March 6, 2024

DOJ 

The Hill: Foreign agent law faces sweeping changes

By Taylor Giorno

.....The Department of Justice is expected to propose sweeping updates to influence disclosure rules for agents of foreign clients next month that could reshape the contours of the World War II-era law.

It has been decades since there have been major legislative or regulatory updates to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which imposed registration and reporting requirements for individuals and entities seeking to sway U.S. policy or the public on matters of foreign interests. 

Congress passed FARA in 1938 in response to the rise of Nazi propaganda in the U.S. The statute does not bar constitutionally protected free speech, but it seeks to create transparency into foreign influence operations. 

The law has not kept up with societal changes in recent years, including the rise of social media and multinational corporations, even as the Justice Department has gotten more aggressive in its FARA enforcement, practitioners say. 

Ed. note: Read IFS President David Keating's 2022 Comments to the DOJ on FARA modernization and our 2022 Coalition Letter with groups like the ACLU, NCAC, and the Knight Institute here.

Supreme Court

Just the News: Lawyer speech codes enforce 'rigid ideological orthodoxy,' chill 'unpopular views,' SCOTUS told

By Greg Piper

.....Can states compel lawyers to give up their First Amendment rights, at least implicitly, as a condition of practicing law?

It's not a farfetched law school exam question but a live issue in desperate need of Supreme Court intervention, legal and policy advocacy groups said in friend-of-the-court briefs last week seeking reinstatement of a lawsuit against Pennsylvania's legal ethics rules.

The Manhattan Institute, Mountain States Legal Foundation, Southeastern Legal Foundation and former Trump administration Department of Education civil rights lawyer Hans Bader, a recurring Biden administration irritant, filed a joint brief.

The Institute for Faith and Family, Foundation for Moral Law and New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is challenging a somewhat different Connecticut legal ethics rule, each filed individual briefs.

Last summer the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court that blocked Pennsylvania's implementation of the American Bar Association's Model Rule 8.4(g), challenged by Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression lawyer Zach Greenberg.

Congress

Washington Times: Republicans press EventBrite and GoFundMe for evidence of government spying on transactions

By Kerry Picket

.....House Republican lawmakers are asking the crowdfunding giants Eventbrite and GoFundMe to cooperate with their investigation into the Biden administration allegedly pressuring large financial institutions to spy on customers’ private transactions in search of people considered by the government to be extremists.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, requested documents from the tech giants detailing the companies’ communications with federal agencies, including the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the FBI.

BBC: Bipartisan US bill could force ByteDance to divest TikTok

By Madeline Halpert

.....A group of US lawmakers has introduced a bill that would require Chinese tech giant ByteDance to sell off the popular video-sharing TikTok app within six months or face a ban.

For years American officials have raised concerns that data from the app could fall into the hands of the Chinese government.

A bipartisan set of 19 lawmakers introduced the legislation on Tuesday.

TikTok called the bill a disguised "outright ban".

In a statement announcing the bill, the lawmakers said "applications like TikTok that are controlled by foreign adversaries pose an unacceptable risk to US national security".

The bill would give ByteDance 165 days to divest, or it would be blocked from the app store and web hosting platforms in the US.

"This legislation will trample the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans and deprive 5 million small businesses of a platform they rely on to grow and create jobs," TikTok said in a statement to the BBC.

The Media

Intelligencer: The ‘Fake’ New York Times Chicken-Sandwich Story Turns Out to Be Quite Real

By Jonathan Chait

.....Recently, former New York Times opinion editor Adam Rubenstein published an account in the Atlantic of his unhappy time at the paper, focusing on the now-infamous episode when Tom Cotton’s op-ed set off an internal firestorm...

But Rubenstein’s argument did not make it controversial. The controversy instead centered on his opening anecdote. Rubenstein repeated a story about an orientation event in which he named his favorite sandwich, from Chick-fil-A, only to be rebuked by an HR representative, “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people,” a comment met with snaps of approval by others in the room.

On social media, various left-wing journalists asserted immediately this episode was a fabrication. “Never happened,” wrote New York Times Magazine writer and journalism professor Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Is anyone going to contact the Atlantic to ask them about the process behind publishing this egregiously fake anecdote,” pleaded left-wing podcaster Michael Hobbes.

