white supremacist and they are free to take over campus and suppress her views. Their schools are too weak and fearful to stop them.

This is a sick state of affairs that should not continue. Claremont McKenna has shown that it is possible to take a stand. There is no reason why schools cannot suspend students who shut down campus speeches. Repeat offenders should be expelled. Anyone who participates in a violent protest should also be expelled. All schools should join Claremont McKenna in endorsing the University of Chicagos Principles of Free Expression, which declare that the University has a solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.

If, after that, a few radicals still seek to break the rules, let them suffer the consequences of satisfying their confused consciences. The rest of the student body the ones who dont want to spend the year back home with their parents will get the message: You can speak and protest all you want, but you cannot prevent someone else from speaking.

If conservative protesters force a Marxist student organization to cancel its speaker event, they should also be suspended. This is about more than protecting conservative speakers or viewpoint diversity. It is not even best framed as a matter of free speech. It is, quite simply, about repelling a growing assault on the idea of the university. In silencing lecturers and suppressing ideas, the students behind this assault place free inquiry within ever-more-circumscribed boundaries, necessarily perverting the pursuit of the truth that has always been academias sacred mission. If criticism of Black Lives Matter is out of bounds, for example, then what will separate the academy from the public square? Only the lack of personal responsibility.

Allan Bloom, that great defender of the university, explained its mission far better than I can:

The question that every young person asks, Who am I?, the powerful urge to follow the Delphic command, Know thyself, which is born in each of us, means in the first place What is man? And in our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers and thinking about them. Liberal education provides access to these alternatives, many of which go against the grain of our nature or our times. The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.

Bloom wrote thatliberal education puts everything at risk and requires students who are able to risk everything. But as he surely knew, it also requires courage on the part of teachers and administrators. Teachers must create a classroom that can bring students into contact with the alternative answers, and administrators must set and enforce rules that sustain teachers and students in their proper purpose.

In suspending students who deliberately shut down a campus speech, Claremont McKenna has stood up in defense of free speech and of itself. Let others follow.

READ MORE: BDS, Hypocrisy, and our Barren Public Sphere Be Very Worried about the Future of Free Expression Anti-Free-Speech Radicals Never Give Up

Elliot Kaufman is an editorial intern at National Review.

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Claremont McKenna Defends Free Speech Other Universities ... - National Review

Earlier this month, Americans came together to celebrate the founding of this nation with fireworks and sparklers.

Though the United States is still a relatively young country, it has undergone dramatic changes from what it once was in 1776. Not only have we drastically industrialized and expanded our landscape beyond the original 13 colonies, but our political culture and climate has also undergone its own transformations. Our Founding Fathers wisely prepared us for tackling tyrannical leaders, preventing government overreach, and protecting our personal liberty.

Yet, they failed to avoid the development of political echo chambers.

This is not to say these men had not anticipated the possibility of our country developing a divisive political culture. In fact, John Adams communicated his fears of our democracy splitting into a two-party system, "concerting measures in opposition of each other." He even went as far as to call this the "greatest political evil under our constitution."

It's not hard to see why Adams held such passionate distaste for political parties. Lately, our democracy has amounted to pointing fingers and name calling from the echo chambers we've created. But the effects of these biased bubbles pour into other aspects of life. According to a Rasmussen survey, 40 percent of voters claimed the 2016 election negatively affected a personal relationship with a friend or family member. We've even seen students escalate to violent protests on college campuses against classmates they disagree with.

With the power of technology, we can retreat into our echo chambers on social media platforms. We can delete, block, and report dissent away. It becomes easier and easier to control what messages and ideas we hear behind our screens. This encourages the idea that tolerance is optional. That you can cut off relationships because you disagree with the other person; furthermore, you can segregate people in groups based on said opinions.

Intolerance of differing ideas is not the way to achieve positive social change. Intolerance only begets negative outcomes.

At Young Americans for Liberty, we strive to foster a culture of tolerance and respect. Disagreement is inevitable; how one addresses disagreement and differing perspectives is the key to success. I discourage everyone to stray away from trying to belittle our philosophical opponents on social media, that ultimately create opposing echo chambers and do not yield a positive result.

The message of liberty is a positive one. We are driven to action grounded in the principles of free markets, individual liberty, and limited government.

