SUMMARY: President Trump signed an executive order Thursday requiring that U.S. colleges seeking federal research funding must certify that their policies support free speech in order to receive it. Amna Nawaz talks to Jerry Falwell Jr., and Georgetown University’s Sanford Ungar about how free expression is constrained on college campuses and what the president’s action will do to change that.
SUMMARY: A pair of longtime New Jersey radio hosts, Dennis Malloy and Judi Franco, were kicked off the [talk radio] air Thursday after repeatedly referring to Gurbir Grewal, the country's first Sikh attorney general, as "turban man." In an exclusive interview, Grewal joins Amna Nawaz to speak out against discrimination and stand up for those who can’t.
SUMMARY: A Supreme Court case centering on abortion and free speech involves California's so-called crisis pregnancy centers -- clinics run by anti-abortion groups -- and whether state law can require those centers to more fully disclose what they are and what they offer. Marcia Coyle from The National Law Journal joins William Brangham to discuss the case, as well as a defamation against President Trump.
Since the passage of the American Health Care Act, Republican members of Congress have tried to swing public opinion to their side. ProPublica has been tracking what they're saying.
This story was co-published with Stat and Kaiser Health News.
Earlier this month, a day after the House of Representatives passed a bill to repeal and replace major parts of the Affordable Care Act, Ashleigh Morley visited her congressman's Facebook page to voice her dismay.
“Your vote yesterday was unthinkably irresponsible and does not begin to account for the thousands of constituents in your district who rely upon many of the services and provisions provided for them by the ACA,” Morley wrote on the page affiliated with the campaign of Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. “You never had my vote and this confirms why.”
The next day, Morley said, her comment was deleted and she was blocked from commenting on or reacting to King's posts. The same thing has happened to others critical of King's positions on health care and other matters. King has deleted negative feedback and blocked critics from his Facebook page, several of his constituents say, sharing screenshots of comments that are no longer there.
“Having my voice and opinions shut down by the person who represents me — especially when my voice and opinion wasn't vulgar and obscene — is frustrating, it's disheartening, and I think it points to perhaps a larger problem with our representatives and maybe their priorities,” Morley said in an interview.
King's office did not respond to requests for comment.
As Republican members of Congress seek to roll back the Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, and replace it with the American Health Care Act, they have adopted various strategies to influence and cope with public opinion, which polls show mostly opposes their plan. ProPublica, with our partners at Kaiser Health News, Stat and Vox, has been fact-checking members of Congress in this debate and we've found misstatements on both sides, though more by Republicans than Democrats. The Washington Post's Fact Checker has similarly found misstatements by both sides.
Today, we're back with more examples of how legislators are interacting with constituents about repealing Obamacare, whether online or in traditional correspondence. Their more controversial tactics seem to fall into three main categories: providing incorrect information, using euphemisms for the impact of their actions, and deleting comments critical of them. (Share your correspondence with members of Congress with us.)
Incorrect Information
Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo., sent a note to constituents this month explaining her vote in favor of the Republican bill. First, she outlined why she believes the ACA is not sustainable — namely, higher premiums and few choices. Then she said it was important to have a smooth transition from one system to another.
“This is why I supported the AHCA to follow through on our promise to have an immediate replacement ready to go should the ACA be repealed,” she wrote. “The AHCA keeps the ACA for the next three years then phases in a new approach to give people, states, and insurance markets plenty of time to make adjustments.”
Except that's not true.
“There are quite a number of changes in the AHCA that take effect within the next three years,” wrote ACA expert Timothy Jost, an emeritus professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law, in an email to ProPublica.
The current law's penalties on individuals who do not purchase insurance and on employers who do not offer it would be repealed retroactively to 2016, which could remove the incentive for some employers to offer coverage to their workers. Moreover, beginning in 2018, older people could be charged premiums up to five times more than younger people — up from three times under current law. The way in which premium tax credits would be calculated would change as well, benefiting younger people at the expense of older ones, Jost said.
“It is certainly not correct to say that everything stays the same for the next three years,” he wrote.
In an email, Hartzler spokesman Casey Harper replied, “I can see how this sentence in the letter could be misconstrued. It's very important to the Congresswoman that we give clear, accurate information to her constituents. Thanks for pointing that out.”
Other lawmakers have similarly shared incorrect information after voting to repeal the ACA. Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., wrote in a May 19 email to a constituent that “in 16 of our counties, there are no plans available at all. This system is crumbling before our eyes and we cannot wait another year to act.”