Various reporters have in fact taken up this challenge and contacted the Atlantic. Jesse Singal reached out to the magazine and was told the entire story was fact-checked and the details of the anecdote in question were “confirmed by New York Times employees who had contemporaneous knowledge of the incident in question.”

Candidates and Campaigns

Washington Post (Technology 202): What fake images of Trump with Black voters tell us about AI disinformation

By Will Oremus

.....On Monday, a BBC investigation highlighted what it called an emerging disinformation trend in the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign: fake, apparently AI-generated images purporting to show Donald Trump posing with Black people. 

The story cited several images shared on X, Facebook and other platforms, suggesting they were aimed at influencing Black voters to support Trump. There was no evidence, however, that the Trump campaign was involved; at least one of the images the story cited was first shared by an obvious parody account, though other accounts later shared it without indicating it was fake. It’s also unclear just how far and wide the images spread, or how many people were deceived by them…

[The creator of the image] told The Technology 202 that he created the image using the AI image tool Midjourney to illustrate a Nov. 29 post about Trump’s growing support among Black voters, knowing that posts with images tend to do better on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and X than those without. He said the image took him “30 seconds” to create…

The story raises thorny questions about the interplay between AI image tools, social media platforms and the mainstream media in an election year. 

The States

People United for Privacy: Bipartisan Opposition Sinks Multi-Year Crusade to Violate Mainers’ Privacy

By Alex Baiocco

.....Threats to nonprofits’ right to engage in public policy debates while maintaining the privacy of their supporters continue to fail in 2024. In Maine, lawmakers recently voted to defeat anti-privacy legislation first introduced in 2023.

As People United for Privacy has warned, the harmful polices in Arizona’s recently-enacted Proposition 211 are appearing in proposals across the country, from Oklahoma to Oregon all the way to Maine. L.D. 1590, introduced by Senator Richard Bennett (R), would have brought the scourge of “original source” donor disclosure and top-funder disclaimer requirements to Maine policy discussions.

Original source donor disclosure requires groups to not only disclose their own contributors, but also their contributors’ contributors. Under this convoluted policy, nonprofits that have always protected the privacy of their supporters are forced to disclose the names and home addresses of those individuals to a group they have contributed to in order for the recipient group to include that information in its own reports. In addition to the multilayered privacy concerns, the recordkeeping requirements and administrative burdens alone are enough to keep many nonprofits from engaging in activity at the heart of the First Amendment’s protections.

Meanwhile, top-funder disclaimer requirements force nonprofits to list their top contributors within the communication itself.

College Fix: UC Santa Cruz gets $500,000 to combat ‘hate’

By Jeanine Yuen

.....Free speech experts say university must be careful not to suppress speech

University of California Santa Cruz will spend at least $500,000 to combat “hate.”

The money comes from a $7 million pool established by the University of California system…

Abby Butler, a spokesperson for the university, did not respond to two emailed requests for comment sent in the past three weeks that asked for further information on the program. The College Fix asked what free speech protections would be included in the hate training…

Several free speech experts said universities must be cautious when addressing “hate” and other issues.

South Florida Sun Sentinel: Florida anti-free speech bill would chill robust debate

By Editorial Board

.....There are no lessons learned in the Florida Legislature.

Prodded by their hostility toward the “liberal media,” lawmakers tried last year to pass a bill that would have made it easier to sue for defamation. It was conservative media owners who realized this “own the libs” measure would have adverse effects.

Corporate media — a term of choice for Gov. Ron DeSantis, who supported last year’s legislation (HB 991) — have resources to fight expensive lawsuits. Small local radio stations and online publications — and your local Rush Limbaughs who might get too loose with facts — do not.

This year, the measure is back in a different version. An unlikely coalition of liberal-leaning groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and libertarian Americans for Prosperity, founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, is fighting it.

Wall Street Journal: No More DEI at the University of Florida

By The Editorial Board

.....A handful of states have been trying to extricate their public universities from the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) quagmire. Florida demonstrated on Friday how to do it the easy way by shutting down the DEI bureaucracy.

The University of Florida said it is dismissing all DEI staff, closing its DEI office and halting DEI contracts with outside vendors. The school also announced the laid-off staff would get 12 weeks of severance, and that the $5 million saved from the cost of DEI would go to a “faculty recruitment fund.” That’s a wrap, folks.