protest rights

The Washington Post's Robert Barnes reports on a challenge to the law that keeps protesters away from the U.S. Supreme Court except for the sidewalks surrounding the highest court in the country. The D.C. U.S. Attorney argued that there is a legitimate governmental interest to keep demonstrations away from courthouses because courts don't make decisions by reference to public opinion, but one judge ruled that it was inconsistent with the First Amendment for the government to prohibit virtually all expression in front of the court.

Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and writing in The Huffington Post, asked whether distributed denial of service attacks are a legitimate form of protest --- such as when Anonymous hackers targeted Paypal for refusing to send donations to Wikileaks. Fourteen criminal defendants facing federal charges for the Paypal DDOS attacks are due in court this week.

On one hand, "a denial of service attack is damaging and costly. Many of PayPal's customers rely on PayPal for their livelihood," Omidyar says. On the other hand, Omidyar writes "I can understand that the protesters were upset by PayPal's actions and felt that they were simply participating in an online demonstration of their frustration. That is their right, and I support freedom of expression, even when it's my own company that is the target."

However, Omidyar concludes such attacks are not the same as other forms of free expression because one protestor's computer is turned over to a central controller and has a magnified impact of making "hundreds of web page requests per second."

The Washington Post reports on the harsh sentences that 21 Islamist women and girls were given for protesting a court decision "that came a day after police beat and terrorized prominent female activists in a crackdown on secular demonstrators under a tough new anti-protest law." They were protesting to demand the reinstatement of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, who was ousted by the Egyptian military. The Post further reports Egypt has enacted a law barring public political gatherings of 10 people or more without police consent.

The Washington Post has a piece that begins: "Courts from Moscow to Murmansk sent out a broad and uncompromising message Tuesday: Russian authorities will not tolerate protest, not from the weak or the powerful, not on land or at sea." A photojournalist and Greenpeace activists detained after a protest of Arctic drilling were denied bail in one case. In another case, a man with disabilities was confined to indefinite psychiatric treatment after being arrested at a protest when Vladimir Putin was inaugurated.