Black was referring to the possibility that, in 16 Tennessee counties around Knoxville, there might not have been any insurance options in the ACA marketplace next year. However, 10 days earlier, before she sent her email, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee announced that it was willing to provide coverage in those counties and would work with the state Department of Commerce and Insurance “to set the right conditions that would allow our return.”
“We stand by our statement of the facts, and Congressman Black is working hard to repeal and replace Obamacare with a system that actually works for Tennessee families and individuals,” her deputy chief of staff Dean Thompson said in an email.
On the Democratic side, the Washington Post Fact Checker has called out representatives for saying the AHCA would consider rape or sexual assault as pre-existing conditions. The bill would not do that, although critics counter that any resulting mental health issues or sexually transmitted diseases could be considered existing illnesses.
Euphemisms
A number of lawmakers have posted information taken from talking points put out by the House Republican Conference that try to frame the changes in the Republican bill as kinder and gentler than most experts expect them to be.
An answer to one frequently asked question pushes back against criticism that the Republican bill would gut Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor, and appears on the websites of Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., and others.
“Our plan responsibly unwinds Obamacare's Medicaid expansion,” the answer says. “We freeze enrollment and allow natural turnover in the Medicaid program as beneficiaries see their life circumstances change. This strategy is both fiscally responsible and fair, ensuring we don't pull the rug out on anyone while also ending the Obamacare expansion that unfairly prioritizes able-bodied working adults over the most vulnerable.”
That is highly misleading, experts say.
The Affordable Care Act allowed states to expand Medicaid eligibility to anyone who earned less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level, with the federal government picking up almost the entire tab. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia opted to do so. As a result, the program now covers more than 74 million beneficiaries, nearly 17 million more than it did at the end of 2013.
The GOP health care bill would pare that back. Beginning in 2020, it would reduce the share the federal government pays for new enrollees in the Medicaid expansion to the rate it pays for other enrollees in the state, which is considerably less. Also in 2020, the legislation would cap the spending growth rate per Medicaid beneficiary. As a result, a Congressional Budget Office review released Wednesday estimates that millions of Americans would become uninsured.
Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, said the GOP's characterization of its Medicaid plan is wrong on many levels. People naturally cycle on and off Medicaid, she said, often because of temporary events, not changing life circumstances — seasonal workers, for instance, may see their wages rise in summer months before falling back.
“A terrible blow to millions of poor people is recast as an easing off of benefits that really aren't all that important, in a humane way,” she said.
Moreover, the GOP bill actually would speed up the “natural turnover” in the Medicaid program, said Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health care think tank. Under the ACA, states were only permitted to recheck enrollees' eligibility for Medicaid once a year because cumbersome paperwork requirements have been shown to cause people to lose their coverage. The American Health Care Act would require these checks every six months — and even give states more money to conduct them.
Rowland also took issue with the GOP talking point that the expansion “unfairly prioritizes able-bodied working adults over the most vulnerable.” At a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing earlier this year, GOP representatives maintained that the Medicaid expansion may be creating longer waits for home- and community-based programs for sick and disabled Medicaid patients needing long-term care, “putting care for some of the most vulnerable Americans at risk.”
Research from the Kaiser Family Foundation, however, showed that there was no relationship between waiting lists and states that expanded Medicaid. Such waiting lists pre-dated the expansion and they were worse in states that did not expand Medicaid than in states that did.
“This is a complete misrepresentation of the facts,” Rosenbaum said.
Graves' office said the information on his site came from the House Republican Conference. Emails to the conference's press office were not returned.
The GOP talking points also play up a new Patient and State Stability Fund included in the AHCA, which is intended to defray the costs of covering people with expensive health conditions. “All told, $130 billion dollars would be made available to states to finance innovative programs to address their unique patient populations,” the information says. “This new stability fund ensures these programs have the necessary funding to protect patients while also giving states the ability to design insurance markets that will lower costs and increase choice.”
The fund was modeled after a program in Maine, called an invisible high-risk pool, which advocates say has kept premiums in check in the state. But Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, says the House bill's stability fund wasn't allocated enough money to keep premiums stable.
“In order to do the Maine model — which I've heard many House people say that is what they're aiming for — it would take $15 billion in the first year and that is not in the House bill,” Collins told Politico. “There is actually $3 billion specifically designated for high-risk pools in the first year.”
Deleting Comments
Morley, 28, a branded content editor who lives in Seaford, New York, said she moved into Rep. King's Long Island district shortly before the 2016 election. She said she did not vote for him and, like many others across the country, said the election results galvanized her into becoming more politically active.
