There is a lot of crossover here and the Right to be Forgotten. The EFF opposed EU right to be forgotten laws because they could often be used in censorship (like in this very matter).
In the US, there are fewer people who expunge criminal records because there are companies that will produced expunged records in background checks so long as they were public at any time. Banning this gets into 1st amendment grounds.
And that's the flip side: labeling theory. In places like Australia, certain crimes do get removed from your record so long as you've stayed out of the system for five years. Even their sex offender registry has limited use (certain jobs, housing restrictions etc.); it's not public like ours. Then again, they don't have freedom of speech (except in Victoria; sorta).
Could we have laws that restrict companies from considering criminal records past x number of years in the US? I'm not sure if that'd be possible in our currently legal system.
In America, you can't really restrict information, once it's published, except in certain limited cases (like when a case involves a minor).
We have that here (Netherlands). You are under no circumstances allowed to not hire someone because of past failures if the statue if limitation has expired or the sentence has been served. There might be restrictions on what you can do after you have served, but it is not up to the company to judge on this. This is one of the reasons the "right to be forgotten" exists.
You can however request a "VOG" (translation something like: "Confirmation of good behavior") in which a company (or volunteer organisation for instance) asks for very specific cases like "Allowed to work with children" or "Can have access to privileged data like personal data or medical". The request is handled by the government. You get a response like "No comment" if there is no problem or "Not granted" if you fail. This avoids the problem of having people judge your exact misdemeanors/behavior in the past and leaves it out of a private companies hands and allows the right to be forgotten to exist.
You can also request it and let the person reject the request on legal grounds, but this usually gets you into more problems than you would like.
There is one "but". For higher security clearances (like for working for the state department equivalent) they are allowed to look further back and are allowed to view data from further back and do proper background checks forcing specific issues to come to the light of day. But that check is way more complex than a simple "VOG".
Not all child rapists are the same. If an eighteen-year-old has consensual sex with a seventeen-year-old, technically they have "raped a child". And yes, over zealous prosecutors do prosecute cases like this. There are people on the offender registry convicted of distributing child pornography because they sent someone a nude selfie when they were a teenager.
Not according to any reasonable interpretation of raped a child. You aren't the only one who assumed I would use the braindead US legal definition, so sorry for for not being clearer.
But if somebody rapes a five year old I don't want to work with them, don't want to be near them, etc. There are crimes that are impossible to rehabilitate from.
Exactly. Most employers hear that you're on the registry and stop their inquiries at that point. The registry tars everyone on it with the same brush.
I'm not saying you would fail to make the distinction. But many people do, and many essentially innocent people suffer, and IMHO society as a whole, suffer as a result.
Sure theres no argument with someone who aims at pre-pubescent children. But those laws have themselves been perverted so that even a single picture between 2 17 year olds is this horrible felony that ends up ruining 2 lives.
So yeah, its time to quit this Scarlet Letter for most "sex crimes" - cause its a gross miscalculation of justice and law.
I don't disagree, and obviously if I was taking the time to interview a candidate, I would also take the two minutes to look at what they were charged for.
I am using 'X' to represent a conviction for a crime. I am using 'X' because I don't want anyone to think that I am condoning or justifying any particular crime.
1. How would someone else know that the person did X?
2. What if that crime had nothing had bearing on the position?
3. What about the concept of a sentence representing the 'complete payment to society'? Denying someone the ability to make a living turns a finite sentence into an indefinite sentence.
For me,
1. If someone was guilty of embezzlement, this would be relevant (positive or negative) if the position involving money handling (cashier, or accounting) - but not relevant if the position was social work.
2. If the person was guilty of stalking, a position that would allow access to customers' PII would be problematic.
I appreciate your idea to remove any particular crime and consider them all, but to me what you did matter (also why). If somebody was guilty of embezzlement because they owed money to drug gangs I wouldn't be afraid to have them handle money (a majority would take embezzlement over murder). Heck I wouldn't have a problem hiring a murder, if the circumstances of the act was special.
But there can be no excuse to rape a five year old.
Your response is exactly why I phrased my response the way I did.
You ignored the part where I said that if a person has served their sentence, this represents the end of the social punishment. If you want to argue for a life long sentence than do so.
