Freedom of Speech

People For the American Way President Ralph G. Neas joined Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and other leaders from a broad coalition of civil liberties and privacy organizations to support new legislation Wyden has authored to strengthen legal protections for personal information against government abuse.

This ruling allows the Department of Justice to bury these secret arrests even deeper. Now the public is denied access even to the names of attorneys representing detainees. Indeed, this ruling takes us closer to authorizing the government to use secret arrests and detentions on a broad range of criminal suspects — or just outspoken critics. The repercussions could be disastrous.

PFAW President and lifelong baseball fan Ralph G. Neas sent a letter calling on Baseball Hall of Fame President Dale Petroskey to reconsider his decision to cancel a celebration of the 15th anniversary of “Bull Durham” because of the political activism of two of its stars. “Baseball is one of the great American traditions,” Neas wrote. “But an even greater and longer American tradition is the right of free speech.”

In defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down as unconstitutional a similar Nebraska ban on so-called “partial birth” abortion procedures, the Senate voted 64-33 to approve the “Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.”

People For the American Way President Ralph G. Neas said the legislation was a far broader attack on women’s reproductive choice than its sponsors have claimed. The bill, which contains language that is so broad it could forbid some of the most safe and common abortion procedures available to women, sets the stage for further encroachments on reproductive freedom.

People For the American Way Foundation joined today with the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and other groups to file a brief in federal court in support of parents challenging a school board’s decision to remove all Harry Potter books from the school library shelves. The decision by the Cedarville, Arkansas, school board, which requires written parental permission before students can check out the books, disregarded a 15-0 decision by the board’s Library Committee. The episode was triggered by a parent’s complaint that the books promote witchcraft and sorcery as well as the ideas that “magic will solve your problems” and that “parents/teachers/rules are stupid or something to be ignored.”

Bipartisan House and Senate negotiators retained a Senate amendment restricting the data mining activities of the Pentagon’s Office of Total Information Awareness (TIA). The final bill requires Congressional oversight of the program and conditions its funding on actions by the executive branch to protect privacy and monitor the usage of personal information. It also bars deployment of TIA technology without explicit Congressional authorization.

In a bold bipartisan move, the U.S. Senate adopted an amendment that could protect Americans from the broad reach of government data-mining efforts associated with the office of Total Information Awareness.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments October 28th in Richmond concerning the appeal of a ruling that set a strong precedent protecting the freedom of speech on the Internet. That ruling helped to solidify protection of electronic speech as equivalent to the protection of written and oral speech.

On September 4th, Judge Denise Cote of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York dismissed on procedural grounds Sarah Jones’ lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission. Jones was suing because the FCC branded her work “indecent” in a ruling against a broadcaster, and that designation has had a continuing chilling effect on her First Amendment right to free speech.