Earlier this year, Morley found an online conversation among King's constituents who said their critical comments were being deleted from his Facebook page. Because she doesn't agree with King's stances, she said she wanted to reserve her comment for an issue she felt strongly about.
A day after the House voted to repeal the ACA, Morley posted her thoughts. “I kind of felt that was when I wanted to use my one comment, my one strike as it would be,” she said.
By noon the next day, it had been deleted and she had been blocked.
“I even wrote in my comment that you can block me but I'm still going to call your office,” Morley said in an interview.
Some negative comments about King remain on his Facebook page. But King's critics say his deletions fit a broader pattern. He has declined to hold an in-person town hall meeting this year, saying, “to me all they do is just turn into a screaming session," according to CNN. He held a telephonic town hall meeting but only answered a small fraction of the questions submitted. And he met with Liuba Grechen Shirley, the founder of a local Democratic group in his district, but only after her group held a protest in front of his office that drew around 400 people.
“He's not losing his health care,” Grechen Shirley said. “It doesn't affect him. It's a death sentence for many and he doesn't even care enough to meet with his constituents.”
King's deleted comments even caught the eye of Andy Slavitt, who until January was the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Slavitt has been traveling the country pushing back against attempts to gut the ACA.
Since the election, other activists across the country who oppose the President's agenda have posted online that they have been blocked from following their elected officials on Twitter or commenting on their Facebook pages because of critical statements they've made about the AHCA and other issues.
Since its launch in 2013, the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has quickly become the go-to spot for racists on the internet. Women are whores, blacks are inferior and a shadowy Jewish cabal is organizing a genocide against white people. The site can count among its readers Dylann Roof, the white teenager who slaughtered nine African Americans in Charleston in 2015, and James Jackson, who fatally stabbed an elderly black man with a sword in the streets of New York earlier this year.
Traffic is up lately, too, at white supremacist sites like The Right Stuff, Iron March, American Renaissance and Stormfront, one of the oldest white nationalist sites on the internet.
The operations of such extreme sites are made possible, in part, by an otherwise very mainstream internet company — Cloudflare. Based in San Francisco, Cloudflare operates more than 100 data centers spread across the world, serving as a sort of middleman for websites — speeding up delivery of a site’s content and protecting it from several kinds of attacks. Cloudflare says that some 10 percent of web requests flow through its network, and the company’s mainstream clients range from the FBI to the dating site OKCupid.
The widespread use of Cloudflare’s services by racist groups is not an accident. Cloudflare has said it is not in the business of censoring websites and will not deny its services to even the most offensive purveyors of hate.
“A website is speech. It is not a bomb,” Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a 2013 blog post defending his company’s stance. “There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.”
Cloudflare also has an added appeal to sites such as The Daily Stormer. It turns over to the hate sites the personal information of people who criticize their content. For instance, when a reader figures out that Cloudflare is the internet company serving sites like The Daily Stormer, they sometimes write to the company to protest. Cloudflare, per its policy, then relays the name and email address of the person complaining to the hate site, often to the surprise and regret of those complaining.
This has led to campaigns of harassment against those writing in to protest the offensive material. People have been threatened and harassed.
ProPublica reached out to a handful of people targeted by The Daily Stormer after they or someone close to them complained to Cloudflare about the site’s content. All but three declined to talk on the record, citing fear of further harassment or a desire to not relive it. Most said they had no idea their report would be passed on, though Cloudflare does state on the reporting form that they “will notify the site owner.”
“I wasn’t aware that my information would be sent on. I suppose I, naively, had an expectation of privacy,” said Jennifer Dalton, who had complained that The Daily Stormer was asking its readers to harass Twitter users after the election.
Andrew Anglin, the owner of The Daily Stormer, has been candid about how he feels about people reporting his site for its content.
“We need to make it clear to all of these people that there are consequences for messing with us,” Anglin wrote in one online post. “We are not a bunch of babies to be kicked around. We will take revenge. And we will do it now.”
ProPublica asked Cloudflare’s top lawyer about its policy of sharing information on those who complain about racist sites. The lawyer, Doug Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel, defended the company’s policies by saying it is “base constitutional law that people can face their accusers.” Kramer suggested that some of the people attacking Cloudflare’s customers had their own questionable motives.
