This article is part of a special report on the 50th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers.

The Pentagon Papers case was a triumph for press freedom. Or was it?

The Supreme Courts unsigned opinion rejecting the Nixon administrations attempt to censor publication of a secret history of the Vietnam War was just three paragraphs long and declared only that the government had not overcome a heavy presumption against prior restraints on that occasion.

The vote was, moreover, fairly close 6 to 3. Every justice contributed a concurring or dissenting opinion, none of which got more than two votes. You need a spreadsheet to make sense of who voted for what, but the bottom line is at odds with the conventional view that the case was a flat-out First Amendment victory.

A majority of the Supreme Court not only left open the possibility of prior restraints in other cases but of criminal sanctions being imposed on the press following publication of the Pentagon Papers themselves, Floyd Abrams, who represented The New York Times in the case, wrote in his 2014 book, Friend of the Court.

There are, it turns out, two ways to understand the Pentagon Papers decision. One is that it was a potent vindication of press freedom establishing a bedrock principle: The government cannot stop the new media from providing information to citizens in a democracy.

Another view takes account of the letter and limits of the decision. Even as to prior restraints, the Supreme Court left the door slightly ajar. As to the possibility of punishing the press after publication, two justices in the majority wrote that they had no doubt that news organizations could be prosecuted under the espionage laws.

To be sure, the decision has taken on a symbolic weight that has swamped its technical holding, said Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago and an editor of a volume of essays commemorating the 50th anniversary of the decision, National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press.

The case created a largely overwhelming sense that the press cannot be either enjoined from or prosecuted for publishing national secrets, he said. Thats become the expectation as a result of Pentagon Papers.

But even if the decision seems to have created near-absolute protection for the press, he went on, it addressed only one piece of the relationship between citizens and their government.

An intermediary the press was protected. But neither its sources nor its readers gained rights.

What Pentagon Papers and its successor decisions created, Professor Stone said, was an incoherent state of the law.

The decision did not live up to its promise, Anthony Lewis, a Supreme Court reporter and columnist for The Times and an authority on the First Amendment, wrote in his 1991 book, Make No Law.

The Pentagon Papers case was a famous victory for the press, and for the Madisonian principle that the public must know what its government is doing, wrote Mr. Lewis, who died in 2013. Or so it seemed at the time. Later decisions showed that it was not much of a victory.

Prior restraints against the press may have been effectively barred, Mr. Lewis wrote, but the Supreme Court did not hesitate to block books by former government officials who sought to write about national security secrets they had learned in the course of their employment.

In those later decisions, Professor Stone said, the court took the view that there is no right to leak and no public right to information.

The decision had another, darker side, wrote Alexander Bickel, the Yale law professor who argued the case for The Times in the Supreme Court.

The American press was freer before it won its battle with the government, he wrote in his classic 1975 book, The Morality of Consent.

Through one civil and two world wars and other wars, there had never been an effort by the federal government to censor a newspaper by attempting to impose a prior restraint, he wrote. That spell was broken, and in a sense, freedom was thus diminished.

Justice William O. Douglas, who was in the majority in 1971, wrote two years later that the vote had been too close and had followed two weeks of successful government-imposed censorship.

We have allowed ominous inroads to be made on the historic freedom of the newspapers, he wrote. The effort to suppress the publication of the Pentagon Papers failed only by a narrow margin and actually succeeded for a brief spell in imposing prior restraint on our press for the first time in our history.

The Supreme Court: Upcoming Cases

It was unimaginable, though, that the Supreme Court would rule out prior restraints entirely, and that posed a litigation-strategy puzzle for Professor Bickel when he argued before the justices.

He conceded, at least in the abstract, that courts could stop a publication if it would lead directly and unavoidably to a disastrous event.

Justice Potter Stewart explored the point. What if, he asked, a disclosure of sensitive information in wartime would result in the sentencing to death of 100 young men whose only offense had been that they were 19 years old and had low draft numbers?

Professor Bickel tried to duck the question, but the justice pressed him: You would say that the Constitution requires that it be published and that these men die?

Professor Bickel yielded, to the consternation of some of The Timess allies. Im afraid, he said, that my inclinations of humanity overcome the somewhat more abstract devotion to the First Amendment.

As a matter of litigation tactics, it was a necessary answer, said David Rudenstine, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and the author of The Day the Presses Stopped, a history of the case.

I dont think an advocate could say anything else, Professor Rudenstine said, unless you really wanted to lose the case.

Still, Professor Bickels response outraged the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed an unusual brief that same day disavowing Mr. Bickels answer. It said Justice Stewarts question must be answered in a totally different manner and that the answer is, painfully but simply, that the right of a free people to determine its destiny has been, and should continue to be, paramount to any attempt by the government to impinge upon, erode or ultimately destroy the right of the people to know.

Professor Bickel had made another concession when he argued the case in the federal appeals court in New York. Asked for an example of a government secret that would justify a prior restraint, he posited, presciently as it turned out, one in which the hydrogen bomb turns up.

