Monthly Archives: July 2017

Like disputes over abortion, the death penalty, and drug prohibition, the conflict between Israel and Palestine divides Americans into polarized camps of mutual distrust. If any consensus is possible on those issues, it is that there is nothing like a consensus, and that the attendant conflict is better handled through politics than violence.

Yet dozens of members of Congress have backed confusingly worded legislation that would impose new restrictions on American citizens who want to participate in boycotts against Israel, if they originate with an international organization like the UN or the EU. The bill thus seems to risk excluding some would-be boycotters from normal politics by criminalizing some expressions of dissent as a serious felony.

One neednt favor Boycott, Divest, Sanctions, the most prominent boycott campaign targeting Israel, to believe that criminalizing boycotts is deeply illiberal.

Say that BDS is the best path to securing equitable peace in the Middle East. Or say that targeting Israel for a boycott, alone among countries that abuse human rights, is inconsistent, wrongheaded, and unlikely to help Palestinians. The merits dont matter here. Americans have a right to adopt even mistaken positions, to engage in even ill-advised activism, and to stop dealing with even laudable entities.

Just how bad the new proposal is depends on how its least-clear language is interpreted. Domestically conceived boycotts of Israel would definitely remain legal.

But according to the ACLU, the law would punish individuals for no reason other than their political beliefs by expanding the Export Administration Act of 1979 and the Export-Import Bank Act of 1945, which prohibit U.S. persons from complying with a foreign governments request to boycott a country friendly to the U.S.

The ACLU analysis argues that:

the bill would amend those laws to bar U.S. persons from supporting boycotts against Israel, including its settlements in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, conducted by international governmental organizations, such as the United Nations and the European Union. It would also broaden the law to include penalties for simply requesting information about such boycotts. Violations would be subject to a minimum civil penalty of $250,000 and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison. We take no position for or against the effort to boycott Israel or any foreign country. However, we do assert that the government cannot, consistent with the First Amendment, punish U.S. persons based solely on their expressed political beliefs.

At National Review, Noah Daponte-Smith mostly agreed. This proposed legislation is indeed unconstitutional and unconscionable, an abridgment of the right to free speech, which is quasi-sacred in American life and enshrined in the founding document of our government, he complained. The senators who currently support it should be, quite frankly, ashamed of themselves, he added. They have lost sight of one of the founding principles of American government, allowing it to be overshadowed by the spectral world of the IsraeliPalestinian dispute.

Other analysts took issue with the ACLUs reading.

Haaretz reports that two of the bills original bipartisan co-sponsors, Senator Ben Cardin and Representative Rob Portman, insist its critics are overstating what it actually forbids:

They wrote that the bills critics misunderstood its language and that despite the ACLUs warnings, no U.S. citizen will face legal penalties for supporting a boycott of Israel under the new legislation. The two congressman explained in their letter that the most controversial part of the bill the one detailing the criminal penalties for participating in boycotts of Israel was in fact an expansion of a law, enacted in 1977, prohibiting U.S. companies from taking part in state-led boycotts of Israel.

That bill was adopted in order to counter the Arab boycott of Israel. The new bill adds a new component to it, stipulating that the penalties for participating in a state-led boycott of Israel will also extend to participation in boycotts led by international governmental organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union.

The newspaper added, Not all of the bills critics are convinced. The language is confusing and doesnt clearly state what Cardin and Portman wrote in their letter, one Democratic staffer told Haaretz, adding that it wouldnt surprise me if a large number of Democrats will ask to amend this, making it much more clear that citizens expressing support for boycotts will not be punished for their political opinion.

The bill strikes me as constitutionally suspect even if Cardin and Portman are correct that only companies, not individuals, will be targeted for participating in some boycotts. If a U.S. citizen owns a chain of Mediterranean restaurants, or a plastic-widget factory, or a freight-forwarding service, and declines to do company business with a foreign country, in support of a UN-led boycott against what she regards as human-rights abuses there, it would be an outrage to punish her as a felon.