Every July we host our national convention that draws hundreds of students from multiple political, economic, and social backgrounds to engage in these ideas. Given their varying backgrounds, these students are bound to disagree with one another on the nuances of liberty. We even stage debates between people of different beliefs who nonetheless believe in the same overarching principles. I assure you, the overall theme is siding with more freedom, and less government intervention.

So what's our plan to combat big-government ideology among youths? I can tell you this: When a socialist comes to campus to speak, you won't see YAL members burning the campus to the ground or throwing rocks through windows. Through robust, campus activism and outreach efforts, YAL members are working hard to present the ideas of liberty in a powerful, peaceful manner to win the hearts and minds of the next generation.

Cliff Maloney Jr. is president of Young Americans for Liberty, a non-profit, youth organization based in Arlington, Va., that boasts more than 900 college chapters across the country.

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On intolerance for free speech, it's time for millennials to lead - Washington Examiner

Like disputes over abortion, the death penalty, and drug prohibition, the conflict between Israel and Palestine divides Americans into polarized camps of mutual distrust. If any consensus is possible on those issues, it is that there is nothing like a consensus, and that the attendant conflict is better handled through politics than violence.

Yet dozens of members of Congress have backed confusingly worded legislation that would impose new restrictions on American citizens who want to participate in boycotts against Israel, if they originate with an international organization like the UN or the EU. The bill thus seems to risk excluding some would-be boycotters from normal politics by criminalizing some expressions of dissent as a serious felony.

One neednt favor Boycott, Divest, Sanctions, the most prominent boycott campaign targeting Israel, to believe that criminalizing boycotts is deeply illiberal.

Say that BDS is the best path to securing equitable peace in the Middle East. Or say that targeting Israel for a boycott, alone among countries that abuse human rights, is inconsistent, wrongheaded, and unlikely to help Palestinians. The merits dont matter here. Americans have a right to adopt even mistaken positions, to engage in even ill-advised activism, and to stop dealing with even laudable entities.

Just how bad the new proposal is depends on how its least-clear language is interpreted. Domestically conceived boycotts of Israel would definitely remain legal.

But according to the ACLU, the law would punish individuals for no reason other than their political beliefs by expanding the Export Administration Act of 1979 and the Export-Import Bank Act of 1945, which prohibit U.S. persons from complying with a foreign governments request to boycott a country friendly to the U.S.

The ACLU analysis argues that:

the bill would amend those laws to bar U.S. persons from supporting boycotts against Israel, including its settlements in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, conducted by international governmental organizations, such as the United Nations and the European Union. It would also broaden the law to include penalties for simply requesting information about such boycotts. Violations would be subject to a minimum civil penalty of $250,000 and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison. We take no position for or against the effort to boycott Israel or any foreign country. However, we do assert that the government cannot, consistent with the First Amendment, punish U.S. persons based solely on their expressed political beliefs.

At National Review, Noah Daponte-Smith mostly agreed. This proposed legislation is indeed unconstitutional and unconscionable, an abridgment of the right to free speech, which is quasi-sacred in American life and enshrined in the founding document of our government, he complained. The senators who currently support it should be, quite frankly, ashamed of themselves, he added. They have lost sight of one of the founding principles of American government, allowing it to be overshadowed by the spectral world of the IsraeliPalestinian dispute.

Other analysts took issue with the ACLUs reading.

Haaretz reports that two of the bills original bipartisan co-sponsors, Senator Ben Cardin and Representative Rob Portman, insist its critics are overstating what it actually forbids:

They wrote that the bills critics misunderstood its language and that despite the ACLUs warnings, no U.S. citizen will face legal penalties for supporting a boycott of Israel under the new legislation. The two congressman explained in their letter that the most controversial part of the bill the one detailing the criminal penalties for participating in boycotts of Israel was in fact an expansion of a law, enacted in 1977, prohibiting U.S. companies from taking part in state-led boycotts of Israel.

That bill was adopted in order to counter the Arab boycott of Israel. The new bill adds a new component to it, stipulating that the penalties for participating in a state-led boycott of Israel will also extend to participation in boycotts led by international governmental organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union.

