Inside Higher Ed and NBC affiliate WALB 10 of Albany, Georgia are among those to carry early word of Barnes' victory. In addition, Sara Lipka, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, offers a rundown of the case—documented extensively over the past three years here on The Torch—as well as the ...

Through this now years-long struggle, Craigslist's legal position has been and remains absolutely, unequivocally correct: the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (or CDA) grants providers of "interactive computer services" an absolute shield against state criminal law liability stemming from material ...

When that happens, it’s called viewpoint discrimination or content discrimination. The designation depends on whether the law, policy or official suppresses speech because of the particular viewpoint or because of the subject matter. Two constitutional protections can be used to combat this form of selective speech discrimination — one in the First Amendment, the other in the 14th.

Read David Hudson’s commentary in full.

This is the fifth meeting of the IGF, which was established to discuss public policy issues related to Internet governance on a global scale. Approximately 1,500 government policymakers, technologists, politicians, and others will attend.

EFF experts will participate in nine workshops in Vilnius, including "The Future of Privacy," with EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston and EFF International Rights Director Katitza Rodriguez, who is also a member of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group that helped plan the meeting. Also on the agenda is "Governance of Social Media," with EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl and "Why We Need an Open Web," with EFF International Affairs Director Eddan Katz.

For a complete schedule of EFF's participation in IGF see http://www.eff.org/calendar/2010/09/14/eff-united-nations-internet-gover....

WHAT:
United Nations' Internet Governance Forum

WHEN:
September 14-17

WHERE: Lithuanian Exhibition Centre LITEXPO Laisves pr. 5 LT-04215 Vilnius, Lithuania

For more on the IGF:
http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/
http://www.igf2010.lt

Contact:

Rebecca Jeschke
Media Relations Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
press@eff.org

Last week, we covered why Michigan State, Tufts, and Bucknell are on the list, and we described what they must do to put themselves back in FIRE's good graces. Today, we take a look at Johns Hopkins University.

Johns Hopkins earned its place on our Red Alert list with its egregious ...

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn against the Department of Homeland Security as well as U.S. customs and immigration authorities.

The lawsuit says more than 6,500 people have had their electronic devices searched as they crossed U.S. borders since October 2008. Nearly half of those searched were U.S. citizens.

In May, a graduate student in Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal was detained for several hours as his electronic devices were searched, the suit says. The encounter badly frightened the student, according to the suit.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers filed the lawsuit on behalf of the National Press Photographers Association, criminal defense lawyers and the student: Pascal Abidor, a 26-year-old French-American citizen whose laptop computer was confiscated at the Canadian border.

The civil rights groups said photographers regularly travel abroad with cameras, laptops and media storage devices to cover global news stories and rely on their ability to communicate confidentially with sources. ...

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution will protect him, in the same way it allows the Ku Klux Klan to burn crosses and for protesters to torch the American flag.

The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear in several landmark rulings that speech deemed offensive to many people, even a majority, cannot be suppressed by the government unless it is clearly directed to intimidate someone or incite violence, legal experts said.

"Are you just saying something or are you trying to incite violence? That kind of becomes the dividing line," said Ruthann Robson, a constitutional law professor at West Virginia University. "You can speak, and express an opinion, and do it in a symbolic way by burning something, but you can't do it in a way that would incite violence."

The incitement exception comes from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), where the Court held that a Ku Klux Klan’s leader’s speech did not incite violence. The opinion said that “the constitutional guarantees ...

If the ruling stands, money could flow even more freely to this year's crop of voter initiatives. Six such measures are on the ballot — the second-most in state history — and state records show the campaigns have raised a combined $32.5 million, with about $10.1 million spent so far.

The law at issue bans contributions larger than $5,000 in the final three weeks of an initiative or referendum campaign. Family PAC, a political group involved in the 2009 referendum on expanded domestic partnerships for gay couples, sued the state last year challenging the contribution limit.

In a ruling last week, U.S. District Judge Ronald Leighton agreed with Family PAC that the limit was an unconstitutional infringement on political speech. But Leighton kept in place a requirement to identify donors who contribute more than $25, turning aside Family PAC's argument that such publicity might improperly dissuade people from giving to campaigns.

James Bopp Jr., a noted campaign-finance attorney who has represented Family PAC, said the Washington state spending limit clearly violated the ...

Barnes' ordeal began in the spring of 2007, when he peacefully protested Zaccari's plan to spend $30 million of student fee money to construct two parking garages on campus. By posting flyers and sending e-mails to Zaccari, student, and faculty governing bodies, and the Board of Regents, Barnes expressed his concerns and proposed what he saw as environmentally friendly alternatives. Barnes also penned a letter to the ...