In order for someone to function, they need a job. A convicted and released child rapist needs to pay rent. How would you propose housing, clothing this person so they are not homeless in front of your office?
I think it's the same thing that prevents you from not hiring someone because of the color of their skin. You open yourself up to being sued. And if you paid an investigation company money in order to get a sealed criminal background on an individual and then don't hit them that's pretty good evidence you were using that as a hiring decision.
I think the issue of freedom of speech is much more nuanced than that.
For example, even in places with "absolute freedom of speech", which I suspect is what you're implying, there is defamation laws that forbids certain kind of speech. There is also laws around hate speech and so forth.
> In June 2017, the Supreme Court affirmed in a unanimous decision on Matal v. Tam that the disparagement clause of the Lanham Act violates the First Amendment's free speech clause. The issue was about government prohibiting the registration of trademarks that are "racially disparaging". Justice Samuel Alito writes:
> “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express "the thought that we hate". United States v. Schwimmer, 279 U. S. 644, 655 (1929) (Holmes, J., dissenting).”
There are still limits in the US. You have to promise that you’ve never been a member of a communist party on entry. It wouldn’t be wise to talk about bombs near an airport, or tweet about killing the president when he’s visiting your city. People who say controversial things, write controversial articles, or make controversial films tend to get detained and questioned at the border a lot, get harassed, and get their devices confiscated.
Absolute freedom of speech doesn’t really exist anywhere. The US is probably one of the most liberal countries on earth when it comes to policing it, but it’s not like anyone can say anything.
> People who say controversial things, write controversial articles, or make controversial films tend to get detained and questioned at the border a lot, get harassed, and get their devices confiscated.
Since when? How would that even work? The president orders the NSA to generate a list of disagreeable film makers and journalists and passes it to the TSA and customs? Do you have any evidence for that claim at all?
> It wouldn’t be wise to talk about bombs near an airport, or tweet about killing the president when he’s visiting your city.
Those are not free speech issues. It is not illegal to talk about bombs at an airport or to threaten the president. Just because you shouldn't does mean you're not free - freedom from consequences isn't the same as freedom of action. Restricted speech is exceedingly rare and, to my knowledge, only applies to public safety (falsely yelling fire in a theatre) and inciting violence (rallying everyone to get weapons and go shoot cops)
This works through a mechanism called a "terror watch list"
For example, imagine you're a Youtuber and you make a serious, fair film about the Israel-Palestine conflict. You successfully get access to senior people on both sides.
Except Hamas is a terrorist organisation, and to get that access you've visited online forums about the organisation, contacted people in the US associated with it, and flown to a terrorism hotspot to meet with terrorist leaders. That pattern is pretty similar to someone who had been radicalised and wanted to fight abroad!
So you're put on a terror watch list, and at the border you're subject to extra searches, with the random delays that entails.
> "Since when? How would that even work? The president orders the NSA to generate a list of disagreeable film makers and journalists and passes it to the TSA and customs? Do you have any evidence for that claim at all?"
"We’ve learned about this fishing expedition through documents we obtained in a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit filed on Poitras’s behalf to find out why she was constantly being stopped by federal agents during her travels. Border agents detained Poitras at airports over 50 times from 2006 to 2012. The detentions began after she directed and released documentary films about post-9/11 life in Iraq and Yemen that challenged the U.S. government’s narrative about the war on terror."
I just read that article in full, and it doesn't claim the same things you claim it does.
Whatever your opinion of the government abusing surveillance power, Poitras wasn't detained because the government didn't like what she was saying, she was detained because the government suspected that she had foreknowledge of an attack that took place in Iraq where a U.S. soldier was killed and kept silent about the attack so that she could film it.
Now that belief was unjustified, ended up being wrong and in my opinion an absolute abuse of power by the government, but it is not a matter related to freedom of speech or censorship.
You are taking that situation and exploiting it to push an unrelated narrative, and I think that's disingenuous.
No-one said anything about the president or the NSA being involved. There are tons of ways this can work. And it actually happens.
Just once you're flagged and are inside The Machine you get detained upon entry whilst they confiscate your devices, try to see where you've been etc. Lookup the wikipedia page of Laura Poitras who for years lived in Berlin due to USA government surveillance. And this started way before her involvement with Snowden as a filmmaker.