The newspaper added, Not all of the bills critics are convinced. The language is confusing and doesnt clearly state what Cardin and Portman wrote in their letter, one Democratic staffer told Haaretz, adding that it wouldnt surprise me if a large number of Democrats will ask to amend this, making it much more clear that citizens expressing support for boycotts will not be punished for their political opinion.

The bill strikes me as constitutionally suspect even if Cardin and Portman are correct that only companies, not individuals, will be targeted for participating in some boycotts. If a U.S. citizen owns a chain of Mediterranean restaurants, or a plastic-widget factory, or a freight-forwarding service, and declines to do company business with a foreign country, in support of a UN-led boycott against what she regards as human-rights abuses there, it would be an outrage to punish her as a felon.

Another analysis worth considering, The US anti-BDS bill may be bad, but not as bad as some critics say by David Schraub at Jewish Telegraphic Agency, argues that although the ACLU is mistaken in some of the concerns that it expresses, the bill nevertheless poses a significant risk of chilling speech because whether or not Israel boycotters are doing so because they personally find the nation terrible versus because they wish to support a U.N. declaration that Israel is terrible will often be quite blurry. In any event, its not clear why that should be legally dispositive.

He concludes, laws can be bad without being apocalyptic and inadvisable without being unconstitutional. Discussions of Israel/Palestine, in particular, suffer from a marked propensity from people on all sides to abandon care and perspective This bill does not do the more outrageous things it stands accused of. That does not mean it is well-drafted, necessary or worth the tempest it is stirring up.

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Why an Effort to Thwart Some Boycotts of Israel Fails the Free-Speech Test - The Atlantic

In May, when lawyers for tech goliath LinkedIn warned a tiny data-scraping operation to stop gathering information from its members profiles, they probably didnt realize they were teeing up a weighty legal conundrum over the public square characteristics of privately owned social media sites.

Yet because of the crucial role that data analytics now plays in society, a squabble of seemingly traffic-ticket dimensions has drawn world-class legal talent, with Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe enlisted in the data-miners defense, while former Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Jr., has been retained by LinkedIn, which was acquired by Microsoft (MSFT) last year for $26 billion.

On Thursday the people analytics startup known as hiQLabs, which has built its whole business on data scoured from LinkedIns member profiles, will ask a federal judge in San Francisco to order its unwilling host to stop blocking its bots, citing federal and state constitutional free speech guarantees.

Data analytics on public information is a foundation stone of the modern internet, wrote Tribe and two other hiQ lawyers in a brief filed last week. They depict hiQ as following in the footsteps of such seminal web pioneers as Alta Vista, Excite, and Google. Without such technologies internet users would be unable to make sense of the billions of web pages that exist in this modern marketplace of ideas, the brief continues. To allow LinkedIn to impose debilitating financial and criminal liability on a startup for accessing public pages would have a widespread chilling effect on innovation across the country, and thereby thwart valuable commercial and academic research.

In response, LinkedIn portrays the case as far simpler. LinkedIn is a private entity with a right to control access to its private property and to decide how and to whom it will make information available from its servers as part of its business, argue its lawyers, Verrilli and Jonathan Blavin, both of Munger Tolles & Olson. hiQ has identified no plausible legal justification for the unprecedented relief it seeksa mandatory injunction granting hiQ access to LinkedIns computers so that hiQ can . . . threaten the privacy of LinkedIns members and the integrity of LinkedIns relationship with those members. (LinkedIn earned $975 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2017.)

Because hiQs information-gathering activity informs its communications with clients, hiQ maintains that it is entitled to free-speech protection. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, however, ordinarily protects citizens only against government attempts to limit speechnot actions by private companies, like LinkedIn. For that reason, hiQ relies mainly on the free speech provision of the California state constitution, which has been found to afford protection even in certain quasi-public forums, like privately owned shopping malls. In addition, hiQ hopes to capitalize on language from a U.S. Supreme Court decision handed down just last month, in which the justices characterized social media sitesincluding Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitteras the equivalent of the modern public square, and one of the most important places . . . for the exchange of views today. In that case, Packingham v. North Carolina, the court struck down, on First Amendment grounds, a state law that broadly banned convicted sex offenders from accessing social media sites.