Eight years later, on the only other occasion on which the federal government has sought a prior restraint on national security grounds, a federal judge in Wisconsin barred The Progressive magazine from publishing an article called The H-bomb Secret, which included detailed instructions for making a hydrogen bomb.

While the appeal was pending, others published similar information and the government dropped its case.

As that case suggests, prior restraints that actually keep information already in the hands of the press from the public are hard to accomplish. By the time the Supreme Court ruled in the Pentagon Papers case, more than a dozen newspapers had published parts of them. These days, a whistle-blower like Daniel Ellsberg could skip the intermediaries entirely and post documents directly on the internet.

In a contemporary context, the prohibition on prior restraints is almost irrelevant, Professor Rudenstine said.

The more significant constraint is the possibility of criminal prosecution after the fact, one left open by some of the justices in the majority in the 1971 decision.

According to a 1975 memoir by Whitney North Seymour Jr., who was the U.S. attorney in Manhattan in the early 1970s, Richard G. Kleindienst, a deputy attorney general, suggested convening a grand jury in New York to consider criminal charges against The Times. Mr. Seymour said he refused. A grand jury was then convened in Boston, but it did not issue an indictment.

So far, there have been no prosecutions of journalists in the United States for seeking or publishing classified information, but the espionage laws on their face may well be read to forbid possession and publication of classified information by the press.

One, enacted in 1917, prohibits anyone with unauthorized access to documents or information concerning the national defense from telling others. In the Pentagon Papers case, Justice Byron R. White, joined by Justice Stewart, said it seems undeniable that a newspaper can be vulnerable to prosecution under the 1917 law.

But the law, as Harold Edgar and Benno C. Schmidt Jr. described it in a comprehensive 1973 article in the Columbia Law Review, is in many respects incomprehensible and so sweeping as to be absurd.

If these statutes mean what they seem to say and are constitutional, they wrote, public speech in this country since World War II has been rife with criminality.

At the same time, there is an almost universal consensus that the government classifies far too much information. Erwin Griswold, a former dean of Harvard Law School who argued the case for the Nixon administration as U.S. solicitor general, agreed that the classification system was broken.

It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material, he wrote in a 1989 essay in The Washington Post, that there is massive over-classification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another.

That applied, he wrote, to the Pentagon Papers themselves. I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication, he wrote. Indeed, I have never seen it even suggested that there was such an actual threat.

The presss victory in the Pentagon Papers case may have been incomplete. But a loss would have been devastating.

What would be the law today if the case had come out differently? Professor Rudenstine asked. Its very possible that there could have been a prosecution of The Times. That would have changed American law quite a lot.

The general thought, he said, was that if you lost the prior restraint case that there was no chance of winning the criminal prosecution. The opposite happened, said Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University and the other editor of National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press. As a practical matter, the press and the government have arrived at the state of mind that there will not be prior restraints or subsequent prosecutions that that would violate the spirit of the First Amendment, he said. Apart from the Progressive case, the government has not gone after the press in either form.

But he added that this was in large part a product of mature accommodation among responsible institutions, one that was at risk during the Donald Trump administration.

The continuing viability of a fulsome Pentagon Papers doctrine does not apply in the context of a near-authoritarian government like the one we had, he said. Its those kinds of ambiguities about Pentagon Papers that makes the whole system much more vulnerable when you have a true threat to democracy.

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The Complicated Impact the Pentagon Papers Had on Free Speech - The New York Times

That may be an overstatement. Mr. Wizner, who runs the A.C.L.U.s free speech project, has represented the National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden and rattled off important cases his lawyers handled. But FIRE, he acknowledged, has taken a strong lead on campuses, where so many consequential battles are fought.

FIRE does not have the same tensions, Mr. Wizner said. At the A.C.L.U., free speech is one of 12 or 15 different values.

Traditionally, the A.C.L.U.s state affiliates monitor and argue free speech cases, but in recent years some shied from such fights. Here are a few examples:

In 2015, University of Missouri students protested racism and established an encampment in a campus quad. When a student journalist tried to take photos and talk to protesters, students and a communications professor physically blocked the reporter from doing so. The A.C.L.U. of Missouri applauded the courageous leadership of student activists and faculty members, and two national A.C.L.U. officials wrote columns about the protests. They did not mention First Amendment rights.

Four years later at the University of Connecticut, two white students walking home late at night loudly repeated a racial slur. In the ensuing uproar, the university police arrested and charged the students with ridicule on account of race.

The A.C.L.U. of Connecticut demanded that the university hire 10 Black faculty and staff members and require a freshman course on ending racism on campus. It made no mention of the arrests, other than to opine that the police force is an inherently white supremacist institution.

Two days later, Mr. Cole issued a corrective: The students conduct is not criminal, he stated. The First Amendment protects even offensive and hateful speech.

Even the New York Civil Liberties Union, traditionally an independent-minded A.C.L.U. affiliate that has produced several national executive directors and stood at the forefront in defending free speech cases, did not want to talk about those issues. A spokeswoman for its executive director, Donna Lieberman, said, We dont feel well have anything to add.

