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Posts by Jonathan Peters

Apr 27

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So your tweets are no different from bank records, huh?

Posted 24 days ago by Jonathan Peters

Follow me @jonathanwpeters on Twitter.

Your tweets are no different from bank records, a New York judge ruled Monday.  Prosecutors had subpoenaed an Occupy protestor’s tweets after he was arrested in the fall during a Brooklyn Bridge protest.  The judge was ruling on the protestor’s motion to quash the subpoena, which sought “user information, including email address,” and three months of tweets from the protestor’s Twitter feed. As Adam Martin wrote in The Atlantic:

 Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. wrote that there was no precedent in New York for an order to quash a subpoena to a “third-party online social networking service seeking to obtain the defendant’s user information and postings.” But he wrote that “an analogy may be drawn to the bank record cases where courts have consistently held that an individual has no right to challenge a subpoena issued against the third-party bank.” Sciarrino ruled that [the protestor] couldn’t quash the subpoena, but he didn’t necessarily rule that the tweets or other information would be admissible as evidence.

The judge added that prosecutors proved that the tweets might be relevant to the case against the protestor, calling into question his “anticipated defense” that police officers led protesters onto the bridge before arresting them.  The judge also said that ”Twitter’s license to use the defendant’s Tweets means that the Tweets the defendant posted were not his.”  (The license is non-exclusive.)  For its part, Twitter had notified the protestor of the subpoena and had refused to comply with it while the protestor prepared his motion to quash.

I’m troubled by the judge’s reasoning. Read more

Mar 14

2 Comments

Lee Bollinger: “We can expect censorship anywhere to be censorship everywhere”

Posted 68 days ago by Jonathan Peters

This is the seventh in a series of interviews I’m conducting with lawyers and scholars around the country who’ve made a mark on the First Amendment.  Follow me @jonathanwpeters on Twitter. 

Lee Bollinger is the president of Columbia University. Previously, he was the president of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he also had served as a law professor and dean of the law school. Bollinger is the chair of the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a director of the Washington Post Company, and a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. He is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.  A leading First Amendment scholar, Bollinger is widely published on the freedoms of speech and press, and his books include: “Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era,” ”Images of a Free Press,” “The Tolerant Society: Freedom of Speech and Extremist Speech in America,” and “Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century.”

What’s the most serious threat today to free expression?

Censorship increasingly is a threat not only to the citizens of countries where there is censorship but also to the larger system, which is global in nature. We can expect censorship anywhere to be censorship everywhere. You see the effects of censorship on new technologies and on the substance of speech itself. I think we’ve moved in the world, through markets and trade and foreign investment, to a point where there’s a degree of interdependency of all countries. And that means we need to have a global marketplace of ideas.

In the United States, though, we’re still thinking of freedom of speech and press as national phenomena, and of course we care about free speech in other countries, but we think of it as a matter of human rights. But it’s more than that—it’s about the collective global discussion that has to happen in order to shape the world in ways that citizens want to shape it. Read more

Feb 7

It’s time to update the law to protect journalists who use the cloud to store information

Posted 104 days ago by Jonathan Peters

I’m careful … not to keep anything sensitive in the cloud that might compromise a source. And that’s not only because of the technical risk that someone might access my data without my knowledge, but also because the legal protection for journalists using the cloud is, well, cloudy. Congress should clear the air by updating the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 (PPA), which protects journalists generally from government searches and seizures.

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Jan 26

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Floyd Abrams on Free Expression, Broadcast Regulation, WikiLeaks, Citizens United and SOPA

Posted 116 days ago by Jonathan Peters

One thing that troubles me is the willingness of too many people to be selective in their support for First Amendment norms, because of their political or ideological views. The First Amendment doesn’t work that way—its protections don’t vary according to whether the left or right will benefit from a particular case. The Nation magazine invited me to a forum in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Someone at the forum said, “The wrong people are winning First Amendment cases. What can we do about it?” My answer was, “Maybe you ought to change your political views to conform with your First Amendment views, rather than the other way around, trying to change the First Amendment to conform with your political views.

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Jan 13

What Are the Rights of Reporters Covering Protests?

Posted 129 days ago by Jonathan Peters

Reporting on protests is no easy job—just ask the thirty-six reporters arrested while covering the Occupy movement, from New York to Boston to Nashville and beyond. Amid clashes between protesters and the police, the reporters ran afoul of the law. They went places where they weren’t supposed to go, and they did things they weren’t supposed to do. Or so claim the police.

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Jan 6

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Free Expression: Five Questions with Jack Balkin

Posted 136 days ago by Jonathan Peters

If you build censorship requirements into the infrastructure of free expression, you shouldn’t be surprised if governments start using them more expansively and more frequently. That’s because, to put it bluntly, government officials can almost always find a good reason to limit access, to filter and to block. We’re not China or Iran, but that’s all the more reason not to start going down the same road.

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Dec 8

Free Speech: Eight Questions With Geoffrey Stone

Posted 165 days ago by Jonathan Peters

The capacity of the government to keep information from the public is effectively a means of censorship, without actually restricting speech as such. With a strong executive branch, today we find ourselves in a position where we can say what we want, but we can’t get the information we need in order to speak intelligently.

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Dec 1

Indecency and the FCC: It’s time to ditch Pacifica

Posted 172 days ago by Jonathan Peters

The question today is whether indecency regulation makes sense at all on a media landscape dotted by online and streaming entertainment options.

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Nov 25

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Enough is enough: End the arrests of journalists documenting police activity in public places

Posted 178 days ago by Jonathan Peters

I don’t envy Bloomberg—or any other mayor—who has the difficult job of protecting public parks and at the same time preserving the right peaceably to assemble. But this, arresting journalists, is part of a larger problem, a pattern of harassing people for documenting police activity in public view.

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Nov 10

Free Press: Five Questions with Lee Levine, Outside Counsel to the New York Times, Many Others

Posted 193 days ago by Jonathan Peters

“To the extent WikiLeaks is receiving information without participating in illegal conduct, and the information disseminated is truthful and about a matter of public concern, then WikiLeaks is entitled to as much protection as any press organization doing essentially the same thing.”

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