New from the Institute for Free Speech
No One is Safe from the Doxxers
By Luke Wachob
Over the weekend, The Daily Beast exposed the identity of a day laborer and Trump supporter who allegedly edited a video of Rep. Nancy Pelosi to make it appear as though the Speaker of the House was drunk. The Beast also published the man’s occupation, criminal history, and even interviewed his ex-girlfriend. Then, the site’s editor-in-chief went on CNN to brag about the “scoop.” …
Publicizing gratuitous details about a person who exercises no real power is disproportionate and cruel. Indeed, the man said he tried to stay private in order to protect himself from retaliation for his political views.
“I’m in New York City,” he told the reporter. “Very liberal. People make judgments. I just don’t want to be linked to a conservative right-winger and be potentially denied services and stuff… People are nasty. You should see some of the messages that are coming in.”
People value their privacy, in politics as elsewhere. We vote in private booths. We celebrate anonymously-authored texts from history that speak truth to power. We join together in civic organizations and advocacy groups to speak as one, so that more powerful forces cannot divide and conquer us as individuals.
Yet on various fronts, privacy is under attack. The Institute for Free Speech is a stalwart critic of efforts to force advocacy groups to publish the names, addresses, occupations, and employers of their supporters. Proponents of these efforts claim they are focused on curtailing the influence of society’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals. Yet public exposure is most harmful to average people whose lives can be seriously affected by harassment and boycott campaigns.
As The Daily Beast article shows, name-and-shame tactics aren’t reserved for “megadonors” or those who wield actual power.
Supreme Court
Washington Examiner: Supreme Court rejects Pamela Geller’s appeal over ads depicting Prophet Muhammad on DC Metro
By Melissa Quinn
The Supreme Court declined Monday to consider an appeal from anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller over advertisements depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were rejected by D.C.’s public transit.
Geller and her organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, argued the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority violated their free speech rights when it refused to post the ads in 2015. The cartoon featured a depiction of the Project Muhammad – which Islam forbids – holding a sword and saying, “You can’t draw me,” with the words “Support Free Speech” across the top.
The organization blocked the ads, intended for WMATA’s buses and dioramas, under new advertising guidelines passed just days after submission that barred issue-oriented displays.
Geller’s organization argued the restrictions are content- and viewpoint-based, in violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech.
The group accused WMATA of adopting the advertising guidelines “to silence the viewpoint” it expressed, but lost an initial lawsuit in federal court in Washington as well as an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The federal appeals court said the advertising space was a nonpublic forum and rejected Geller’s claim that rejection of the ads was discrimination.
The Courts
NBC Montana: Challenge to IRS donor disclosure rules faces key test
By Associated Press
An attempt to force the Trump administration to resume collecting information about donors to certain nonprofit groups is facing a key courtroom test.
A federal judge in Great Falls will hear arguments Wednesday on whether the lawsuit by Montana Gov. Steve Bullock and New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal should be thrown out based on IRS officials’ contention the states have no right to sue over last year’s rule change.
Last year, the IRS stopped requiring nonprofits such as social-welfare groups and labor unions to turn over the names of donors who give more than $5,000.
Bullock and Grewal argue the change makes it easier for deep-pocketed donors and so-called “dark-money” groups to hide their political spending.
Congress
The Hill: House Intelligence panel to examine ‘deepfake’ videos in June
By Olivia Beavers
The House Intelligence Committee has slated a hearing in June that will examine a series of national security matters, including the threat of videos manipulated by artificial intelligence (AI) that look strikingly real, a panel aide said.
The congressional hearing on June 13 will be one of the first to primarily focus on so-called deepfakes, which experts and lawmakers say pose a major disinformation threat heading into the 2020 election.
The hearing comes amid a spotlight on a fake video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that made its way across Facebook and other social media platforms in late May…
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told The Hill in April that foreign and domestic actors could “wreak havoc” with the technology during elections.