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Once a Bastion of Free Speech, the A.C.L.U. Faces an Identity Crisis - The New York Times

At the end of April, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Brandi Levy, a high school cheerleader, who posted Fuck school fuck cheer fuck softball fuck everything to Snapchat in 2017 and was kicked off the team for a year. The words were superimposed over a photo showing B.L. and her friend with their middle fingers raised, members of her legal team explained. The courts ruling in this case could potentially disrupt the established principle that students do not lose their right to free speech at the schoolhouse gate, as the court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines in 1969. Mother Jones called Levys case the most important student free speech case to come before the Supreme Court in a half-century.

One notable figure on todays free speech beat, Michael Powell of The New York Times, surely missed an opportunity to highlight this case in his story, published this weekend, on the alleged wavering of First Amendment defense at the American Civil Liberties Union. In Powells telling, the organization is locked in an unprecedented, perhaps irreconcilable struggle between free speech and social justice. Its national and state staff members debate, often hotly, whether defense of speech conflicts with advocacy for a growing number of progressive causes, including voting rights, reparations, transgender rights and defunding the police, Powell writes. As a result, he claims, the organization has fallen down on its principles. One hears markedly less from the A.C.L.U. about free speech nowadays. Its annual reports from 2016 to 2019 highlight its role as a leader in the resistance against President Donald J. Trump. But the words First Amendment or free speech cannot be found. Nor do those reports mention colleges and universities, where the most volatile speech battles often play out.

Much the same, however, could be said about some glaring omissions in Powells own missive. What he pitches as a document of an existential threat to the organizations commitment to free speech should be seen for what it is: a culture war in 1As clothing. Its a familiar trick, one which everyone from Josh Hawley to Abigail Shrierwhose anti-trans work Powell referenceshas tried in the immediate post-Trump era. By comparison, Powell aims for a lighter touch, but his omissionsof history, of the organizations present caseloadreveal the storys true concern: a certain kind of speech, for a certain kind of person.

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The New York Times' Culture-War Definition of Free Speech - The New Republic

Jun 7th 2021

WESTERNERS TEND to regard freedom of speech as a universal good. However, a forthcoming report by Justitia, a Danish think-tank, demonstrates that public support for freedom of expression varies widely among countries, just as legal restraints on speech do. In many countries, particularly authoritarian regimes, people say they want fewer controls. But perhaps surprisingly, in a handful of places poll respondents suggest they want less freedom than they currently have.

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The report is based on a survey conducted in February of 50,000 people in 33 countries. The researchers asked respondents whether they believed that a wide range of controversial statements, such as insulting the national flag or making offensive comments about minority groups or religious beliefs, should be permitted. They combined the average responses to each of these questions into an index of support for free speech. They then compared these scores with an index of freedom of expression compiled by V-Dem, another think-tank, which measures how much liberty people in each country enjoy in practice.

In general, the more freedom respondents in a given country said they wanted, the more that country tended to provide. One inescapable weakness in the reports approach is that people in places with tight restrictions on speech may not feel comfortable telling pollsters how they really feel. However, large shares of respondents in many authoritarian countries, including Egypt, Turkey and Russia, were nonetheless willing to say that they approved of liberties that their governments do not protect. This was particularly true in countries that started to limit freedom of expression only recently, such as Hungary and Venezuela. Perhaps people who once enjoyed freer speech than they do now are more likely to support it than are those who have always lived under stricter rules.

However, just as respondents in many countries said they did not have enough freedom of expression, people in others tended to say they were actually given too much liberty. This pattern was most pronounced in Kenya, Tunisia, and Nigeria. These countries grant rights similar to those found in Japan or Israel, but their citizens tend to disapprove of freedom of speech just as much as people do in Egypt or Turkeythe two countries with the toughest restrictions on expression among the 33 surveyed by Justitia.

Although not enough data is available to explain this phenomenon fully, faith and sectarianism may play a role. In general, respondents in Muslim-majority countries were far less supportive of free speechparticularly when it comes to offensive comments about religionthan those elsewhere. Within the Muslim world, this pattern tends to hold regardless of a countrys form of government: respondents were barely more enthusiastic about freedom of expression in democratic Indonesia than they were in authoritarian Egypt. In both Tunisia and Nigeria, Islamist movements have gained ground over the past decade. They may have shifted public opinion against free speech faster than those countries governments could change laws.

Another possible explanation is sectarian conflict. Kenya and Nigeria have been riven by fighting between ethnic groups at various points during the past two decades, and citizens of those countries may fear that hostile speech presages violence. Kenyas low overall score on support for freedom of expression was driven largely by the 82% of respondents there who said that the government should be able to prevent people from making statements that are offensive to minority groups, which was by far the highest share in the survey. In both rich countries and poor ones, people are often willing to sacrifice civil liberties if they think their safety is at risk.

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In some countries, people think they have too much freedom of speech - The Economist

This is indeed true most of the time. But it doesn't mean that government agents with hurt feelings won't sometimes try suing private citizens who have the temerity to criticize how government bureaucrats do their jobs. Such was the case earlier this spring when Louisville Metro Police officer Cory Evans filed a lawsuit against the "DUI Guy" an attorney named Larry Forman who has a YouTube channel for defamation after Forman accused Evans of planting evidence.