> Since when? How would that even work? The president orders the NSA to generate a list of disagreeable film makers and journalists and passes it to the TSA and customs? Do you have any evidence for that claim at all?
"Citizenfour director Laura Poitras sues US over 'Kafkaesque harassment'
Film-maker whose documentary about Edward Snowden won an Oscar says she has been held for hours at a time by airport officials, told she was on a no-fly list and threatened with handcuffs for taking notes"
> Since when? How would that even work? The president orders the NSA to generate a list of disagreeable film makers and journalists and passes it to the TSA and customs? Do you have any evidence for that claim at all?
Actually yes. Just look at the McCarthy era witch hunts against 'communists' in Hollywood. The FBI and CIA were involved in drawing up the watch lists.
This all says nothing about the tacit control given to corps to control the work we undertake, thus controlling conversations we are allowed 40+ hours of week (the bulk of our waking life).
Or how Citizens United is enabling purchasing and pushing speech of a certain kind which we can see modifies people.
“Who controls the past controls the future.”
“The best books tell you what you know already.”
“War is peace.”
American is living those quotes and has been for decades.
I think what your parent meant was Australia doesn't have any explicit freedom of speech protection laws, unlike the US and some other countries. Which is true.
"The Australian Constitution does not explicitly protect freedom of expression. However, the High Court has held that an implied freedom of political communication exists as an indispensible part of the system of representative and responsible government created by the Constitution. It operates as a freedom from government restraint, rather than a right conferred directly on individuals."
- https://www.humanrights.gov.au/freedom-information-opinion-a...
Yep. A lot of people assume freedom of speech means they are allowed to say anything they want in a public forum, and nobody are allowed to stop them. But in actuality, freedom of speech means you are free from being censored by the gov't, but only the gov't. A private forum (such as a site, or newspaper) can freely censor anyone's speech if they choose to use their forum/platform/print.
>there is defamation laws that forbids certain kind of speech. There is also laws around hate speech and so forth.
You can't be criminally prosecuted for hate speech (unless the prosecutor stretches other laws to cover your "hate speech") or most instances of defamation (except in certain cases on a state by state basis[1]). You can be sued but that's a civil matter.
do defamation laws forbid you from defaming someone, and force the removal of all defamatory material from the public record? Or do they fine you if you defame them and enjoin you to publically state you were wrong?
> Could we have laws that restrict companies from considering criminal records past x number of years in the US? I'm not sure if that'd be possible in our currently legal system.
Yes, these laws exist in many places in the US often under the name "ban the box"
Here in DC, it is illegal for me to obtain an applicant's criminal record until after I've made an offer and I cannot withdraw an offer simply because the applicant has a record.
I think SF and NYC have some version of this as well.
> I cannot withdraw an offer simply because the applicant has a record.
how is this proven? If you fired an employee after a "while", may be siting business reasons, how does the employee prove that you checked the criminal record, and then that information is what led to the termination?
At that point, you've spent a fair amount of money onboarding the employee, and they'd likely be eligible to file for unemployment benefits. Even if there are no further repercussions under the "ban the box" regulations, it still tips the scale—at least a bit—toward reducing the friction for those with criminal records to obtain employment.
They dont.
Employees are continually screwed over by employers, and even so most people work in Employment At Will states - so its even harder to prove it was anything.
I think it is abhorrent that data of expunged criminal records are kept by private firms. Why can't this be made illegal if yelling "fire" in a theater is?
Can't tell if your question is rhetorical or not, but: Falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre is different because it (1) is actually false, (2) leads to an immediate and unambiguous risk of life, and (3) is not potentially of political importance.
The first is the most important in the US for free-speech issues. For instance, "it's true" is considered an absolute defense in cases of slander/libel, no matter how mean spirited or damaging.
> Why can't this be made illegal if yelling "fire" in a theater is?
Yelling “fire” in a theater is not illegal. It was asserted to be the kind of thing the government might permissible prohibit in dicta (which are not themselves authoritative) illustrating the decision rule, without any citation to supporting precedent, in a later-overturned case in which the court allowed what is now recognized as an imperssible restriction on core political speech.
