The Fourth Circuit reversed a district court’s holding that pressing the “Like” button on Facebook is not “enough speech” to warrant First Amendment protection.
The opinion compares “liking” a political candidate on Facebook to “displaying a political sign in one’s front yard,” undoubtedly a form of protected political speech. The Court upheld the First Amendment right of a public official’s employees to “like” an opposing candidate’s Facebook page.
Read more about the decision here.
In August, New Jersey became the twelfth state to pass a law prohibiting employers from asking employees for their social media usernames and passwords. Read more about the New Jersey law here.
Some states, including California, Michigan, and Illinois, also prohibit schools from requiring students to disclose their social media passwords. Illinois’s Right to Privacy in the School Setting Act takes effect January 1, 2014.
The Reporter’s Committee for the Freedom of the Press filed an amicus brief in ACLU v. Clapper arguing that government collection of call records violates the First Amendment freedom of the press by impeding reporters’ ability to maintain confidential sources.
The brief supports the ACLU’s motion for a preliminary injunction to stop the NSA from collecting logs of the time and duration of phone calls made within the United States. The ACLU’s complaint includes a First Amendment claim based on the freedom of association — the right to organize and express political ideas as a group — but RCFP’s brief focuses on the right of the press to gather news.
The brief argues that mass surveillance makes sources more wary of contacting journalists and emphasizes that confidential sources are critical to accurate reporting on important issues.
Today the D.C. Circuit will hear oral arguments in Verizon v. FCC, Verizon’s challenge to the FCC’s Open Internet Rules passed in 2010. The rules are designed to prevent Internet service providers from engaging in practices that favor certain content.
While the main question in this case is whether the FCC has the authority regulate the Internet in this way, also at issue is Verizon’s novel First Amendment claim: Verizon contents that it has a First Amendment right to make decisions about how to treat Internet traffic on its network.
Read more about this case and the FCC’s Open Internet Rules here.
A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion released yesterday shed more light on how the National Security Agency collects Americans’ email data, highlighting the disconnect between the NSA’s collection practices and the Obama Administration’s characterization of email surveillance under the PRISM program.
The FISA Court opinion held that methods used by the NSA from 2007 to 2011 of collecting email data — including the content of email subject lines, senders, and times of transmission — violated the Fourth Amendment and Federal statutes. While the NSA can collect emails involving foreign senders and recipients under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, it cannot collect purely domestic emails.
Until 2011, the NSA’s collection of emails involved collecting “bundles” of emails from individuals’ inboxes, failing to separate the purely domestic emails bundled with the “targeted” emails involving non-U.S. persons. Basically, the NSA was collecting screenshots of individuals’ inboxes when only one of many emails in the screenshot was the subject of the investigation.
Since details of the PRISM email surveillance program were leaked in June, President Obama has repeatedly told Americans not to worry because “the NSA cannot target your emails.” While the President has never clarified what “targeting” means, this opinion makes it clear that, at least before 2011, the fact that Americans’ emails were not “targeted” doesn’t mean they were not collected.
Several proposed amendments to key sections of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, including a bill that failed in a close House vote last month, would prohibit the “bulk” collection of data. These amendments would require the NSA to show that someone is the subject of an investigation before it collects that person’s data.
Natasha Duarte is a 2L at the University of North Carolina School of Law and a first-year master’s student at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