As Louisvilles WDRB reports:

"Forman posted body camera footage to his YouTube channel from a 2018 incident where LMPD Officer Cory Evans searched a man's vehicle following a suspected DUI. The video depicts officer Evans and another unidentified officer searching the vehicle for alcohol. Evans looks in the center console without finding anything, but the video jumps forward to the view of the other officer, who opens the console and finds a bottle of liquor minutes later."

While I dont agree with Forman when he concludes, The video speaks for itself, Formans conclusion is nonetheless quite plausible. In other words, the body cam video footage makes it easy to see how Forman could sincerely believe that Evans did indeed plant the evidence. That is, Forman may have simply been stating what he believed to be the truth.

Now, Evanss attorney claims the accusation has hurt the reputation of the LMPD officer and the suit is seeking damages.

Lets hope Evans loses, and loses big.

Defamation as a Means to Silence Critics

The problem of a police officer suing a community member for an accusation of abuse helps illustrate one of the central problems with defamation lawsuits: they can be used by powerful people to silence critics.

In the United States, we are fortunate that it is quite difficult to win a defamation lawsuit. Generally speaking, in American courts, plaintiffs claiming damages from defamation must prove actual harm as well as intent to harm. The plaintiff must also prove the defamatory comments are false.

The difficulty of winning a defamation suit under such circumstances helps discourage countless defamation lawsuits. Thank goodness.

Alas, in other parts of the world, this is not the case, and we find many cases of government agents suing or prosecuting citizens for defamation. We even find wealthy and powerful private citizens suing critics, even when those critics are apparently stating what they believe to be facts.

The potential for abusing defamation law helps illustrate, yet again, the wisdom of deferring to freedom of speech as a dominating legal principle, and as a philosophy behind the US governments First Amendment. The presumption should be overwhelmingly in favor of the freedom to speak freely, as efforts to limit speech in the name of protecting reputations presents many opportunities for the abuse of government power.

In all times and places, of course, agents of the regime prefer to silence their critics if they think they can get away with it. Historically, regimes have employed many strategies, such as blasphemy laws, or have simply outlawed criticism. But, as The Economist has reported:

"All these approaches attract international criticism. So some governments turn instead to defamation laws. Defamation is recognised almost everywhere as grounds for a civil claim, in which subjects of wanton and damaging falsehoods can demand financial compensation. But when defamation is a criminal offence, governments can go beyond fining critics who have caused demonstrable harm, and imprison them simply for speaking. Though several countries have recently decriminalised defamation, many more still prosecute it zealously. And even where it can no longer lead to jail, charges can stifle criticism if courts award vast damages."

Fortunately, in the United States, where defamation are suits are generally difficult, it is especially difficult for government personnel or government agencies to sue for defamation.

This has been true for many decades, and this tendency toward skepticism of government-initiated suits was greatly strengthened in the American courts in 1964 with the Sullivan ruling, in which the U.S. Supreme Court concluded:

For good reason, no court of last resort in this country has ever held, or even suggested, that prosecutions for libel on government have any place in the American system of jurisprudence.

In the U.K., on the other hand, protections against defamation suits have been far weaker, even in regard to suits by government agencies. Only in recent decades, for example, has the UK turned toward heavily and explicitly restricting government suits against critics.

Use by Private Parties to Intimidate Critics

Invoking the government's courts to cover "damages" can be used in the private sector to silence one's opponents as well.

In the United Kingdom, where defamation laws are far more extensive than in the United States, we can find cases of defamation suits used to gain commercial and political advantage.

For example, when a plastic surgeon expressed doubts over the efficacy of a breast-enhancement cream, the creams manufacturers threatened the surgeon with legal action.

In another case, Saudi businessman Khalid bin Mahfouz sued a researcher who publicly concluded that Mahfouz had given money to al-Qaeda.

Such lawsuits would be quickly dismissed in the United States, but in the UK, matters are different. As NPR has reported:

"Crooks and brigands from around the world come [to the UK] launder their reputations, where they couldn't get exculpation in either their home country or indeed in the United States of America," says Mark Stephens, a London lawyer who often represents media companies in these cases. In American courts, the burden of proof rests with the person who brings a claim of libel. In British courts, the author or journalist has the burden of proof, and typically loses. "So you've got the rich and powerful shutting down and chilling speech which is critical of them," says Stephens.

Of course, the fact that its very hard to win defamation lawsuits in the US doesnt mean no one ever threatens them. Donald Trump, for example, is notorious for threatening defamation suits against critics. This dates back to well before his years as an elected official or presidential candidate. In 1984, for example, Trump sued architecture columnist Paul Gapp for making fun of Trumps plan to build a two hundredstory skyscraper in southern Manhattan. Trump claimed Gapps remarks caused Trump $500 million in damages.

Trump has tried many similar suits, including a suit against a writer who said Trump wasnt really a billionaire in 2006.

Trump sued one of his own Trump University students in 2010 over the students criticism of the schools business practices.