“Now with deepfake technology, the Russians can push out fake audio or fake video that is indistinguishable from being real. They can make candidates for office say things they’ve never said,” Schiff said.
Schiff also said at the time that one of his chief concerns in 2016 was whether WikiLeaks added forged documents to the authentic ones it published after emails were stolen from the Democratic National Committee.
He said faked videos could be “far more debilitating,” and even have “an election-altering impact.”
Schiff, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) have highlighted the videos’ threat, which has received little attention so far in Congress.
Privacy
National Review: The Daily Beast Doxes the Powerless to Defend the Powerful
By David French
We have now reached the point where – if you become the target of online attacks – the death threats are virtually presumed. The efforts to undermine your career are nearly automatic. And it doesn’t matter who you are or what side you’re on. The mob can come for anyone. Again, this is so well-known and so commonly discussed that it’s easy to look at stories like the Daily Beast’s, especially given the gratuitous inclusion of embarrassing personal details, and believe they’re intended to facilitate exactly this consequence.
Moreover, no one understands what it’s like to endure this unique slice of hell until they experience it. You simply can’t say, “Well, this forklift operator knew the rules. He broke the rules. Now he pays,” and pretend that you’re enacting any kind of proportionate justice for the offense.
My default presumption is to protect anonymous speech – even as a journalist – absent compelling reasons to the contrary. To do otherwise is to feed the cycle of rage and personal destruction. To do otherwise invites personal catastrophe. It can even – in certain circumstances – invite violence. We live in a punitive age, dominated by a spirit of vicious intolerance.
We can choose to participate in this culture or resist this culture. The Daily Beast chose to participate. It chose to launch another online mob, this time against a target far more vulnerable than the prominent public officials and prominent public voices who (sometimes) have the resources and social capital to mitigate the resulting harm.
The real problem with the drunk-Pelosi video isn’t that a man in the Bronx posted it, but rather that powerful people spread it. I am far more concerned with Rudy Giuliani’s conduct than with the online activities of a “day laborer” from the Bronx. I’m also more concerned about the response of other powerful people and entities to this man than I am by this man’s conduct.
FEC
Election Law Blog: JFC: FEC Deadlocks on Rules for Joint Fundraising Committees, Bringing Us Closer to Concerns of Huge Fundraising Raised by SCOTUS Dissenters in McCutcheon Case
By Rick Hasen
Michael Beckel: [twitter]
The Media
Washington Post: Trump urges customers to drop AT&T to punish CNN over its coverage of him
By Craig Timberg, Taylor Telford and Josh Dawsey
President Trump took his long-running attacks against CNN to a new level on Monday by suggesting in tweets that a consumer boycott of its parent company, AT&T, could force “big changes” at the news organization.
“I believe that if people stoped [sic] using or subscribing to AT&T, they would be forced to make big changes at CNN, which is dying in the ratings anyway,” Trump tweeted. “It is so unfair with such bad, Fake News!”
The comment, which Trump tweeted in response to seeing CNN coverage while traveling in London during a European tour, fueled criticisms that the president was using his power inappropriately to intimidate critics.
Historians struggled to cite an equivalent threat even from presidents such as Richard Nixon renowned for their hostility toward the press. Less democratic nations with more tenuous press freedoms often use government regulatory power, criminal investigations or tax audits to punish news organizations seen as providing unflattering coverage, but past U.S. presidents rarely have taken such public shots at the businesses of the owners of major American news organizations, historians said.
“For a president to call for punitive action against a corporation in an effort to shape news coverage is, to say the least, highly unusual,” said presidential biographer Jon Meacham…
“He wants to sanction – and he wants the public more importantly to sanction – news organizations that produce news coverage that he doesn’t like,” said Timothy Naftali, a New York University historian and a CNN contributor. “The frequency and intensity of it is unusual.”