Based in San Francisco, hiQ was founded in 2012, has raised about $14.5 million in financing, and employs 23 people, of whom 11 have advanced degrees, it says. The company offers corporate clients data analysis of their own workforces. To do this, it analyzes data that its automated web-crawling software programs, or bots, gather from the employees public profiles on LinkedIn. One hiQ service, called Keeper, for instance, identifies which employees hiQ judges to be most irreplaceable and the greatest flight risks. Another service, called Skill Mapper, assesses talent deficiencies in the clients workforce. In its briefs, hiQ identifies eBay, Capital One, and GoDaddy as clients, and claims that Bank of New York Mellon, Chevron, and IBM are among its prospective clients.

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LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. Photo: Stephen Lam/Getty Images

While there is no dispute that hiQ uses only public profilesinformation that LinkedIn members have elected to leave open to the worldLinkedIn deploys multiple technological shields in an effort to render even that information off-limits to bots. Bots, the company argues in its briefs, pose security threats to its members (they may be being operated by identity thieves or fraudsters, for instance) and technical threats to the site (in that they could bring it down through overload, including denial-of-service attacks). While LinkedIn does permit bots from certain known search engines, like Google and Bing, it blocks about 95 million data-scraping attempts per day, according to its briefs.

LinkedIn has no idea whether a bot may have good intentions, or whether it is a malicious actor, such as a hacker seeking to take down the LinkedIn site, a spammer, or an identity thief, the companys lawyers wrote in a brief filed last week.

Sometime this spring, LinkedIn says, it learned that hiQs bots were somehow piercing its standard lines of defenses. hiQ claims, in contrast, that LinkedIn actually knew what it had been doing for years, but only started objecting recently, after forming a plan to launch a competing people analytics service of its own.

On May 23 LinkedIns lawyers served hiQ with a cease-and-desist letter, alleging that hiQ, by circumventing its technological shields, was violating the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and a California anti-hacking statute, among other laws. Later, LinkedIn started rebuffing hiQs botssuccessfully, this timeby blocking seven internet addresses it had figured out belonged to hiQ.

On June 7 hiQ sued in federal court in San Francisco, asking for a judicial declaration that its practices were lawful, and a temporary restraining order preventing LinkedIn from locking out its bots.

By selectively blocking a company from access to its public profiles for anticompetitive purposes, says hiQ attorney Deepak Gupta, of Farella Braun & Martel, in an interview, LinkedIn is acting unlawfully not only as a matter of unfair competition law but also as a matter of the constitutional law of both the United States and California.

In a press statement, LinkedIn says: Our members control the information that they make available to others on LinkedIn and they trust us to honor that control. HiQ is taking member data, without their knowledge, and using it for purposes our members havent agreed to.

U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen will preside over Thursdays hearing. At an earlier proceeding, on June 29, he appeared torn by the issues presented. On the one hand, he expressed skepticism that the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Acta criminal statutereally barred the mere use of bots to harvest public information. You can get it manually if you hired a hundred million people to do it, he observed, but if you want to do it quickly and automatedly, you cant do it? That is a crime?

At the same time, he seemed reluctant to mint a broad, new constitutional right that might prevent LinkedIn and other sites from warding off the millions of bot attacks they sustain daily.

If Judge Chen doesnt grant hiQ a preliminary injunction, the startup may turn into a shutdown. HiQ attorney Gupta acknowledged at a hearing last month that, without a court order, the company was likely to go under. Though LinkedIn agreed to a standstill agreement on June 29, permitting hiQs bots to resume scouring the site until Judge Chen ruled, the outfit appears to have no Plan B.

Employees are coming to work, Gupta said when LinkedIn was blocking its bots, and theres really nothing for them to do.

Roger Parloff writes about law and business.

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LinkedIn lawsuit could determine whether bots have a right to free speech - Yahoo Finance

The article WSUs Camp Candoo mixes fun and friendship for children with speech disorders was a great read! It makes me feel good to know that there is such an innovative camp for children with the many different types of speech disorders faced by young people. My hat goes off to the founders of Camp Candoo.

If I may, I would like to mention to Spokesman-Review readers a little-known topic concerning speech disorders in children. Regrettably, it is not well-known that every child in the U.S. with any type of speech problem has the right to free speech therapy, as dictated by federal legislation in the 1970s. This benefit of free therapy is not an entitlement based on family income, and is therefore open to all children. An informative source on accessing this free speech therapy is a brochure, Special Education Law and Children Who Stutter, on the website of The Stuttering Foundation (www.stutteringhelp.org), a site known for its free resources for children and adults who stutter. Again, all the speech problems are encompassed by this amazing benefit of free speech therapy.