Thanks to the U.S.s laissez-faire attitude toward defamation, these cases were dismissed relatively quickly, although not without first causing his victims many sleepless nights and legal fees.

One can only hope that the lawsuit brought by Cory Evans of the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department receives the contempt that it deserves from the courts.

After all, government agents and agencies already exercise far more power over their fellow citizens than is the case for average people. The last thing we need is for these agents of the regime to be able to threaten their critics with lawsuits for the act of merely saying things.

Police officers and other government employees who dont like being subject to public criticism can always resign their positions and become ordinary private taxpaying citizens.

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute.He has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of "Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre." Republished from mises.org.

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OPINION: How defamation suits are used to stifle free speech - The Richmond Observer

The PTI government is on the back foot on the proposed digital regulation draft after a strong protest by the media and journalists community calling for a struggle to preserve free speech. While the government was thinking of some curbs on the content of the social media, the mainstream journalists are adamant not to allow such restrictions as they believe electronic media is already subjected to over-regulation.

But is the government right in imposing curbs and how far we need to go in preserving constitutional safeguards like freedom of speech? Are we aware of the new challenges that come with the advent of evolving cyberspace?

The debate is more relevant in the broader context of new realities: the exponential growth of net usage, its effects on the consumers, particularly the youth, the power of international media platforms, and the abuse of cyberspace by hackers, terrorists, and dark propagandists in the post-Covid-19 world.

Concerning net usage, Covid-19 has multiplied reliance on the internet as a means of education, communication, diplomacy, trade, and services from take-aways to household shopping. Due to staying home to avoid contraction of Covid-19, physical-societal space has dramatically shrunk, diffusing virtual interactions and communication.

The extent of digitalization of Pakistani society is by and large measured from these numbers: As of April 2021, the percentage of internet users in Pakistan is almost 50 percent which means approximately 100 million citizens, while 70% of consumers are youth a good as well as bad news. The good news is the youth has mounting aspirations, exposure and new avenues to explore opportunities in their lives through the net. The bad news is they are also exposed to dark propaganda, twisted narratives, influences, and ominous content targeting their innocent minds to sign up to particular agendas.

Since cyberspace is a new realm, the state has no digital sovereignty as a result it has grave implications unfolding in various ways: Besides, sexting among kids, a 2 years old kid can watch cartoons equally tagged for other messages. Then there are manuals of bomb-making and all sorts of terrorist activities which can be performed as a lone wolf warrior. Whereas various chat rooms can encourage them to imbibe the dark propaganda and hence respond. For example, the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq getting traction and recruitment in the western world was due to the net-based propaganda, its influence, and information operations.

In Pakistan's context, the virtual world brings in new challenges to the youth of Balochistan in particular as it subjects them to the consumption of all sorts of information, propaganda, and influences of militants and terrorist outfits. Balochistan has around 70 percent youth under the age of 22 years. They have the keyboards and the time of the whole world, but can hardly make sense between what is valid information and what is dark propaganda.

The influence of militant operations and their sponsors through dozens of websites and servers operating mostly out of India underscores the vulnerabilities of the youth to get access to their nefarious activities from a narrative building, claiming terror incidents of bomb blast to delegitimising the statehood of Pakistan.

Worse, the manipulation of the youth of Balochistan through social media is an art only to exacerbate biases, stereotypes, and mischaracterization of Pakistan and Balochistan's future aspirations through CPEC and its development trajectory. It is very important that the authorities concerned invest in digitalized projects to engage the youth of Balochistan and give a counter-narrative to militants and also check what is being churned out through social media.

At the country level, the net platform is a digital window to be an interface between an individual and the state, between society and the state, and hence it necessitates a case for a legitimate, much larger debate as to what restrictions and regulations should space be subjected to and who should decide "the good" for the state and society.

Learning from western experiences, hackers, cyber schemers, and dark propagandists are already undermining the digital sovereignty of advanced countries like America, the UK, and Russia.

Recent examples of how digital threat in real life is unfolding as a bigger problem to advanced economies are as follows: recently non-state actors attacked a gas pipeline called Colonial pipeline in America disrupting supply to the entire East Coast. In recent times ransomware (extorting money through digital blackmail or hacking from companies) and cyber attacks have targeted financial markets, schools, hospitals, and other government networks and influence operations for diverse purposes like recruitment, terrorism, and other anti-state criminal activities.

In other instances, India subjecting Twitter to Indian IT laws and the power of private giants like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter suspending individual accounts President Trump's accounts suspension under the pretext of checking hate speech demonstrate the extent of the power, a) the influence of global social media giants and, b) the limits of freedom of speech.

Interestingly, India banned Chinese apps like TikTalk and WeChat. Most European countries including the UK and France banned Hawaii 5G. While China has threatened two EU companies like Erricson and Samsung to be proscribed, it already has its own version of FB, Twitter, and Whatsapp. The above examples have brought a new debate to the fore the de-facto corporate sovereignty vs state's digital sovereignty.