I can’t see how you can prevent someone making a truthful record of history. What are you going to do? Hold a gun to people’s heads and tell them to forget that things have happened?
In a whole lot of countries this information is not readily publicly available in the first place, and privately publishing it means someone has violated the terms under which they were given access.
E.g. in the UK, to even be able to do a check to see if someone is barred from certain types of work, you are required to abide by a long list of terms which goes much further than merely not republishing the data. To request a less comprehensive check requires you to have a compelling need (a specific set of roles). The basic checks can only requested by the person they're about.
Violating the terms comes at the risk of no longer being able to do records check (among other consequences), which may force you to close down your business in the worst case.
Nothing prevents you from making a truthful record of history if you have the data, but lots of things act to prevent most attempts to publish them.
That's fine, but this thread is specifically talking about the US, where all court records are public documents unless specifically sealed by a judge, with justification that can be challenged in court.
Now, publishing expunged records in the US is morally dubious. I don't know the case law in this area, though, so I don't know where it stands on legal grounds.
Do you believe it should be legal for companies to have terms that prevent you from working at a competing company in a similar industry. It is illegal to share much of the information you learn there as well. The big difference is that you aren't meticulously saving every piece of information for easy access at your new company and that you know you're breaking the law if you did share that information. Simply make it illegal to use the data after a certain amount of time and the problem will fix itself.
Side note - "yelling fire in a crowded theater" is not persay illegal, and was actually used in a free speech trial against a man who wrote anti-draft pamphlets.
Falsely yelling fire in a theater. Plus that was only a rhetorical point used to justify a ban on pacifically protesting the draft, by emotionally appealing to recent (at the time) tragedies.
Eugene Volokh discussed this case earlier today on his blog [0]. His rough conclusion, with appropriate caselaw citations, was that the 9th circuit will almost certainly overturn the injunction on the article.
The times wrote about a confidential document that was mistakenly released to the pulblic. The judge who sealed the document in the first ordered the times to redact their article which goes against decades of case law and arguably the first amendment.
Not only this but the Streisand effect seems to suggest that the court order will have the opposite than intended effect
Yes and arbitrary state censorship via prior restraint is knocking on our doors right now. If this isn’t throughly thrown out with prejudice, things will only get much, much worse.
John Saro Balian, 45, pleaded guilty to one count each of soliciting a bribe, obstruction of justice and making false statements to federal investigators as part of a plea agreement he reached with prosecutors. The document was ordered to be filed under seal but appeared on PACER, a public online database for court documents.
I'd say that last part is the part that got LAT in trouble... I rarely support the whole "under seal" thing, especially when it's in order to protect a corrupt dirtbag cop, but this "ask for forgiveness not permission" stuff won't fly with many judges...
But yeah, this guy is scum. Not only has he gleefully profited from both sides of the ruinous Drug War, but his police status has allowed him to escape the draconian punishments that normal people suffer.
>this "ask for forgiveness not permission" stuff won't fly with many judges...
TFA makes it extremely clear that the First Amendment gives newspapers and others the right to publish information obtained from documents that end up available to public in error. All case law indicates that the LA Times waa acting fully within the boundaries of the law and did not need to "ask for forgiveness" or whatever.
This ruling is extremely unusual and clearly unconstitutional.
Heres is the full redacted part:
>The document was ordered to be filed under seal but appeared on PACER, a public online database for court documents.
>According to the agreement, filed in U.S. District Court, Balian agreed to cooperate with federal authorities by responding truthfully and completely in interviews and court proceedings. He is scheduled to be sentenced in September, when prosecutors are expected to recommend a reduced sentence.
>The charges to which he pleaded guilty carry a maximum sentence of 35 years in prison.
So, I imagine what's happening here is that this guy played both sides, and was caught and was being used as a mole by the US law enforcement. By releasing these charges publicly, the concern is that the cartel will now know he was disloyal and may attempt revenge.
This is entirely speculative, but it seems much more probably than the judicial branch going out of its way to help the executive.
The paragraph before that mentions that it is often appeals courts who have protected the behavior, as various trial "...Judges have issued similar orders before..."
Incidentally, no one would wish to see the cop's family harmed, but it's not like this plea agreement came as a surprise to them, so they already had time to reorganize their lives for security. That makes the seal difficult to justify. Also, the risks they face are mostly due to the cop's actions.
