prior restraint

The Connecticut Supreme Court has rejected a prior restraint case involving legal newspaper Connecticut Law Tribune, CLT's Thomas B. Scheffey reports. The court said the case had become legally moot because the trial judge retracted his order barring the Law Tribune from publishing a story with details from a juvenile court record. However, the newspaper appealed seeking "a ruling that this prior restraint violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and its counterparts in the Connecticut Constitution. The mother [of two children placed in foster care because of a rancorous divorce] sought a ruling that the confidentiality interests of the children trumped the constitutional free speech provisions," Scheffey reports.

After the Portland Press Herald defied a gag order, a judge presiding over a domestic assault case involving an attorney retracted the order, the newspaper's Scott Dolan reports: "'It is certainly very clear to me that this particular order was not lawful, and I should not have ordered the media to refrain from reporting what was said,”' Judge Jeffrey Moskowitz said in a Portland courtroom. It was the testimony of the lawyer's 34-year-old ex-girlfriend that the judge ordered not to be reported.

When Twitter filed its First Amendment lawsuit this week challenging the government gag on disclosing government surveillance requests to its customers, the company did so to establish "a constitutional right to truthfully inform its customers and the broader public that it has not received particular types of surveillance requests. In other words, Twitter is seeking judicial endorsement of its right to publish a 'warrant canary,'" Brett Max Kaufman writes in Just Security. According to Kaufman, the Electronic Frontier defines a warrant canary as a "'regularly published statement that a service provider has not received legal process that it would be prohibited from saying it had received. Once a service provider does receive legal process, the speech prohibition goes into place, and the canary statement is removed,' thereby informing the public that the process has been received."

The reason why Twitter is fighting against government compulson to remain silent and to report when it has not received surveillance requests is that the government has taken the position that Twitter is bound by a settlement reached with other tech companies about reporting surveillance requests even though it did not sign onto the accord, Kaufman said.

Twitter has filed a lawsuit challenging the federal government's gag order restricting the extent the social media company can reveal the scope of government surveillance on its service, Ars Technica's David Kravets reports. Twitter argues that it faces an unconstitutional prior restraint on its speech because of the gag order: "'Twitter’s ability to respond to government statements about national security surveillance activities and to discuss the actual surveillance of Twitter users is being unconstitutionally restricted by statutes that prohibit and even criminalize a service provider's disclosure of the number of national security letters (“NSLs”) and court orders issued pursuant to FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] that it has received, if any.'"

Alabama blogger Roger Shuler was released last month after he spent five months in jail for refusing to delete allegedly defamatory posts about a lawyer and the son of a former Alabama governor, Reporters Without Borders reports. Shuler finally asked his wife to remove the articles in order to get out jail, but his release is conditional.

Reporters Without Border said that the court order "'constitutes prior censorship. It is unacceptable that this blogger has had to renounce his freedom to inform for the sake of his physical freedom.'"

The Wall Street Journal will now be able to report the names of individuals that British prosecutors plan to implicate in a criminal case alleging that they were involved in a scheme to manipulate "benchmark interest rates," that paper reports today. The judge in the case will not contine a temporary order barring the WSJ from publishing the names in England and Wales as well as to remove the identities of those people on-line. Prosecutors had sought the order. Dow Jones & Co., WSJ's publisher, had called the order "a serious affront to press freedom," WSJ also reported.

Tech firms, including Yahoo and Facebook, want to be able to disclose more on the requests they receive from the government for Internet surveillance of Americans. The reason for not doing more earlier, the Yahoo CEO said, was the risk of committing treason and being imprisoned for it. In court, Yahoo is arguing that not being allowed to engage in the dialogue on surveillance or respond on the specifics of what it has been asked to do is a  prior restraint on its free speech. Historically, governmental retraint on speech prior to publication or utterance has been extremely frowned upon and tends to get struck down by judges. That argument may be a stronger one for Yahoo to prosecute in the FISA court.