Hate sites such as The Daily Stormer have become a focus of intense interest since the racially divisive 2016 election — how popular they are, who supports them, how they are financed. Most of their operators supported Donald Trump and helped spread a variety of conspiracy theories aimed at damaging Hillary Clinton. But they clearly have also become a renewed source of concern for law enforcement.
In testimony Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chief Will D. Johnson, chair of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Human and Civil Rights Committee, highlighted the reach and threat of hate on the Internet.
“The internet provides extremists with an unprecedented ability to spread hate and recruit followers,” he said. “Individual racists and organized hate groups now have the power to reach a global audience of millions and to communicate among like-minded individuals easily, inexpensively, and anonymously.
“Although hate speech is offensive and hurtful, the First Amendment usually protects such expression,” Johnson said. “However, there is a growing trend to use the Internet to intimidate and harass individuals on the basis of their race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, disability, or national origin.”
A look at Cloudflare’s policies and operations sheds some light on how sites promoting incendiary speech and even violent behavior can exist and even thrive.
Jacob Sommer, a lawyer with extensive experience in internet privacy and security issues, said there is no legal requirement for a company like Cloudflare to regulate the sites on their service, though many internet service providers choose to. It comes down to a company’s sense of corporate responsibility, he said.
For the most part, Sommers said, a lot of companies don’t want “this stuff” on their networks. He said those companies resist having their networks become “a hive of hate speech.”
Jonathan Vick, associate director for investigative technology and cyberhate response at the Anti-Defamation League, agrees. He said that many of the hosts they talk to want to get hate sites off their networks.
“Even the most intransigent of them, when they’re given evidence of something really problematic, they do respond,” he said.
Cloudflare has raised at least $180 million in venture capital since its inception in 2009, much of it from some of the most prominent venture capital firms and tech companies in the country. The service is what’s known as a content delivery network, and offers protection from several cyber threats including “denial of service” attacks, where hundreds of computers make requests to a website at once, overwhelming it and bringing it down.
Company officials have said Cloudflare’s core belief is in the free and open nature of the internet. But given its outsize role in protecting a range of websites, Cloudflare has found itself the target of critics.
In 2015, the company came under fire from the hacker collective Anonymous for reportedly allowing ISIS propaganda sites on its network. At the time, Prince, the company’s CEO, dismissed the claim as “armchair analysis by kids,” and told Fox Business that the company would not knowingly accept money from a terrorist organization.
Kramer, in an interview with ProPublica, reiterated that the company would not accept money from ISIS. But he said that was not for moral or ethical reasons. Rather, he said, Cloudflare did not have dealings with terrorists groups such as ISIS because there are significant and specific laws restricting them from doing so.
In the end, Kramer said, seedy and objectionable sites made up a tiny fraction of the company’s clients.
“We’ve got 6 million customers,” he told ProPublica. “It’s easy to find these edge cases.”
One of the people ProPublica spoke with whose information had been shared with The Daily Stormer’s operators said his complaint had been posted on the site, but that he was “not interested in talking about my experience as it’s not something I want to revisit.” Someone else whose information was posted on the site said that while she did get a few odd emails, she wasn’t aware her information had been made public. She followed up to say she was going to abandon her email account now that she knew.
“The entire situation makes me feel uneasy,” she said.
Scott Ernest had complained about The Daily Stormer’s conduct after Anglin, its owner, had used the site to allegedly harass a woman in the town of Whitefish, Montana. After his complaint, Ernest wound up on the receiving end of about two dozen harassing emails or phone calls.
“Fuck off and die,” read one email. “Go away and die,” read another. Those commenting on the site speculated on everything from Ernest’s hygiene to asking, suggestively, why it appeared in a Facebook post that Ernest had a child at his house.
Ernest said the emails and phone calls he received were not traumatizing, but they were worrying.
“His threats of harassment can turn into violence,” he said of Anglin.
Anglin appears quite comfortable with his arrangement with Cloudflare. It doesn’t cost him much either — just $200 a month, according to public posts on the site.
“[A]ny complaints filed against the site go to Cloudflare, and Cloudflare then sends me an email telling me someone said I was doing something bad and that it is my responsibility to figure out if I am doing that,” he wrote in a 2015 post on his site. “Cloudflare does not regulate content, so it is meaningless.”
Representatives from Rackspace and GoDaddy, two popular web hosts, said they try to regulate the kinds of sites on their services. For Rackspace, that means drawing the line at hosting white supremacist content or hate speech. For GoDaddy, that means not hosting the sort of abusive publication of personal information that Anglin frequently engages in.
