freespeech
At last, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a free man. Why was he ever locked up in the first place? Before the Justice Department dropped its request for Assange to be extradited to the U.S. to stand trial, he had toplead guilty to violating the Espionage Act. That cleared the way for Assange to walk out of the maximum-security prison in London where he was being held. But it also sets a legal precedent that threatens free speech and journalism worldwide. Assange isn't a spy. He's a publisher, guilty of embarrassing the U.S. government. "Really anybody who is concerned about press freedom s...
Reason
In June 2022, the Supreme Court clarified the constitutional test for gun control laws, saying they must be "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation." To illustrate the public safety implications of that ruling, Bloomberg Law reported last year that the decision had "forced the Justice Department to abandon a firearms charge against an Iranian American drug user with suspected ties to foreign terrorism." As reporters Ben Penn and Seamus Hughes told it, "The firearm charge against Ali Hemani, 26, appears to have served the same purpose as when it's often brought...
Reason
The Supreme Court will allow federal agencies to resume widespread communication with social media companies for the purposes of suppressing controversial speech. For everyone who was perturbed by the Twitter Files and Facebook Files—which revealed a vast web of government pressure on private actors, called jawboning—this is a regrettable outcome. The case was Murthy v. Missouri—also known as Missouri v. Biden—and involved a group of individuals who were kicked off Facebook and Twitter. They contended that the platforms took such actions at the behest of the federal government. The Court held ...
Reason
A billboard criticizing former President Donald Trump by comparing him to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro has been taken down, apparently because a congresswoman asked the advertiser to remove it. While the founder of the political group behind the billboard says a different message critical of Trump will be coming soon, the fact that a politician openly intervened to quash controversial political speech is cause for concern. The billboard showed pictures of Trump and Castro with the Spanish message, "No a los dictadores no a Trump," which translates to "No to dictators no to Trump." The message q...
Reason
Julian Assange was released from prison this week after agreeing to plead guilty to conspiring to disclose classified documents related to national security. After five years behind bars, it's hard to exactly call this a win for the WikiLeaks founder. But on the surface, it is a loss for the U.S. government, which wanted to put Assange away for a much, much longer period of time. And yet, on some level, authorities got exactly what it seems they wanted: a warning to anyone who would dare to publish information that makes the government look bad. It provides a clear view of what happens when yo...
Reason
A case pending at the U.S. Supreme Court stems from the efforts a multitude of federal agencies made to remove certain viewpoints from public view. In other words, they sought to abridge freedom of speech—you know, that thing that the First Amendment explicitly bans. The case, Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden), may support or overturn the 5th Circuit's ruling that the government violated the First Amendment to reduce the circulation of viewpoints that various agencies believed noxious. This included, the court noted in its decision, controversies surrounding the "COVID-19 lab-lea...
Reason
Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy and economics at Stanford University and a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which rejected COVID-19 lockdowns in favor of focused protection of older Americans and other high-risk groups. Bhattacharya is now involved in a high-profile lawsuit before the Supreme Court, alleging that the government improperly pressured social media platforms to censor scientific opinions that deviated from official narratives. Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with him in May at Reason Weekend in Boston. Q: You're originally from India, but you grew u...
Reason
When someone claims to have been arrested in retaliation for constitutionally protected speech, what sort of evidence is necessary to make that case? Five years ago in Nieves v. Bartlett, the Supreme Court held that an arrest can violate the First Amendment even if it was based on probable cause, provided the claimant can present "objective evidence that he was arrested when otherwise similarly situated individuals not engaged in the same sort of protected speech had not been." Today in Gonzalez v. Trevino, the Court said that showing does not require "very specific comparator evidence" indica...
Reason
The Phoenix Police Department regularly violates the constitutional rights of its most vulnerable residents, including minors, homeless people, racial minorities, and those experiencing mental health crises, according to a report released Thursday by the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. The investigators documented incidents where Phoenix police fabricated incident reports, needlessly used physical force and dangerous restraints, illegally detained homeless people and destroyed their property, delayed medical aid to wounded suspects, and assaulted people for criticizing or filming t...
Reason
A Texas public library can't remove books simply because they discuss topics like "butts and farts," a federal court ruled last week. The case is one of the more bizarre instances of library censorship in recent years, but it nonetheless led to a decisive option from the majority, who found that it is unconstitutional to remove library books out of a "desire to limit access to ideas with which they [disagree]." The legal battle began after Llano County Judge Ron Cunningham received complaints in 2021 concerning "pornographic and overtly sexual books in the library's children's section." The co...
Reason
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