Annie Youderian reports: Signs declaring “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “Fag troops” at the funeral of a Marine killed in Iraq may have been “distasteful and vulgar,” but they are nonetheless protected by the First Amendment, the 4th Circuit ruled Thursday, overturning a $5 million verdict against the Westboro Baptist Church. The three-judge panel…
Tag: First Amendment
Newspaper faces backlash for outing Web critic
The Associated Press reports another story involving online anonymity and outing critics. In this case, a Wisconsin newspaper turned over the identity of a critic without any subpoena or court order…. and subsequently regretted it. The incident generated discussion, yet again, about whether anonymous critics are entitled to protection of their anonymity. Getting named the…
Wikileaks Under Fire For Publication of Court-Protected Information
Chris Burke writes: Wikileaks, a whistle blower website, encourages and advertises anonymous tipsters to upload confidential documents to its site. But what if that document, or a portion of that document, were privileged by a court order? Such a scenario could be heading for a disaster with Wikileaks at the helm. Wikileaks is widely known…
Rights need protection in blogosphere
Bill Simmon is a filmmaker, blogger, board member of the Vermont ACLU, and media educator. Simmon offers his opinion on the implications of a NY court’s decision to order Google to out an anonymous blogger and alerts us to yet another case. Simmon writes, in part: Critics of Ms. Port (and the countless anonymous Internet…