“There is certainly content that, while we respect freedom of speech, we don’t want to be associated with it,” said Arleen Hess, senior manager of GoDaddy’s digital crimes unit.
Both companies also said they would not pass along contact information for people who complain about offensive content to the groups generating it.
Amazon Web Services, one of the most popular web hosts and content delivery networks, would not say how they handle abuse complaints beyond pointing to an “acceptable use” policy that restricts objectionable, abusive and harmful content. They also pointed to their abuse form, which says the company will keep your contact information private.
According to Vick at the ADL, the fact that Cloudflare takes money from Anglin is different from if he’d just used their free service.
“That’s a direct relationship,” he said. “That raises questions in my mind.”
Some companies offering other services vital to success on the web have chosen not to do business with Anglin’s The Daily Stormer. Google, PayPal and Coinbase, for instance, have chosen to cut off his accounts rather than support his activities. Getting booted around from service to service can make it hard to run a hate site, but Cloudflare gives the sites a solid footing.
And, by The Daily Stormer’s account, advice and assurances. In a post, the site’s architect, Andrew Auernheimer, said he had personal relationships with people at Cloudflare, and they had assured him the company would work to protect the site in a variety of ways — including by not turning over data to European courts. Cloudflare has data centers in European countries such as Germany, which have strict hate speech and privacy laws.
Company officials offered differing responses when asked about Auernheimer’s post. Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel, said he had no knowledge of employee conversations with Auernheimer. Later, in an email, the company said Auernheimer was a well-known hacker, and that as a result at least one senior company official “has chatted with him on occasion and has spoken to him about Cloudflare’s position on not censoring the internet.”
A former Cloudflare employee, Ryan Lackey, said in an interview that while he doesn’t condone a lot of what Auernheimer does, he did on occasion give technical advice as a friend and helped some of the Stormer’s issues get resolved.
“I am hardcore libertarian/classical liberal about free speech — something like Daily Stormer has every right to publish, and it is better for everyone if all ideas are out on the internet to do battle in that sphere,” he said.
Vick at the ADL agrees that Anglin has a right to publish, but said people have the right to hold to task the Internet companies that enable him.
“Andrew Anglin has the right to be out there and say what he wants to say. But the people who object to what he has to say have a right to object as well,” he said. “You should be able to respond to everybody in the chain.”
SUMMARY: The Supreme Court offered two decisions today. The justices ruled in favor of a young Muslim woman who was rejected from working at Abercrombie & Fitch because she wears a hijab. The court also overturned the conviction of a man who had posted threatening language against his ex-wife on Facebook. Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss those cases.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): The often divided Supreme Court was mostly united today on two high-profile decisions, one involving workplace discrimination and the other about threats made online.
Jeffrey Brown has that story.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Both cases ended in lopsided decisions from the high court. In one, justices ruled in favor of a young Muslim woman who was rejected from working at the clothing store Abercrombie & Fitch because she wears a hijab, or headscarf. In the other, the court overturned the conviction of a man who had posted threatening language against his ex-wife on Facebook.
With us now, as always, to discuss the cases is Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal.
Welcome back, Marcia.
Let’s start with the headscarf case. Right?
MARCIA COYLE, The National Law Journal: OK.
JEFFREY BROWN: Remind us of the facts of this case.
MARCIA COYLE: All right.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Abercrombie & Fitch on behalf of Samantha Elauf, claiming that the company violated Title VII, our nation’s major job bias law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of religious beliefs and practices.
Ms. Elauf, as you said, had applied for a job in the company’s Tulsa, Oklahoma, store wearing the headscarf. She didn’t say it was for religious reasons, but the hiring manager believed that was the case, sought guidance from a superior on whether that headscarf violated the company’s dress code, what it called the look policy.
SUMMARY: With a court ruling that two Al Jazeera journalists who were imprisoned in Egypt for more than a year will be released on bail, Judy Woodruff looks at a new survey of press freedom and abuses around the world. Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner speaks with Ali Rezaian, brother of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who has been jailed in Iran on secret charges since July.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): An Egyptian court ruled today that two Al-Jazeera journalists who had been jailed for more than 400 days will be released on bail.
Baher Mohamed and Mohamed Fahmy still face a retrial. Their colleague, Australian Peter Greste, was freed a few weeks ago.
Today’s ruling is a small victory for press freedom advocates. But a new report released in Washington warns that journalists are increasingly coming under threat.
