Daily Archives: January 14, 2015

First Amendment Rap

By: Jasmine Cooper

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First Amendment Rap - Video

LONDON, UK The attacks against French newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris last week have sparked a worldwide conversation about free speech.

Now the satirical paper is going to print again with its first post-attack edition, and the freedom of expression debate is raging on.

Whats on the cover? You guessed it a new cartoon of Prophet Muhammad. That's forbidden in Islam, but Charlie Hebdo and its fast-growing fan base insist the paper has the right to print it.

Some are wondering what that right is all about. Americans know something about their First Amendment. International law also protects freedom of expression and opinion its in the second sentence of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. In practice, it varies considerably by country, even within Europe.

Heres a brief explainer on the different legal interpretations of free speech in the United States, Britain and France.

The US has the First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.What First Amendment protections exist in say France or Britain?

None. The Bill of Rights applies only in the US.

Thats irritating.

Sorry. But both France and Britain are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights and theInternational Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which spell out countries obligation to protect citizens rights to free expression, even of controversial or inflammatory opinions. (The US has signed on to the ICCPR as well.) They have national laws protecting free speech as well.

And citizens here are serious about that freedom. When marchers mobbed the streets across France this weekend, many raising pens toward the sky, they were showing solidarity with the slain staff of Charlie Hebdo. But demonstrators were also taking a stand for the newspapers right to express itself through controversial cartoons.

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#FreedomOfSpeech: What that means in the US, Britain and France

"We have the right to make dumb jokes."

-- Tina Fey

I'm a free speech advocate. I've been arrested and I have served jail time for exercising my First Amendment rights. As a reporter, magazine editor and political cartoonist, I've received complaints (and a few rare death threats) for my work. So it goes without saying that I share the global outrage over the brutal murders of the cartoonists and staff at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. It chills the blood to imagine any American cartoonist being placed in the crosshairs of a Kalashnikov. No matter your race, religion, history or lifestyle, murder is a heinous crimefar worse than even the most wounding insult.

But after dwelling on the causes and effects of this tragedy, I find that I have some qualms about the argument that there should be no limits to the exercise of free speech.

My concerns begin with a question: "At what point does satire become bullying?" At what point does satire morph from a deftly wielded surgical tool into a blunt instrument of personal or cultural assault? As we have seen, a pen can draw a cartoon but a weaponized cartoon can draw blood. Does the cause of "free speech" bind us to defend slanders, lies and defamation?

Many advocates of free speech make a point of defending uncensored and fearless public expressionbut only so long as the speech does not veer into venomous and hateful rhetoric. When "free speech" devolves into racist or misogynistic invective, it can prove as devastating to public peace as yelling "Fire!" in the legendary "crowded auditorium." Such mean-spirited expressions are classified as "hate speech" and are characterized by content that "offends, threatens, or insults groups, based on race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, or other traits."

Unclothed Emperors Versus the Naked Masses

Satire, as a form of mockery, reads entirely differently depending on where and how it is directed. Ridicule directed against the powerfulwhether the target be a wealthy member of the elite or a multinational corporationis most easily recognized as the proper use of the satiric tool. However, ridicule directed against the powerless, the disenfranchised, or the disabled can be seen as inappropriate and coldhearted bullying.

Even hate speech can be nuanced by the interplay of social realities. It's one thing for the oppressed to call for the elimination of the ruling classes; it's another matter for the rulers to call for the elimination of masses. Regicide and genocide are both crimes but there is a vast difference in scale.

Satire, as defined by Wikipedia, is "a genre of literature, and sometimes graphic and performing arts, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, corporations, government or society itself, into improvement."

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Satire and Sanity: Where Do You Draw the Line? (News Analysis)

While not quite as momentous as the legal tussle over the Pentagon Papers, in the ongoing push-pull between the First Amendment and national security, Twitter is taking an important stand against government overreach.

Last year, thanks to pressure brought by tech companies such as Google, LinkedIn and Facebook, the government relaxed the gag rules associated with national security-related warrants and subpoenas. But it still dictated exactly how much the companies could disclose about these requests.

Twitter, which has probably been the most aggressive of the major tech companies in pushing against these limits, argues in a suit it filed in federal court in San Francisco that it should be able to publish more detailed information about the requests, citing its First Amendment right to free speech.

This fight may seem a small matter given past battles between speech rights and government's powers. The Twitter case does not raise the same grave matters as the Pentagon Papers, secret documents that described the history of American involvement in Vietnam, which were at the center of one of the most important free-speech cases in U.S. history. Nor is this as important as the current debates over the government's broad crackdown on journalists reporting on counterterrorism efforts.

But the principle is the same: how to strike the balance between the free-flow of information in a democracy versus the need to keep some secrets from our enemies. And it comes in this post-Snowden world of ours, whose disclosures of National Security Agency surveillance have raised profound questions about the government's efforts to monitor communications in its hunt for terror plots. In the wake of those disclosures, it seems to me that it's more important than ever for us to have a better understanding of just what the government is up to in our name.

"Twitter's efforts go to the core of informing the public what type of surveillance state we live in," said Alex Abdo, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. "The government wants to have it both ways. It wants to conscript the tech companies to spy on their customers. But it won't let them inform the public."

The battle this time is in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, with the most recent development coming late last week when the government filed a motion to dismiss much of the Twitter case.

Like a lot of lawsuits, Twitter's struck me at first as splitting hairs.

For example, when it comes to National Security Letters, an administrative subpoena that gives the FBI broad search powers, the government demands that Twitter disclose only how many it receives in increments of thousands; Twitter wants to disclose them in a more narrow range, by the one-hundreds. Likewise, when describing all national security requests, Twitter wants to talk about requests in groups of 25, not 250, as the government prescribes.

For its part, the government argues that there isn't a free speech constitutional issue, and that it needs "to maintain the secrecy of information that could reveal sensitive investigative techniques and sources and methods of intelligence collection."

Read more:
Quinn: Twitter takes a free speech stand against U.S. government