> often appeals courts who have protected the behavior, as various trial "...Judges have issued similar orders before..."
That omits every time a district judge has declined to issue such an order.
In reference to the original post:
> ask for forgiveness not permission
News organizations don't ask permission of anyone before publishing, least of all courts.
Finally, I'll add that if news organizations can publish the Pentagon Papers and Snowden's leaks, certainly they can publish an accidentally leaked plea agreement.
I’d add that they are the asking for forgiveness; prior court rulings clearly established that they have “permission”, since the information was not illegally obtained, and is of public interest.
What if this crooked cop gets a job with even a modicum of authority in the future? Surely, insuring this incident shows up in background checks would help future potential employers.
> especially when it's in order to protect a corrupt dirtbag cop
It was an order to protect his family from retribution from violent psychopaths that have in the past murdered not just informants / plea deal recipients, but their entire family in the most bloody way imaginable. I would not be surprised if the headline in a few days is about his wife and children dying in ways unfit to print. And it would be irresponsible journalism of the LA Times that made it happen.
I’m one of the most pro free speech person I know, but I’m squarely with the judge and the right to seal court proceedings here. And with a now gone age of journalism where this crap didn’t happen in the first place.
Wow. Your circle of acquaintances must be strongly against freedom of speech, then.
You cannot create the Memory Hole by court order. LA Times has a constitutional right to print anything they obtain legally. They are not directly placing anyone's lives at risk by publishing.
If anything, they could publish another article about how slipshod security practices in the court system leak sensitive information to the public, and the court system tries to censor journalists rather than investigating and fixing their own problems.
The easiest way to protect the corrupt cop's family would have been to crack down on police corruption, so that no cop could get so deeply involved with a violent criminal organization that their family would ever be at risk. If the gangs couldn't get corrupt cops to cover for them, they would find it much more difficult to murder families for retaliation and intimidation.
Judging by Mexico's example, publishing may also put the journalists and their families at risk.
This is definitely shooting the messenger. In a system where doing that is illegal.
The judge is wrong, and should be reversed. Yesterday.
The "easy" way for cops, cop families, and normal people to be protected is to end the disastrous Drug War. It wouldn't matter if all police were paragons of virtue, applying enforcement rather than treatment to a drug problem is a sure way to end up with multiplied problems.
Any argument you can devise for this relies utterly on the critical step "a murderer acts on information in the article". The murderer was always the one placing people's lives at risk. And the murderer could also subscribe to the very same services which index public documents and court filings daily, that newspapers often use--like LexisNexis, for instance. Users can even be alerted on certain names and keywords. The LA Times article publication isn't even a critical step!
Even "a person is shocked/scared to death by the published information" would require some physiological condition that would enable someone to drop dead from an emotional response, such as heart disease with ventricular fibrillation, or organ failure due to chronic cortisol and adrenaline poisoning.
Perhaps publication of a paradox, like "This article contains no true statements," would kill an overly-logical AI?
The crime triangle of motive, method, and opportunity is closed by the criminal--the one with mens rea, the evil motive--not by anyone who produced any element of the opportunity.
Your assertion is completely unsupportable, and indirectly hostile to freedom of speech, by attributing imagined harms to speech, when their ultimate causes lie elsewhere.
> John Saro Balian, 45, pleaded guilty to one count each of soliciting a bribe, obstruction of justice and making false statements to federal investigators as part of a plea agreement he reached with prosecutors. The document was ordered to be filed under seal but appeared on PACER, a public online database for court documents.
> According to the agreement, filed in U.S. District Court, Balian agreed to cooperate with federal authorities by responding truthfully and completely in interviews and court proceedings. He is scheduled to be sentenced in September, when prosecutors are expected to recommend a reduced sentence.
And it doesn't contain the "corrections" ...
> 5:15 p.m.: This story has been updated to remove references from the filed plea agreement, which was ordered sealed by a judge but publicly available Friday on the federal court’s online document database. The changes were made to comply with an order issued Saturday by a U.S. federal judge. The Times plans to challenge the order.
> 3:40 p.m.: This article was updated with a statement from the Glendale police chief.
> This article was originally published at 10:55 a.m.