Another analysis worth considering, The US anti-BDS bill may be bad, but not as bad as some critics say by David Schraub at Jewish Telegraphic Agency, argues that although the ACLU is mistaken in some of the concerns that it expresses, the bill nevertheless poses a significant risk of chilling speech because whether or not Israel boycotters are doing so because they personally find the nation terrible versus because they wish to support a U.N. declaration that Israel is terrible will often be quite blurry. In any event, its not clear why that should be legally dispositive.

He concludes, laws can be bad without being apocalyptic and inadvisable without being unconstitutional. Discussions of Israel/Palestine, in particular, suffer from a marked propensity from people on all sides to abandon care and perspective This bill does not do the more outrageous things it stands accused of. That does not mean it is well-drafted, necessary or worth the tempest it is stirring up.

See the article here:
Why an Effort to Thwart Some Boycotts of Israel Fails the Free-Speech Test - The Atlantic

In May, when lawyers for tech goliath LinkedIn warned a tiny data-scraping operation to stop gathering information from its members profiles, they probably didnt realize they were teeing up a weighty legal conundrum over the public square characteristics of privately owned social media sites.

Yet because of the crucial role that data analytics now plays in society, a squabble of seemingly traffic-ticket dimensions has drawn world-class legal talent, with Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe enlisted in the data-miners defense, while former Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Jr., has been retained by LinkedIn, which was acquired by Microsoft (MSFT) last year for $26 billion.

On Thursday the people analytics startup known as hiQLabs, which has built its whole business on data scoured from LinkedIns member profiles, will ask a federal judge in San Francisco to order its unwilling host to stop blocking its bots, citing federal and state constitutional free speech guarantees.

Data analytics on public information is a foundation stone of the modern internet, wrote Tribe and two other hiQ lawyers in a brief filed last week. They depict hiQ as following in the footsteps of such seminal web pioneers as Alta Vista, Excite, and Google. Without such technologies internet users would be unable to make sense of the billions of web pages that exist in this modern marketplace of ideas, the brief continues. To allow LinkedIn to impose debilitating financial and criminal liability on a startup for accessing public pages would have a widespread chilling effect on innovation across the country, and thereby thwart valuable commercial and academic research.

In response, LinkedIn portrays the case as far simpler. LinkedIn is a private entity with a right to control access to its private property and to decide how and to whom it will make information available from its servers as part of its business, argue its lawyers, Verrilli and Jonathan Blavin, both of Munger Tolles & Olson. hiQ has identified no plausible legal justification for the unprecedented relief it seeksa mandatory injunction granting hiQ access to LinkedIns computers so that hiQ can . . . threaten the privacy of LinkedIns members and the integrity of LinkedIns relationship with those members. (LinkedIn earned $975 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2017.)

Because hiQs information-gathering activity informs its communications with clients, hiQ maintains that it is entitled to free-speech protection. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, however, ordinarily protects citizens only against government attempts to limit speechnot actions by private companies, like LinkedIn. For that reason, hiQ relies mainly on the free speech provision of the California state constitution, which has been found to afford protection even in certain quasi-public forums, like privately owned shopping malls. In addition, hiQ hopes to capitalize on language from a U.S. Supreme Court decision handed down just last month, in which the justices characterized social media sitesincluding Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitteras the equivalent of the modern public square, and one of the most important places . . . for the exchange of views today. In that case, Packingham v. North Carolina, the court struck down, on First Amendment grounds, a state law that broadly banned convicted sex offenders from accessing social media sites.

Based in San Francisco, hiQ was founded in 2012, has raised about $14.5 million in financing, and employs 23 people, of whom 11 have advanced degrees, it says. The company offers corporate clients data analysis of their own workforces. To do this, it analyzes data that its automated web-crawling software programs, or bots, gather from the employees public profiles on LinkedIn. One hiQ service, called Keeper, for instance, identifies which employees hiQ judges to be most irreplaceable and the greatest flight risks. Another service, called Skill Mapper, assesses talent deficiencies in the clients workforce. In its briefs, hiQ identifies eBay, Capital One, and GoDaddy as clients, and claims that Bank of New York Mellon, Chevron, and IBM are among its prospective clients.