Edward Herrington

Naples, Florida

Originally posted here:
Free speech therapy - The Spokesman-Review

Wyoming Equality has the right to discriminate. They have a right to treat me differently than they treat others, just because of what I believe. They have the right to refuse me employment, just because of who I am. When they declined to speak and act in support of my views, they were perfectly within their rights.

Likewise, bakeries, florists and printers who think like Wyoming Equality have the right to refuse my request to create pastries, arrangements or prints that contradict the message they want to send. They have the right to call you and me bigots, homophobes and haters. They even have a right to say that we are morally wrong.

Every single day, groups like these exercise their first amendment rights. And it hurts. It hurts me, personally. It shames me publicly as it is intended to and it has created a climate where people who share the same ideas that I do are materially harmed on a regular basis. It hurts, but I still defend their right to discriminate.

Some, like Memories Pizza in Indiana, were forced to close due to threats of arson and bodily harm. Others, like Melissas Sweet Cakes in Oregon, had their equipment vandalized. Still more have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to the harassment and fines of their own state or city governments.

Businesses like Elane Photography, Arlenes Flowers and Masterpiece Cake Shop have been shuttered. Public servants like Kelvin Cochrane and Ruth Neely have been fired for expressing their beliefs off the job.

Discrimination is happening every day, in plain sight. I wish it would stop. I have personally talked with LGBT lobbyists and asked them to stop. I have publicly written in these pages asking to be included in a serious conversation of how we might work together to stop it. (Lets Work Together to Protect All Wyo. Citizens, Jan. 3)

There are many other civic-minded people as well who sincerely want to join hands to protect all Wyoming citizens from harm to both their person and property. Instead, two Cheyenne city councilmen have been working in secret with Wyoming Equality for months, refusing every request even to see a draft of what they are working on.

It is clearer every day that the real point of the ordinance is not to stop actual discrimination but to insert sexual orientation and gender identity language into city code. Thats the whole thing. Anybody who thinks theres a better way to address discrimination is excluded from the table.

Advocating for this SOGI language, Wyoming Equalitys Sara Burlingame has a favorite talking point which was quoted in the WTE last Thursday: [it is] currently legal to fire, evict or refuse service to someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. (Councilmen Again Pushing for Protections for LGBT Residents, July 20, 2017)

Of course, this is true. But its a half truth rather, it is a scintilla of the truth. The whole truth is that it is currently legal to fire, evict or refuse service to someone because of their political party, hair color, height, weight, IQ, schooling, tattoos and a million other relevant and irrelevant factors.

But is anyone saying that we should include all of this in an ordinance? That would be silly. Laws are not given to make everybody virtuous, or to make everybody do whatever I think they ought to do.

Laws are passed when there is actual harm that is happening which needs to be stopped, not simply when there is potential harm few, if any, are actually doing. So where is the actual harm? Who, exactly, has been denied employment or housing based on sexual orientation or gender identity? We have been debating these SOGI laws for years and still havent seen one single case of this kind of discrimination in Wyoming.

Andrew Koppelman, a law professor and progressive activist, has studied discrimination nationwide and found, Hardly any of these cases have occurred: a handful in a country of 300 million. In all of them, the people who objected to the law were asked directly to facilitate same-sex relationships by providing wedding, adoption, or artificial insemination services or rental of bedrooms. There have been no claims of a right to simply refuse to deal with gay people.

Again, there have been no claims of a right to simply refuse service to gay people. None. What people are claiming is the right to decline saying things, by word or deed, that they dont believe to be true. They simply want the same right that Wyoming Equality exercises every day.

For this reason, I find it offensive and disingenuous when people who are defending the First Amendment are smeared as haters who want to deny service to certain people. Those who make these unjust claims know better. They just dont want to talk about the real issue.

There simply is no rising tide of discrimination against people on the basis of gender ideology. But there is, demonstrably, a rising trend to punish people who disagree with gender ideology. So why would Cheyenne want to jump on that bandwagon?