Lessons learnt: Pakistan also has to transit from analog sovereignty to digital sovereignty which encompasses control and direction of anarchic content, software development, and companies power. Here one point extrapolation of digital sovereignty with some complete border control is not meant, but a state directing the speed of companies and regulating the content of digital social space so it does not create threats to the state and society's integrity and sanctity.

The problem Pakistan is facing is we as a whole have yet to evolve a strategic coherence about the challenges of digital threats.

Our elite from media to judiciary and policymaking need to recognize compelling cases to assert digital sovereignty by imposing regulations on free-for-all content that it has to regulate the borders of cyberspace and develop the capability to counter virtual threats to its digital systems and society at large.

Rather than clinging to archaic laws and principles meant for addressing the challenges of the bygone era, we need to balance the state's case for regulated digital platforms and content, and the free speech imperative which is not absolute in its very nature and is already subject to limits even in the western societies.

Currently, individuals and big companies' boards decide what to say and how to say, hence the law unto themselves where they should be subject to a sovereign state's law: this should be the baseline for the country to start with.

The recent debate of free speech and the anarchic content on social media platforms need to be understood, and broadly debated, to draw a line as to where a state can regulate, and how far should it go vis--vis the recognition of the limits of free speech so that we do meet the challenges of the new de facto realities of the virtual world.

(Jan Achakzai is a geopolitical analyst, a politician from Balochistan, and an ex-adviser to the Balochistan government on media and strategic communication. He remained associated with BBC World Service. He is also Chairman of the Centre for Geo-Politics & Balochistan. He tweets @Jan_Achakzai)

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Digital sovereignty vs freedom of speech? - The News International

Free speech is all around us, even in ways that might not be immediately obvious.

We talk a lot about the First Amendments free speech protections during campaign season, when individuals want to express a deeply held idea, when they want to refrain from speaking, and when an idea is deemed unacceptable by certain groups.

The Constitutions protection of free speech surely matters in all those situations, but free speech is a much broader value than thatit is at the root of our most basic human and social needs, including our economic dealings.

Our daily economic lives depend on free speech in underappreciated ways. Many of us earn our livelihood through creative activity and trade, and both are directly related to the First Amendment. But every single one of us depends on commercial messagesadvertisements, solicitations, and descriptions of products and servicesto improve our economic well-being in one way or another.

All those boxes on the grocery store shelves, for example, are not just dinner; they are the tangible expression of the First Amendment.

But surprisingly, courts have not treated this essential and routine expression of free speech to full First Amendment protection.

Since the 1980 case of Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission, several Supreme Court decisions have created an untenable hierarchy in First Amendment law. The law sometimes reserves the highest protection for the expression of political ideas but allows the government more latitude to restrict speech that provides commercial information.

Further, courts have held that speech by compensated professionals may be regulated in ways that political speech may not.

So when award-winning restaurateur Chef Geoff Tracy wanted to advertise happy hour deals at his Virginia restaurant, the speech police were waiting to shut down ads that used the verboten phrases happy hour or two-for-one. Why? Because of an arbitrary law restricting his freedom of speech.

Virginia law allowed restaurants to offer half-priced drinks but made it illegal to call these specials two-for-one.

A similar situation faced Peggy Fontenot, an Indian artist who belongs to a tribe that the State of Oklahoma doesnt recognize. When she marketed her artwork as American Indian-made, the state told her she didnt qualify as a real Native American.

Likewise, the Georgia Board of Nursing was worried that if Debbie Pulley honestly explained her decades of experience as a midwife, people might jump to the conclusion that she was a practicing registered nurseso they tried to deny her the right to use the word midwife to describe herself.

In each of those cases, Pacific Legal Foundation fought back and won, protecting the right of free speech. But in each of those cases, the odds were stacked against us because the speech touches on economic regulations. Government had a thumb on the scale that wouldnt be there in any other free speech case.

Because the courts have created a two-track First Amendment, numerous free speech principles that protect the free expression in some contexts have no application to commercial or professional speech.

The overbreadth and prior-restraint doctrines prevent government from regulating speech with too broad a brush, or stifling speech before it is uttered, but they are generally inapplicable to commercial speech restrictions. And while restrictions on noncommercial speech that discriminate against certain topicswhat courts call content-based restrictionsare subject to the highest judicial scrutiny, content-based restrictions on commercial speech remain subject to only middling review.

Justice Clarence Thomas has correctly written that there is no philosophical or historical basis for asserting that commercial speech is of lower value than noncommercial speech.

The truth is that for many people, seemingly mundane communications about products, services, prices, and economic opportunities are as important to them in their daily lives as the most contentious or momentous political debates. This is truer than ever in the age of the internet, where global trade thrives online and new ways of delivering professional services, like telemedicine and online education, are becoming the norm.

The free exchange of ideas and information is vital for human progress in both our intellectual and material lives.

PLF is committed to the consistent application of the First Amendment, overturning the precedent that has undermined protections for commercial and professional speech.

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Free speech protects ideas, including the right to truthfully advertise - Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF)

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That the dictatorship of the Communist Party and military in North Korea (the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, DPRK) suppresses free speech is taken for granted, and it regularly draws criticism from around the world. But such aversion to free speech is not limited to authoritarian regimes.

