Posts Tagged free speech

Corporate Censorship Of Alex Jones

From Spiked:

 Radicals and liberals declared themselves ‘very glad’ that these business elites enforced censorship against Jones and Infowars. We should be ‘celebrating the move’, said Vox, because ‘it represents a crucial step forward in the fight against fake news’. Liberals for capitalist censorship! The world just got that bit odder, and less free.

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Facebook Censoring Links To Gun File Site

From The Washington Free Beacon:

Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Coalition, told the Free Beacon that links to CodeIsFreeSpeech.com have been blocked by Facebook, and Amazon has taken the site down from its servers. The website, which has republished the gun-design files at the center of the Wilson case, is a joint project of the Firearms Policy Coalition, Firearms Policy Foundation, Calguns Foundation, and California Association of Federal Firearms Licenses. Combs said publishing the files was within their First Amendment rights and the actions taken by employees at the tech giants is an attempt to censor them that he believes may have wide-ranging consequences

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Social Media Purge Has Begun

From Zero Hedge:

One day after what appeared to be a coordinated attack by media giants Facebook, Apple, Spotify and Google on Alex Jones, whose various social media accounts were banned or suspended in a matter of hours, the crackdown against alternative media figures continued as several Libertarian figures, including the Ron Paul Institute director, found their Twitter accounts suspended.

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Journalists Want Exemption To Facebook Rules

From The New York Times:

In a letter sent Monday, lawyers for a group of researchers and journalists asked Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, to alter the agreement that people must adhere to to use the site. They want Facebook to create a news-gathering exception to its bans on creating inauthentic accounts and on using automated tools that scrape public data about users for large-scale analysis.

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ACLU Retreats From Defending Free Speech

From Reason:

The American Civil Liberties Union will weigh its interest in protecting the First Amendment against its other commitments to social justice, racial equality, and women’s rights, given the possibility that offensive speech might undermine ACLU goals.

“Our defense of speech may have a greater or lesser harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed,” wrote ACLU staffers in a confidential memo obtained by former board member Wendy Kaminer.

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Bill Whittle: Guns, Knives, Facebook and Free Speech

Bill Whittle:

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Guns, Bans and YouTube

From Free The People:

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Defense Distributed Part of New Documentary

From The Verge:

In the film, Wilson is openly positive about the election of Donald Trump, which may help explain the film’s chilly reception among the liberal-leaning Sundance audience. Then again, there are plenty of reasons for people on the left — Lough included — to find Wilson unsettling. Lough interviews him at length in The New Radical, about other pioneers of the crypto movement, other libertarian radical activists, and how printable weapons level the playing field for anyone who wants a potentially undetectable plastic gun without any government oversight.

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Students Arrested For Handing Out Constitutions

From Washington Times:

Kellogg Community College students Brandon Withers and Michelle Gregoire were arrested Sept. 20, 2015, in Battle Creek after they refused to stop handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution on campus. Officials cited the school’s Solicitation Policy, which requires permission for such behavior, before having the Young Americans for Liberty members and a friend arrested.

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Lawmaker Trolls Anti-Gun Hypocrites With Reporter Registration Bill

From US News:

A South Carolina lawmaker invited nationwide condemnation Tuesday with legislation proposing a mandatory journalist registry and potential jail time for violators. But state Rep. Mike Pitts now says he intentionally duped reporters and press advocates to expose what he sees as their hypocrisy.

“I filed this legislation as an experiment to make a point about the media and how they only care about the constitution when it comes their portion of the 1st Amendment,” the Republican legislator wrote on his Facebook page Wednesday morning.

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EFF Files Brief In Support Of Defense Distributed’s 3-D Files

From EFF:

The underlying legal ideas stretch back to one of EFF’s earliest major legal victories. Twenty years ago, in Bernstein v. U.S. Department of Justice, a judge articulated that code is speech inrejecting so-called export restrictions on code that implements cryptographic protocols. Daniel Bernstein, a mathematics Ph.D. student, wanted to publish source code for a program to run an algorithm he developed. He objected to the State Department classification of his code as a “munition” and, with EFF’s help, sued to establish his First Amendment right to publish the code without arbitrary restrictions outlined in the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and other laws—restrictions that included registering as an arms dealer and submitting the code for governmental review.

Read EFF’s full amicus brief here.

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Cody Wilson Versus The United States

From Fox News:

The (15) members of Congress, led by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Kent., signed onto an amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where Texas inventor Cody Wilson is fighting a lower court ruling in favor of the government agency. The State Department in 2013, citing a law allowing it to regulate international arms trafficking, blocked Wilson and his nonprofit group Defense Distributed from posting technical data for 3-D printing of legal handguns.

Wilson has received more “friend of the court” backup from policy think tank Cato Institute and various free speech organizations.

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Poet Sentenced To Death In Saudi Arabia

From The Guardian:

A Palestinian poet and leading member of Saudi Arabia’s nascent contemporary art scene has been sentenced to death for renouncing Islam.

A Saudi court on Tuesday ordered the execution of Ashraf Fayadh, who has curated art shows in Jeddah and at the Venice Biennale. The poet, who said he did not have legal representation, was given 30 days to appeal against the ruling.

Fayadh, 35, a key member of the British-Saudi art organisation Edge of Arabia, was originally sentenced to four years in prison and 800 lashes by the general court in Abha, a city in the south-west of the ultraconservative kingdom, in May 2014.

 

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NRA Stands Up For First Amendment

From NRA-ILA:

As we reported in June, the Obama Administration’s State Department (DOS) proposed a revision of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) on June 3 that would require anyone seeking to make certain types of information about firearms publicly available to first obtain government approval. Prior restraints of the sort contemplated by the proposal are among the most disfavored regulations of speech under First Amendment case law. Our original alert encouraged gunsmiths, manufacturers, reloaders, serious hobbyists, and others who rely on design, development, production or manufacturing information about firearms to file comments with the State Department opposing the rule and explaining its problems.

 

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Defense Distributed Injunction Against State Department Denied

From Reason.com:

This week U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman denied a motion for a preliminary injunction against the State Department in the case of Defense Distributed v. U.S. Dep’t of State.

Quotes and comment from Judge Pitman’s decision.

He starts with explaining that it takes a lot to get a preliminary injunction to stop someone from an action you assert violates your rights, and he believes the very fact it took DD so long after the injury to file suit proves that they do not face any urgent necessity to stop the State Department from violating their rights.

Judge Pitman does then grant that, well, precedent states that First and Second Amendment violations do rise to the level of “irreparable”  that might demand an injunction.

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