DELPHINE HALGAND, U.S. Director, Reporters Without Borders: The indicators compiled by Reporters Without Borders are incontestable. There was a drastic decline in freedom of information in 2014.
JUDY WOODRUFF: The world’s largest press freedom group surveyed 180 countries, and fully two-thirds in its estimation saw greater restrictions last year. The list placed Finland first as most free, with much of Europe near the top. The United States was 49th, with the report citing lack of a federal shield law and arrests of reporters in Ferguson, Missouri, among other factors.
But, worldwide, the principal cause of deterioration was widespread conflict, especially in Syria, in Iraq and Ukraine. Prime culprits were nonstate actors like the Islamic State group that have menaced and killed journalists. Another major cause, restrictions in the name of national security, from the Middle East, through Asia, and even, the group contends, in the United States.
And while bail was announced for two Al-Jazeera journalists in Egypt today, Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian remains behind bars in Iran. The dual U.S./Iranian citizen has been held since July on secret charges.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now, a look back at a movement some historians believe profoundly changed American culture, politics and education.
“NewsHour” special correspondent Spencer Michels reports has the story.
WOMAN: We’re going to start off by playing a little speech some of you may remember.
MARIO SAVIO, Free Speech Movement: And I will tell you something. The faculty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw material.
SPENCER MICHELS (NewsHour): The sounds of a familiar past blared over Sproul Plaza on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. The voice, from 1964 was that of the late Mario Savio, the most famous leader of the free speech movement, the first big on-campus student movement in the country.
MARIO SAVIO: And you have got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, pile on the apparatus, and you have got to make it stop.
SPENCER MICHELS: These were 20-somethings in the ’60s, civil rights activists who were protesting a university policy forbidding political activity on campus.
Now they were back to keep the past alive and relate it to the present.
JACK WEINBERG, Free Speech Movement: The most significant student movement of our era is taking place in Hong Kong.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
SPENCER MICHELS: Graduate student Jack Weinberg sparked the rebellion 50 years ago, when he was arrested for refusing to take down an organizing table.
JACK WEINBERG: They made the mistake of bringing a police car onto campus. This give me five, 10 minutes to stand up, to draw a crowd, make a speech.
SPENCER MICHELS: Weinberg spent 32 hours in the car as the crowds swelled to 6,000 and the movement was born. The university eventually eliminated the restrictions on political activity.
SUMMARY: In Massachusetts, a 35-foot restricted area outside of abortion clinics give patients and staff a buffer zone from protesters. But as Kwame Holman reports, some say the law restricts the freedom of speech of abortion opponents. Judy Woodruff gets a view from inside the courtroom from Marcia Coyle of the National Law Journal.
SUMMARY: Pro-choice advocates believe buffer zones around abortion clinics are necessary to prevent harassment and targeted violence, while opponents feel their free speech rights are being restricted. Judy Woodruff hears both sides of the debate from Steven Aden of Alliance Defending Freedom and Ilyse Hogue of NARAL Pro-Choice America.
SUMMARY: Bob Dietz on the recent events that have raised questions about the freedom of the foreign press in China. A prominent journalist for Reuters who had been reporting there for years was denied a visa. Bloomberg News has denied a report that they withheld publication of an investigative story for fear they would be kicked out.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Now to another story that has captured the attention of the news media and of Congress.
After new revelations about extensive investigations involving the Associated Press and FOX News, three former Justice Department officials are defending the leak inquiries.
Writing in The New York Times, they said today: "The criticism of the decision to subpoena telephone toll records of AP journalists in an important leak investigation sends the wrong message to the government officials who are responsible for our national security."
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said today the key is to strike the right balance.
But what is that balance?
For that, we turn to Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment lawyer who routinely represents news organizations, and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, now an attorney in private practice in New York City.
SUMMARY: The Justice Department (DOJ) secretly subpoenaed phone records of Associated Press journalists during two months in 2012. The AP was notified that records had been secretly seized for more than 20 of its phone lines, possibly to track government leaks of classified information about a foiled terror plot. Judy Woodruff reports.
SUMMARY: Judy Woodruff talks with David Schultz, legal counsel for the Associated Press, about the procedures for accessing information from the news media about confidential sources, what constitutes "crossing the line" by the government and whether the current investigation was justified by the gravity of the situation.
None.
Not skinny little lifeless corpse one.
Where are the bodies?
Where are the pictures?
Where is the proof this happened?
You know damned well Obama's anus lapping media pundits would swear to any lie he tells.
This is all another lie just like the financial bailout.
Millions of Americans would disagree.