It can also become a problem when a nation that espouses freedom and democracy adopts policies and institutions which directly impinge on freedom of speech.

A serious example of this is the new South Korean law that took effect in March, banning the dissemination of leaflets critical of the Pyongyang regime into North Korea by balloon.

In South Korea it had previously been a common practice for individuals and groups who oppose the Pyongyang regime headed by supreme leader Kim Jong Un to attach leaflets and relief supplies to helium balloons which were then sent across the 38th parallel into North Korean territory.

These materials harshly criticize the inhuman dictatorship in North Korea and explain the truth about the current international situation and history.

Outlawing sending leaflets north amounts to trampling on one of the most important rights possessed by citizens of democratic countriesfreedom of speech.

The new law was adopted by South Korean president Moon Jae-in and his ruling party in response to a strong criticism from Pyongyang last year demanding that the balloon flights be stopped. This knuckling under to threats from Pyongyang by the South Korean leadership defies belief.

When President Moon met with U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington D.C. on May 21, they discussed various issues related to North Korea. One of the things observers had an eye on was what the two men would have to say about the new law banning leaflet distribution.

During an April meeting of the U.S. bipartisan congressional human rights commission, the South Korean government had come under heavy criticism for among other things trying to make South Korean society more like that of North Korea.

Then at the beginning of May, South Korean police conducted a raid to search the offices of a group made up of defectors from North Korea on suspicion that they had violated the new law by releasing large balloons carrying 500,000 leaflets near the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas. That was clear suppression of free speech.

President Biden has vowed that under his administration the United States will speak up about human rights issues around the world. It is, therefore, unfortunate that the issue of the anti-leaflet law was not solved during his summit meeting with Moon.

The joint statement issued following their summit meeting simply reiterated general policies, such as we agree to work together to improve the human rights situation in the DPRK.

The international community should not pretend it does not see what is happening with the anti-leaflet law, which is emblematic of how the Moon administration regularly kowtows to Pyongyang.

Australia, India, South Korea and some other countries have been invited to attend the G7 summit scheduled to start in the United Kingdom on June 11 because they are said to share the same common values of the G7 members.

However, we have to question whether the Moon deserves a seat at that table, considering how his administration so abjectly fawns over the dictatorship in North Korea while cracking down on free speech in South Korea.

The G7 members, along with other attendees such as Australia and India, should press Moon to withdraw the anti-leaflet law.

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(Read The Sankei Shimbun editorial in Japanese at this link.)

Author: Editorial Board, The Sankei Shimbun

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EDITORIAL | South Koreas New Limits on Free of Speech are At Odds with a Seat at the G7 Table - JAPAN Forward

Points on free speech

Thank you for the terrific Jan. 25 Explainer, Twitter banned Trump. Is free speech at risk? The question-and-answer format was perfect for batting aside talking points in a clear, concise manner. I have two suggestions that would have made this article a bit more convincing (at least to a reasonable reader), though I have no idea how the writer would have incorporated them:

1. In addition to the choices by corporations being legally permissible, they are the direct consequence of past behavior of the users being blocked or banned. These decisions were taken in response to the users actions (inflammatory language, lies, etc.), not prejudgment of possible future action (censorship).

2. For those who insist that Twitter has replaced the public square, why should offensive speech or deception online be permitted more leeway? Saying the same thing on Main Street would rightly alarm law enforcement.

Rusty WyrickGhivizzano, Italy

Thanks for the March 8 review of Bill Gates book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, headlined Big challenges energize Bill Gates, especially climate change. Unfortunately, the most telling passage was of Mr. Gates mentioning how huge his own carbon footprint was. It is human nature to crave wealth and the status it brings, and wealth usually brings a prodigal lifestyle. Thus I crave articles about those who practice modest consumption, even as they are generous with their wealth. Those who teach by example are the ones who inspire me.

John StettlerDallas

Your timely March 29 Explainer, Housing crunch: Is flexible zoning the answer? emphasizes the racial aspects of a problem that is far more complex. SB 9 and SB 10, currently under consideration in the California Legislature, would override local residential controls. Suburban issues involved include lack of adequate water supply, traffic congestion, school funding, and environmental questions all of which existing householders have been struggling with for years.

Story continues

Location of housing and education are clearly linked, but these bills, and numerous others now under consideration by the state, are no solution to affordable housing. A policy simply promoting duplexes is not the road to solving a complicated dilemma.

Gloria Wyeth NeumeierKentfield, California

I recently read the April 5 Explainer, Why enrollment matters to district bottom lines. I think that public education will change forever, and Im not optimistic about where it is going. My own familys experience has been terrible since March 2020, simply because only about four months have actually been in person.

What I suspect will happen is that more and more parents will realize that there are other options to public school and those with the means will use them, while those without will have no choice. The inequity in the system will increase. While there are many factors to blame, the actions of teacher organizations to resist returning to school are a prime one. I say this not only as the spouse of a former public school teacher, but also as a practicing physician who has missed zero days of work, which makes me very unsympathetic.