Regardless of their reasons, it feels very wrong to think a judge or an elected official could even think about regulating free speach. Double wrong for doing to the press.
I hope the judge get removed from office. I don't want people like that in charge of justice.
Judges and elected officials routinely regulate free speech. Every court sealed record, every copyright performance enforcement, every liable/slander ruling, every pornograpy lewd speech law/FCC regulation, hate crime and bullying laws that limit what anyone can say, tons of national security arms export that restrict wide gamut of things like CPUs and maths algorithms.
Some of those I agree with. Some I don't. Point is Supreme Court has rightly ruled Free Speech is not a absolute right. It does not trump all other rights. Nor all the duties/responsibilities we put onto governments.
Apropos of anything else, if I go somewhere and broadcast Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, or whatever, that is in no way my speech, and regulating the ability to do so without commission or royalty in no way restricts my ability to speak.
Deriving from a copyrighted work without permission is infringement unless it falls into some exception like fair use. As you note, parodies often qualify for that exception, but that's not the general rule.
Absolutely true. Parent may just not understand all the details. One thing that can be slightly confusing w/r/t copyright and recorded music is that the there's a rule that automatically grants a license to produce a new recording of a piece, without the original author or the copyright holder even being consulted. This is called a "mechanical license"; you can perform your own version of any musical work as long as you pay the fee and royalties for it.
That said, I believe there are still provisions for something like "moral rights" where the original author could sue to block publication.
The US doesn't have a general concept of moral rights, though many countries do. Is there some moral right specifically applicable to those compulsory musical licenses?
You're right -- I don't remember the right term for this case, which is why I put it in quotes. I just know that you can get the license automatically, and do the recording, but that the original artist has some means to try to block you releasing the recording.
Yeah, it's pretty confusing. I'm pretty sure the rules for performing covers are different from the rules for releasing recordings of covers, too. I think performance rights are more permissive.
Can you provide citations to some of the hate crime and bullying laws you mention? I want to know what I should be writing my elected officials about because free speech is so very very close to an absolute, and I like it that way. The few restrictions I'm aware of in currently valid (not overturned) Supreme Court precedent are exceedingly tiny.
Removal from office is the last thing that should happen in this situation. The judge made a questionable decision, which will be appealed, but the judge should not be fired (that is an action reserved for actual misconduct). If we do the latter to judges with whom we do not agree, we jeopardize the independence of our judiciary.
Disagree with the overall sentiment. If judges make decisions which don't represent the mandate of their constituents, they can/should be removed. See the Brock Turner judge in the SF bay area. Glad he's gone!
That said, you may be right about this particular situation.
> If judges make decisions which don't represent the mandate of their constituents, they can/should be removed.
This collapses separation of powers, is against the idea that "law" and "politics" are separate things, and paves the way for removing judges who don't support the views of the Party.
But i do believe that judges should be appointed by a panel of existing judges, and once appointed, can only be removed by said panel (and not the gov't).
Just a clarification: federal judges (like the one in this article) are appointed by the President and confirmed by Congress. They are not elected and do not have constituents in the same way elected officials do.
A judge is there to interpret the law, even if the outcome isn't what the majority of people would like. Politicians are there to sway with what the majority of people want.
Often, a lower court will be bound to make a particular judgment, because of precedent. It isn't unheard of for a judgment to say "We have to decide this way, but it would be really nice if this was appealed up to someone with the authority to decide the other way".
I just want to point out that this type of all-or-nothing thinking may be the most effective way to alienate people from your perspective. I'd consider myself a free-speech nut, but comments like this make me want to distance myself from that label.
I know this isn't related to hate speech, it was done to protect someone's family, but in much of the world, various forms of speech are regulated (by judges or elected officials).
To me, anyways, there's overwhelming anecdotal proof that having some limits on speech correlates (and more than likely contributes) to a safer and more just society without any virulent side effect. This is not a slippery slope.
I think it's good to be vigilant about these things and scrutinize judges and officials though.
> To me, anyways, there's overwhelming anecdotal proof that having some limits on speech correlates (and more than likely contributes) to a safer and more just society without any virulent side effect.
no serious person would suggest that this is a situation which requires limits on speech. you're using it as a platform for suggesting that it is, which I think is insane.