Please keep posting...we need a continuing record of your mental illness so we can confiscate your guns when the time comes...
None.
Not skinny little lifeless corpse one.
Where are the bodies?
Where are the pictures?
Where is the proof this happened?
You know damned well Obama's anus lapping media pundits would
swear to any lie he tells.
This is all another lie just like the financial bailout.
Millions of Americans would disagree.
Please keep posting...we need a continuing record of your mental
illness so we can confiscate your guns when the time comes...
SUMMARY: In addition to arresting activists, the Iranian government has also targeted the people who would defend them and tell their stories. Reporting in affiliation with the Center for Investigative Reporting and KQED, Spencer Michels looks at cases of Iranian attorneys and journalists charged with acting against national security.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): Next to Iran.
Journalists and human rights groups there have charged the government with imprisoning dissidents, part of a campaign to silence criticism of the regime.
The NewsHour, along with the Center for Investigative Reporting and KQED San Francisco, have obtained interviews from an Iranian journalist to help tell that story.
NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels reports.
Ecuador announced Thursday that it was granting political asylum to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who has been holed up for two months in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London awaiting the decision.
“The government of Ecuador, faithful to its tradition of protecting those who seek refuge in its territory or in its diplomatic missions, has decided to grant diplomatic asylum to Julian Assange,” said Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño, reading from a government communiqué at a news conference in the Ecuadorean capital, Quito. He added, “There are indications to presume that there could be political persecution,” and that Mr. Assange would not get a fair trial in the United States and could face the death penalty there.
The move leaves Mr. Assange with protection from British arrest – but only on Ecuadorean territory, leaving him vulnerable if he tries to head to an airport or train. Mr. Patiño said he hoped Britain would permit Mr. Assange to leave the embassy for Ecuador — a request Britain has rejected, saying it has a binding, legal obligation to extradite Mr. Assange to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over accusations that he sexually assaulted two women.
The decision added to the sharp strains between Ecuador and Britain. Just before the announcement of asylum, President Rafael Correa said on his Twitter account: “No one is going to terrorize us!” The night before, Mr. Patiño said that the British authorities had threatened to force their way into the embassy, to which he responded: “We are not a British colony.”
The British Foreign Office said it was disappointed by the Ecuadorean announcement but remained committed to a negotiated outcome to the standoff. Sweden’s foreign minister, Carl Bildt, rejected the suggestion that Sweden would be involved in any kind of persecution. “Our firm legal and constitutional system guarantees the rights of each and everyone,” he wrote on Twitter. “ We firmly reject any accusations to the contrary.
Mr. Patiño’s news conference was broadcast live on British television and Mr. Assange watched the announcement as it happened, British news reports said. He told embassy staff members: “It is a significant victory for myself and my people. Things will probably get more stressful now.”
We've reported here often on efforts to ram through Congress legislation that would authorize massive interference with the Internet, all in the name of a fruitless quest to stamp out all infringement online. Today Representative Lamar Smith upped the ante, introducing legislation, called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or "SOPA," (PDF) that would not only sabotage the domain name system but would also threaten to effectively eliminate the DMCA safe harbors that, while imperfect, have spurred much economic growth and online creativity.
As with its Senate-side evil sister, PROTECT-IP (PDF), SOPA would require service providers to “disappear” certain websites, endangering Internet security and sending a troubling message to the world: it’s okay to interfere with the Internet, even effectively blacklisting entire domains, as long as you do it in the name of IP enforcement. Of course blacklisting entire domains can mean turning off thousands of underlying websites that may have done nothing wrong. And in what has to be an ironic touch, the very first clause of SOPA states that it shall not be “construed to impose a prior restraint on free speech.” As if that little recitation could prevent the obvious constitutional problem in what the statute actually does.
But it gets worse. Under this bill, service providers (including hosting services) would be under new pressure to monitor and police their users’ activities. Websites that simply don’t do enough to police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would qualify as “enough”) are now under threat, even though the DMCA expressly does not require affirmative policing. It creates new enforcement tools against folks who dare to help users access sites that may have been “blacklisted,” even without any kind of court hearing. The bill also requires that search engines, payment providers (such as credit card companies and PayPal), and advertising services join in the fun in shutting down entire websites. In fact, the bill seems mainly aimed at creating an end-run around the DMCA safe harbors. Instead of complying with the DMCA, a copyright owner may now be able to use these new provisions to effectively shut down a site by cutting off access to its domain name, its search engine hits, its ads, and its other financing even if the safe harbors would apply.
