free speech

The Internet is back up in most parts of Syria, which had been experiencing what some say was a state-orchestrated outage presumably designed to hamper rebel forces.

The BBC reported today that the country's capital city of Damascus again had Net access, and Renesys, which operates a real-time grid that continuously monitors Internet routing data, said in a blog post today that it had confirmed a "largely complete restoration of the Syrian Internet."

Renesys and other companies that offer back-end Net services detected a sharp cutoff in traffic to Syria on Thursday. According to Reuters, Syria's minister of information blamed the outage on terrorists, … Read more

Shaheen Dhada wasn't sure what to expect when police called her house Sunday night. The 21-year-old medical student who lives in Mumbai, India, had just posted a political statement on Facebook and her friend Renu Srinivasan "liked" the post.

Within hours, the two young women were arrested and charged with using speech that was offensive and hateful, according to the New York Times.

Now, just days later, Dhada and Srinivasan have come to symbolize India's intolerance of free speech. Tens of thousands of people have taken to social networks criticizing the government's arrests of the … Read more

When you "like" something on Facebook, that expression is indeed covered by the First Amendment, Facebook is arguing in a new court document.

The friend-of-the-court brief, filed last night, also urges an appeals court to vacate a recent ruling by a judge in Virginia that Facebook "likes" are not protected speech.

In that ruling in the spring, U.S. District Judge Raymond Jackson had said, essentially, that just clicking a Facebook button differs materially from the kinds of statements traditionally protected by the First Amendment. As a result, the judge dismissed a claim by six employees … Read more

Twitter has decided to appeal a recent ruling in the legal battle between the social network and New York State over the tweet records of an Occupy Wall Street protester. According to All Things D, Twitter announced today that it's not giving up protecting the rights of its users.

The melee began in May when New York County Criminal Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. subpoenaed Twitter to hand over three months of basic user information and tweets from one of its users, Malcolm Harris. Harris is currently being prosecuted for disorderly conduct at an Occupy Wall Street protest on … Read more

Tens of thousands of registered sex offenders have been purged from social networks like Facebook and MySpace over the past several years -- banned by state laws prohibiting them from using chat rooms, social networks, or instant messaging.

However, some of these registered sex offenders are now trying to turn the tables in state courts. Legal battles over the right to use social networks have ensued across the U.S., from Indiana to Nebraska to Louisiana, according to the Associated Press.

The position of the registered sex offenders and civil liberties groups is that the state bans violate free speech … Read more

Do Google and other search engines have a constitutional right to control their own search results?

The answer is yes, at least in the opinion of UCLA law professor and First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh.

In a report commissioned by the search giant (PDF), Volokh asserts that search results are a type of "opinion" based on what information the search engines believe would be most relevant to their users, according to news site PaidContent. Therefore, the results are protected by the First Amendment.

"Google, Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo Search and other search engine companies are rightly seen … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- The autocratic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia doesn't have much to worry about, at least not yet, from democracy activists and the Internet, one of the country's best known bloggers predicts.

"It is very unlikely that we will see any change in the country in the short and medium term," Ahmed Al Omran, creator of SaudiJeans.org, said at an event in CNET's offices in downtown San Francisco yesterday evening. Al Omran left Saudi Arabia to study at Columbia University and now lives in Washington, D.C.

A so-called Day of Rage protest … Read more

Arizona is faced with a dilemma: to possibly curb free speech or be left in a pre-digital age.

The state's legislature has been under fire the past few weeks for a bi-partisan bill that would revise its telephone harassment and stalking laws, according to the Associated Press. The law was written before the influx of computers and smartphones, and updates would add this modern technology into existing legislation.

On one hand, advocates of this law say it would make it easier to criminalize perpetrators who stalk their victims online or with text messages; but, on the other hand, free … Read more

The torrent-downloading site The Pirate Bay announced last week in a blog post that the Swedish authorities had launched a new criminal investigation into its activities.

"The Swedish district attorney Fredrik Ingblad initiated a new investigation into The Pirate Bay back in 2010," the blog said. "Information has been leaked to us every now and then by multiple sources, almost on a regular basis."

Today, the torrent news site TorrentFreak confirmed that the Swedish police were looking into The Pirate Bay. Apparently, authorities requested that the Swedish hosting company Binero, where The Pirate Bay is registered, … Read more