James SchoutenPayson, Arizona

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Readers write: Points on free speech and public school - Yahoo News

For some countries, too much free speech is considered a bad thing.

A Danish think tank has conducted a 50,000 person, 33 country survey into the idea of free speech.

It found that, while the Western world generally agrees it's a universal good, there were a number of countries where citizens think there is too much liberty to give offence.

This was most prevalent in places like Kenya and Nigeria where they have conflict around religion and sects, with 82 percent of respondents from Kenya saying the government should be able to prevent people from saying something to offend minorities.

But some other countries without those major issues also registered as having too much freedom of speech by their own citizens such as Germany, France, Australia, Argentina and Britain.

Massey University sociologist Paul Spoonley has spent decades researching aspects of free speech. He told Mike Hosking the pandemic may have affected some Western attitudes to free speech.

Covid-19 has caused a little bit of concern about free speech. It looks to be that theres concerns about misinformation, that people are opposed to vaccines and so on.

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Survey suggests people think there is too much free speech - Newstalk ZB

University College London, a self-proclaimed institution of disruptive thinking, takes great pride in its origins. And rightly so. At a time when only white men of the Church of England could benefit from tertiary education, the opening of the Godless institution of Gower Street to people of all backgrounds, was groundbreakingly disruptive. It angered the establishment and the prevailing orthodoxies of 19th-century England.

For the Scottish clergyman, Edward Irving, London University (as it was known then) was the Synagogue of Satan. King George IV was so incandescent by the opening of Londons new secular university, that he ordered the creation of a new place of learning in London, Kings College London (KCL) which set out to imbue the minds of youth with a knowledge of the doctrines and duties of Christianity.

Thankfully, despite the widespread condemnation against UCL, it survived. And it has produced some of the worlds greatest minds, including John Stuart Mill, Mahatma Gandhi, Roger Penrose and Frances Crick. These individuals have made invaluable contributions to their fields. This is UCL at its finest. This is UCL, as a true academic institution of disruptive thinking.

Tragically, almost 200 years later, this university is no longer so welcoming to those who dare challenge the prevailing orthodoxies of our age. Just look at how students and academics have responded to the question of the Israeli-Palestine conflict.

In recent weeks and months, there has been a great deal of pressure put on the provost to retract the IHRA definition of antisemitism. UCLs governing body adopted the IHR definition in 2019. In December 2020, a working group of academics produced a report rejecting the definition. This was followed in February 2021 by UCLs academic board concluding that the IHRA definition was not fit for purpose.

In response, the UCL Students for Justice in Palestine Society (SJP) in a statement said: UCL was founded upon principles of acceptance and tolerance, academic autonomy, and freedom of speech. As a university that prides itself in being the home of disruptive thinking, the academic boards decision shows its continuous commitment to tackling discrimination and carving a new, innovative path.

And yet, despite the SJPs apparent enthusiasm for freedom of speech and disruptive thinking, on a recent Instagram post, they said that they would not engage in dialogue with Zionists. The society also refuses to engage with anyone who rejects the narrative of ethnic cleansing in Palestine and does not acknowledge apartheid within Israel, those who do not accept BDS as a legitimate form of resistance, and lastly, those who do not agree with the so-called right of return idea. In other words, the groups mindset is: if you do not agree with us, we refuse to debate you. They must enjoy talking to themselves!

Back in 2016, protesters disrupted a talk by Hen Mazzig, a former IDF soldier, organised by the UCL Friends of Israel. The protests turned violent and the police had to be called. At the time, UCL stood up for Mazzigs free speech, disciplining five of the students involved and inviting Mazzig back to speak in 2018. But now UCLs academic board seems to be in agreement with No Platform advocates, all while professing a commitment to free speech.

There is a great deal of hypocrisy here. It seems the only time free speech matters to these activists is when it comes to the vilification of Israel. Whenever Israel is brought up, suddenly, they become staunch advocates of free speech.

Defenders of Israel, on the other hand, are often silenced on UK campuses. Take, for example, an incident from November 2019 at KCL. One evening, a former senior IDF officer was set to give a talk on Israels humanitarian work for Syrians caught up in the civil war. A loud mob of 80 pro-Palestinian students protested this outside the event calling for him to be No Platformed. Despite the attempts of the few pro-Israel activists to engage in respectful dialogue, they were subjected to insults and abuse. The pro-Palestinians in attendance could have voiced their views on Israel and Zionism at the event. They could have challenged the IDF officer. But no. They chose division over discussion.

To be clear, I am not for one moment suggesting that Israel should be immune from robust criticism.The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most complicated and multifaceted conflicts on earth. The beauty of free speech is that it allows us to hear different perspectives. This paves the way for understanding, and understanding, of course, is the backbone of peace and tolerance. What is unacceptable, however, is for free speech to only exist for those who wish to demonise the worlds only Jewish state.

Free speech matters for all, and so does disruptive thinking. We should never forget that.

Harry is a student at UCL and the incoming president of the UCL Friends of Israel Society.

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Free speech matters for all at UCL, and so does disruptive thinking - Jewish News