Perhaps Rolling Stone magazine offers a clue. In a June 23 article, Meet the Megadonor Behind the LGBT Rights Movement, Andy Kroll details how the software mogul, Tim Gill, is stealthily using his $500 million fortune to bankroll SOGI legislation across the country.

Most interesting for Wyomingites is that he is not giving his money to national candidates. Instead, he is quietly giving thousands of dollars to elect LGBT-friendly state legislators and to advance local SOGI ordinances.

Perhaps someone should ask Richard Johnson and Scott Roybal if they are writing Cheyennes ordinance alone or if the Gill Foundation is calling the shots. Kroll relates how even the ACLU was forced to sing Gills tune. If it can do that, its not too far-fetched to consider the same possibility in Cheyenne.

But lets get back to Wyoming Equalitys right to discriminate. Do I want to pass a law that strips them of these rights? By no means. I will reason and cajole. I will seek to persuade them both publicly and privately to respect my person and my ideals. But I will never, ever, seek the force of law to hinder their rights to speak and act according to their convictions. I wish they would do the same for me.

Forbidding convictions is not only unAmerican, but its unhuman. No matter how passionately I disagree with someones philosophy, there is one thing that we should always be able to agree on: The freedom to speak and act according to ones convictions comes from a source higher than government. It derives from our common humanity.

Government has no right to take it away. We shouldnt give it the power. The sweetness of a momentary victory comes at a bitter cost to our common dignity.

Right now, people on both sides of the issue are free to say and do things that challenge the other side. We are both free to disagree using reason, logic, morals, beliefs and even feelings. In this respect, the playing field is level.

We can all hope, pray, and work to see that we use our freedoms in charity and in mutual respect. But an ordinance which takes rights away from one side of the debate will not bring about love and respect. It will only slant the playing field.

Jonathan Lange has a heart for our state and community. Locally, he has raised his family and served as pastor of Our Saviour Lutheran Church in Evanston and St. Pauls in Kemmerer for two decades. Statewide, he leads the Wyoming Pastors Network in advocating for the traditional church in the public square.

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Free speech and the right to discriminate - Uinta County Herald

My conversation with Faisal Saeed Al Mutar can be best summed up with one word: Balance.

Al Mutar is an Iraqi-born human rights activist who has been published in The Humanistand appeared as a guest multiple times on The Rubin Report, the talk show hosted by classical liberal pundit Dave Rubin. He has a nuanced view on questions pertaining to relations between the West and the Islamic world, denouncing both the Islamophobia of reactionary politicians like President Donald Trump and what he perceives as the apologist tendencies of certain factions on the left.

It is difficult, in this age of increasingly polarized extremes, to strike a balance between two positions. In terms of the ongoing fight against Islamist terrorism, there are sides who claim that all criticism of Muslim individuals is somehow bigoted, while others seem incapable of or unwilling to recognize the difference between the majority of innocent Muslims and the handful of terrorists.

I picked apart these distinctions and tried to have a measured, balanced conversation with Al Mutar.

On the similarities between the far right critics of Islam and the Islamists themselves:

There are all these people trying to push what a Muslim should be. So with ISIS theyre telling youif you want to be a Muslim you have to follow these strict codes. And for the alt right-ers they say the ISIS narrative is the only way to be a Muslim. So somehow they kind of compliment each other. And so after the same-sex marriage which I think it was great, like a celebration of diversity and love, and love is love, right? And amazing that in a country that is as free as the United Kingdom that they allowed that to happen. And I was watching, observing what people were saying. And you go to alt-right websites, other than saying Wow, thats amazing that there arefresh liberal voices coming up, they were attackingthem.Like, oh these guys arenot real Muslims, theyre infidels. Which is kind of the same thingthat ISIS says about these people!

On why he is so critical of President Donald Trump:

If you are really standing for fighting against Islamic extremism and stuff like that, when you ban entire nations especially countries like Iraq and Iran and many of these folks who are on the front lines of fighting Islamic extremism and terrorism and so on and, if you ban them from coming to the country or make an entire condemnation of entire nations, youre not really siding with the allies that you claim that youre siding with.

Watch our conversation for more on finding balance in the Islamic extremism debate.

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WATCH: Free speech advocate Faisal Al Mutar faces criticsm from right and left - Salon