Personally I am highly suspicious of the 'for the subject's family' motivation as it seems very selectively applied and often comes up only when 'their people' are at risk from their own wrongdoing.
I'm of the view that it should be for everybody or nobody and not to discretion because their discretion always leads to selfish behavior that holds the people who most need to be held accountable to be the least so.
Especially when the DoJ says that fleeing domestic and gang violence are not grounds for asylum, it's ridiculous to consider the lives of a corrupt cop and his family above society, which this decision does.
In politics, there is an adage I like, never give yourself more power than you want your opponent to have.
Free speech is one of those things that fits into this category, regulating speech that makes people uncomfortable does have a very provable slippery slope effect.
We've experimented with aggressively limiting free speech before, and it went very very bad, very fast, I'd rather not try the experiment again.
Another point I'd like to make, is that I'd rather know what peoples 'real' views are, so I can either avoid them or help change their mind, pushing objectionable opinion underground, does not stop people from holding those opinions, it just hides them where it cannot been seen, and actioned upon.
> regulating speech that makes people uncomfortable does have a very provable slippery slope effect.
Yeah, I can tell you hate speech laws don't work well, since any group with an agenda can push for those laws to be used against the common good, or even injudicious application of it, such as we see in the GB, where a woman has been sentenced to community service for quoting song lyrics, or the moronic laws of my country that make the denial of the Holocaust illegal.
However, I'd argue that from a moral standpoint, these laws are even more reprehensible. Language (and thought) are how we test ideas, and when you start to limit that because they're the wrong kind of language or ideas, you limit not only our capability to discuss ideas, but also our ability to talk about these ideas, but also our ability to test them, and therefore, if it is really such a repugnant idea, find out the arguments for why it is so.
There are other reasons why I believe that hate speech is a toxic idea. For example: hate speech is a term used by the small-minded to shut down anything they don't agree with. Serious discussion on any contentious subject is immediately rendered moot by the new Godwin that is calling something hate speech.
It’s the slipperiest slope of all. Thousands of people have been arrested for causing offence in the UK after they introduced their absurd laws. Police have recently been threatening to arrest people for mocking them online. In the US we’re very lucky to have the first amendment to protect our speech no matter who deems it hateful or offensive.
There are middle grounds that also work well, like what Canada has.
It's got entrenched constitutional protections for freedom of expression which courts are willing to use to invalidate laws, but the same constitution explicitly allows certain limits on that freedom.
The balance isn't perfect, especially not as applied to most Canadian defamation laws (Quebec is a bit friendlier to defendants here). But it's pretty good and way better than the UK's lack of any restraint on Parliament's surveillance state tendencies.
Canada is a terrible example, they have compelled speech in their laws. Referring to somebody by the wrong pronoun is a criminal offence in Canada. The right to free speech is intrinsically the right to be offensive, for the very simple reason that any statement at all could be taken as offensive by somebody. As soon as you criminalise being offensive, any speech becomes fair game for government censorship. It is the very definition of a slippery slope.
> Referring to somebody by the wrong pronoun is a criminal offence in Canada.
Please cite the text of a law which actually says this or any case where someone has been convicted for this under a law which does not explicitly say it.
I find that definition is typically only used by people who are more interested in “offence” than “freedom of speech”.
We should obviously all have the freedoms to be offensive, because like you say, offence is essentially arbitrary. But we draw limits on that freedom all the time - for safety, libel, or public order reasons, for example. The real argument should be about where that line is drawn, and not those silly straw men about “they are going to arrest me for calling a man a man”
It’s not silly at all, because that is literally a law in Canada.
There are also 0 restrictions on offensiveness in the US. Any restrictions on speech are restrictions on other crimes. You can’t incite violence for example. If your straw man of what free speech means we’re true, then a gang leader could freely sit behind a desk and direct others to commit crime on his behalf all day because all he’s doing is speaking, right?...
If an employer* in NYC or Seattle tolerates one employee persistently and intentionally referring to another employee by the wrong pronoun, it violates their local discrimination laws just as much as in Quebec, with enforceable penalties to boot.
No, it's not criminal in either place, if it's not coupled with more. Another poster replied with a link debunking this myth as applied to Canada.