And that’s only the beginning: we haven’t even started on the streaming provisions.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): The anti-Wall Street protests went global over the weekend. And, today, world leaders took note of the spreading movement and its possible implications.
NewsHour correspondent Kwame Holman has our report.
KWAME HOLMAN (Newshour): President Obama drew on public discontent without mentioning the protests directly as he promoted his jobs bill in Asheville, N.C.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When you hear what's going on out in the country, when you take the time to listen, you understand that a lot of folks are hurting out there.
KWAME HOLMAN: The nearly month-old Occupy Wall Street movement had started with 1,500 gathered in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, but the ranks surged on Saturday. An estimated 6,000 people joined a rally in Times Square, insisting the system is weighted in favor of the rich and against everyone else.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): The Supreme Court ended its term today with a pair of major decisions that turned on the constitutional right to free speech. By 7-2, they agreed to throw out a California statute that banned the sale and rental of violent video games to minors. Supporters of the law argued that the games allow children to simulate grotesque acts of violence.
But the video game industry said the games should be treated like any other form of entertainment. The court also struck down a provision of Arizona's campaign finance system that provides extra money to publicly funded candidates when they face well-funded rivals.
Joining us now to discuss the court's final rulings of the session is NewsHour regular Marcia Coyle of "The National Law Journal."
Marcia, starting with this California statute that was tossed out, give us the genesis of this.
MARCIA COYLE, "The National Law Journal": OK.
California passed the law 2005 that prohibited the sale or rental of violent video games to anyone under the age of 18. And a violent video game, they defined, was one that gave the player the option of killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting a human image.
It also lacked -- would lack any serious literacy, artistic, political, or scientific value and would appeal to a minor's morbid or deviant interests.
GWEN IFILL: Well, how do all of those things -- that sounds pretty awful.
(LAUGHTER)
GWEN IFILL: How does killing, maiming, dismembering, and sexual assault fit under the rubric of free speech protection?
MARCIA COYLE: Justice Scalia wrote the opinion for a 7-2 majority today.
And he said, basically, California was asking the court to create a new category of unprotected speech. The court has found unprotected speech in only a handful of cases, things like obscenity, fighting words. He said that there was no long history or tradition in this country of prescribing minors' access to violent content.
And he gave as an example Grimm's fairy tales, which he said were grim indeed. And he said, for example, Cinderella's three evil step-sisters had their eyes plucked out by doves. Hansel and Gretel got rid of their captor by baking her in an oven.
GWEN IFILL: But the reader of those books didn't actually pick up a virtual gun and pluck out the eyes of Cinderella's sisters. So -- so, you -- what's in these games that we're talking about. They're very -- probably, anybody with a teenager at home is familiar with them.
MARCIA COYLE: Right. Right.
What's in the -- exactly in the games?
GWEN IFILL: Yes. I mean, what, shooting, running blood?
MARCIA COYLE: There is everything. There's shooting. There's killing. There's rape. There's urinating on women or children.
The next step for Justice Scalia, though, was to say, OK, California, you have this law. In order to pass scrutiny under the First Amendment, there has to be a compelling reason for the law. And the law also has to be narrowly drawn to achieve that interest.
California argued that there were studies showing that you could -- you could link the playing of these violent video games to increased aggression in minors. Justice Scalia said the studies weren't sufficient, that they were conflicting. They were inconclusive.
So there was -- the compelling interest wasn't there. He also said it wasn't narrowly drawn. For example, it was underinclusive. It only singled out violent video games, not violent books, not violent movies. And it was overinclusive. There are actually some minors whose parents don't care if their children have these violent video games. But they were swept in to the prohibition as well.
GWEN IFILL: So, there -- it was 7-2. So there were two dissents.
MARCIA COYLE: Yes.
GWEN IFILL: Who dissented and why?
MARCIA COYLE: The real dissents were by Justice Thomas and Justice Breyer.
Justice Thomas has long believed that the drafters of the First Amendment never envisioned minors having First Amendment rights or access to speech except through parents or guardians. That ended it for him. This law was constitutional.
Justice Breyer felt that there was sufficient evidence here that the court should defer to the legislature's judgment in California, that this law should be upheld. He asked, for example, does it make sense, under the court's precedents, that you can prohibit the sale of a magazine showing nude women to a 13-year-old boy, and yet you're going to protect the sale of a video game in which that same 13-year-old, acting virtually, bind, gag and kill a woman?