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LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. Photo: Stephen Lam/Getty Images

While there is no dispute that hiQ uses only public profilesinformation that LinkedIn members have elected to leave open to the worldLinkedIn deploys multiple technological shields in an effort to render even that information off-limits to bots. Bots, the company argues in its briefs, pose security threats to its members (they may be being operated by identity thieves or fraudsters, for instance) and technical threats to the site (in that they could bring it down through overload, including denial-of-service attacks). While LinkedIn does permit bots from certain known search engines, like Google and Bing, it blocks about 95 million data-scraping attempts per day, according to its briefs.

LinkedIn has no idea whether a bot may have good intentions, or whether it is a malicious actor, such as a hacker seeking to take down the LinkedIn site, a spammer, or an identity thief, the companys lawyers wrote in a brief filed last week.

Sometime this spring, LinkedIn says, it learned that hiQs bots were somehow piercing its standard lines of defenses. hiQ claims, in contrast, that LinkedIn actually knew what it had been doing for years, but only started objecting recently, after forming a plan to launch a competing people analytics service of its own.

On May 23 LinkedIns lawyers served hiQ with a cease-and-desist letter, alleging that hiQ, by circumventing its technological shields, was violating the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and a California anti-hacking statute, among other laws. Later, LinkedIn started rebuffing hiQs botssuccessfully, this timeby blocking seven internet addresses it had figured out belonged to hiQ.

On June 7 hiQ sued in federal court in San Francisco, asking for a judicial declaration that its practices were lawful, and a temporary restraining order preventing LinkedIn from locking out its bots.

By selectively blocking a company from access to its public profiles for anticompetitive purposes, says hiQ attorney Deepak Gupta, of Farella Braun & Martel, in an interview, LinkedIn is acting unlawfully not only as a matter of unfair competition law but also as a matter of the constitutional law of both the United States and California.

In a press statement, LinkedIn says: Our members control the information that they make available to others on LinkedIn and they trust us to honor that control. HiQ is taking member data, without their knowledge, and using it for purposes our members havent agreed to.

U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen will preside over Thursdays hearing. At an earlier proceeding, on June 29, he appeared torn by the issues presented. On the one hand, he expressed skepticism that the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Acta criminal statutereally barred the mere use of bots to harvest public information. You can get it manually if you hired a hundred million people to do it, he observed, but if you want to do it quickly and automatedly, you cant do it? That is a crime?

At the same time, he seemed reluctant to mint a broad, new constitutional right that might prevent LinkedIn and other sites from warding off the millions of bot attacks they sustain daily.

If Judge Chen doesnt grant hiQ a preliminary injunction, the startup may turn into a shutdown. HiQ attorney Gupta acknowledged at a hearing last month that, without a court order, the company was likely to go under. Though LinkedIn agreed to a standstill agreement on June 29, permitting hiQs bots to resume scouring the site until Judge Chen ruled, the outfit appears to have no Plan B.

Employees are coming to work, Gupta said when LinkedIn was blocking its bots, and theres really nothing for them to do.

Roger Parloff writes about law and business.

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Visit link:
LinkedIn lawsuit could determine whether bots have a right to free speech - Yahoo Finance

The article WSUs Camp Candoo mixes fun and friendship for children with speech disorders was a great read! It makes me feel good to know that there is such an innovative camp for children with the many different types of speech disorders faced by young people. My hat goes off to the founders of Camp Candoo.

If I may, I would like to mention to Spokesman-Review readers a little-known topic concerning speech disorders in children. Regrettably, it is not well-known that every child in the U.S. with any type of speech problem has the right to free speech therapy, as dictated by federal legislation in the 1970s. This benefit of free therapy is not an entitlement based on family income, and is therefore open to all children. An informative source on accessing this free speech therapy is a brochure, Special Education Law and Children Who Stutter, on the website of The Stuttering Foundation (www.stutteringhelp.org), a site known for its free resources for children and adults who stutter. Again, all the speech problems are encompassed by this amazing benefit of free speech therapy.

Edward Herrington

Naples, Florida

Originally posted here:
Free speech therapy - The Spokesman-Review