And yes, laws aimed at preventing a hostile work environment, even speech-based ones, have been held to be constitutional in the US.
For a US federal example, repeatedly targeting someone with racial slurs within a workplace* will also get you into punishable trouble.
*Yes, I know certain employers, like 2-person companies, are excluded from these laws. Doesn't change the general point.
2. The restrictions on speech in the US mostly relate to other crimes, like inciting violence. You can’t be arrested in the US for saying something that’s too offensive (like they do in the UK every day).
Section 127 prohibits "sending by public communication network an offensive / indecent / obscene / menacing message / matter". It's unspecified in that article how many were arrested specifically for offensive messages (as opposed, say, to menacing ones).
Menacing like... mocking the police? Threatening behaviour is already a crime in the UK. Section 127 ONLY serves to criminalize any behaviour deemed offensive by the state.
> You can’t be arrested in the US for saying something that’s too offensive
You clearly are unfamiliar with the entire domain of obscenity law not in the US, which is exactly about defining what is so offensive as to be outside the scope of First Amendment protection.
I was thinking it would turn out to be one of those bizarre elected judges that the US has. But I think federal judges are all appointed through some resemblance of a sensible process, so I'm at a loss as well.
Perhaps the judge should look instead to the court's and clerk's own record management. Something that is obviously in error, and the original cause of the risk.
Of course, they may well seek to quash such publicity. After all, who's going to make a deal with a system so incompetent it can't keep a sealed record safe from its own negligent mis-handling?
Well the info could be hosted on IPFS, which eventually could be monetized by something like Filecoin. I suspect you’re trolling, but decentralized technologies certainly will play a part in publicly disseminating information in the future.
Due to high transaction volumes (50 articles/day), the offending article would still be waiting to be published / mined. Thus obviating the need to be redacted.
How can you have every major conservative figure in politics having an outright attack on the press from the president on down...and call it a wild caricature I'll never understand.
Maybe it's fake news from conservatives themselves about the fake news?
There’s already manufactured consent and corruption of civilizational-implosion proportions, but this is a shot across the bow that the day of the fourth estate independent press maybe numbered.
Their wrong actions? What wrong actions? The judge did their job: they considered the facts and the law, and applied their legal reasoning, and reached a conclusion.
The fact that you don't like the conclusion doesn't mean the judge acted wrongly. There's nothing to be held accountable for.
The reasoning or decision itself, on the other hand, will go through the processes of review that almost all judicial decisions go through.
It isn't merely a controversial ruling, it might be easily construed as a favor to friends (police and/or the clerks who published the document by mistake).
It is an incorrect ruling, since it directly contradicts precedent.
This sort of thing often slows down promotions into higher courts (as it should — lower courts should not routinely waste everyone’s time and money with rulings that will surely be overturned on appeal).
The people at the LA times that published the information haven’t been forced to choose between exile in an embassy, and facing a kangaroo court, and also well-documented persecution via probably illegal psy-ops, falsified slanderous/libelous communications “from” trusted colleagues, etc, etc.
Compared to wikileaks, they “got a pass”. It doesn’t make the mistreatment of the LA Times any better though.
Because they obeyed the court order and took it down, so obviously they didn't have to do any of that.
I really don't understand what you are expecting. If you disobey a court, you get punished. Why is that strange?
And the exile in an embassy thing was unrelated to any leaks, despite Assange desperately trying to make it as if it was.
Look, I supported Wikileaks goals at first, but then Assange tried to turn it into his personal PR firm, using the name "wiki" to try to make it as if it's some "for the public thing".
In the US, there are fewer people who expunge criminal records because there are companies that will produced expunged records in background checks so long as they were public at any time. Banning this gets into 1st amendment grounds.
And that's the flip side: labeling theory. In places like Australia, certain crimes do get removed from your record so long as you've stayed out of the system for five years. Even their sex offender registry has limited use (certain jobs, housing restrictions etc.); it's not public like ours. Then again, they don't have freedom of speech (except in Victoria; sorta).
Could we have laws that restrict companies from considering criminal records past x number of years in the US? I'm not sure if that'd be possible in our currently legal system.
In America, you can't really restrict information, once it's published, except in certain limited cases (like when a case involves a minor).