Political Science
FiveThirtyEight: Everyone Knows Money Influences Politics … Except Scientists
By Maggie Koerth-Baker
A political scientist who studies the way companies and interest groups influence policymaking, [Amy] McKay was searching for an answer to a fundamental question of politics: Does money matter? Could making a donation to a politician before he’s elected buy you a favor once he’s in office? The answer seems obvious, but for decades, political scientists had struggled to find a definitive answer. McKay was part of a cadre of researchers convinced it would be possible to reach a well-supported conclusion – if you found the right data to study…
Despite the topic being the subject of vigorous legal and political debate, despite the fact that most Americans believe it’s happening and see it as a problem, despite the testimony of politicians themselves, decades of research haven’t been able to conclusively prove that money buys influence. McKay’s study doesn’t even put an end to this strange lacuna in political science. She herself acknowledges that it isn’t a smoking gun…
The public face of lawmaking (and the easily accessible public record it leaves behind) is largely centered on the roll call vote – the final yeas and nays that decide whether a bill is voted into law or rejected.
Those votes have been the focus of much of the research concerning money and politics, and they suggest that there’s not much to find. More than 40 years of study has largely failed to turn up strong correlations between monetary donations and the outcomes of those votes, said Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard…
But there are many ways to influence legislation beyond dictating whether someone votes yes or no. Those decisions are tiny stitches, largely invisible in the finished bill. The problem for researchers is there’s seldom a record of those small alterations. But to some political scientists, this was the absence of evidence, not evidence of absence. “A lot of us couldn’t accept that money didn’t have any effect in politics,” McKay said.
Fundraising
National Review: The Right’s Grifter Problem
By Jim Geraghty
Why is the conservative movement not as effective as its supporters want it to be? Because day after day, year after year, little old ladies get called on the phone or emailed or sent letters in the mail telling them that the future of the country is at stake and that if they don’t make a donation to groups that might as well be named Make Telemarketers Wealthy Again right now, the country will go to hell in a handbasket. Those little old ladies get out their checkbooks and give what they can spare, convinced that they’re making a difference and helping make the world a better place. What they’re doing is ensuring that the guys running these PACs can enjoy a more luxurious lifestyle. Meanwhile, conservative candidates lose, kicking the dirt after primary day or the general election, convinced that if they had just had another $100,000 for get-out-the-vote operations, they might have come out on top.
What’s more, most of these PACs thrive on telling conservative grassroots things that aren’t true. Clarke didn’t want to run for Senate in Wisconsin, Laura Ingraham wasn’t interested in running for Senate in Virginia, and Allen West wasn’t running for Senate in Florida. The PACs propagate a narrative in which they’re the heroic crusaders for conservative values, secure borders and freedom, up against corrupt establishment elites . . . when they’re in fact run by those coastal political operatives and keeping most of the money for their own operations.
Perhaps you’re thinking, “Oh, every PAC does this.” Nope. In that RightWingNews study, Club for Growth Action PAC had 88 percent actually went into independent expenditures and direct contributions. Republican Main Street Partnership had 78 percent, and American Crossroads was at 72 percent. That allegedly corrupt “establishment” is way more efficient at using donors’ money than all of these self-proclaimed grassroots conservative groups. Over on the liberal or Democratic side, ActBlue charges a 3.95 percent processing fee when passing along donations to campaigns.
The States
News-Press Now: The Latest: Lawmakers pass school funding formula overhaul
By Associated Press
Nevada lawmakers approved a campaign finance measure after an amendment stripped a major provision that created a new reporting requirement.
An amendment to the bill brought by Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro cuts a major provision that would have required organizations that donate more than $10,000 annually to report the contributions.
The repealed provision would have applied to corporations, partnerships and labor unions. It was unclear Monday why lawmakers included the last-minute change.
The bill still clarifies the rules about personal use of campaign funds and bans candidates from paying themselves a salary with contributions.
The state Senate gave final approval in a voice vote minutes before they ended the legislative session. The approval came quickly after the Assembly approved the measure.
