Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Occupy.com)
Court
Ruling Against Chicago Sheriff Proves Thuggish Anti-WikiLeaks Blockade Was
Unconstitutional
By Glenn Greenwald, The
Intercept
03 December 15
The
7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago issued an excellent written ruling on
Monday that has broad implications for rights of free speech and political
activism in the U.S. The court ruled that Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart
violated the First Amendment rights of Backpage.com, an online classified ad
site, by pressuring Visa and MasterCard to prohibit payments to the site on the
ground that the sheriff dislikes some of the site’s “adult” (i.e. sex) ads,
which he believes promote prostitution. Writing for the court, Judge Richard
Posner explained that Sheriff Dart previously attempted to prosecute Craigslist
for such sex ads and failed, and thus decided to destroy Backpage using a
different strategy:
Context
within article. (photo: The Intercept)
Noting
the serious harm to an entity from having a public official suffocate
its sources of revenue not through prosecution but extra-judicial
coercion, the court ordered the sheriff immediately to cease the threatening
behavior and to notify Visa and MasterCard of the ruling, explaining that “the
loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time,
unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”
Beyond the
positive outcome in this specific case — What kind of person would become
sheriff of Chicago and then
choose to spend his time worrying about adult sex ads? — the 7th Circuit’s
ruling is crucial for protecting free speech rights generally. That’s because
corrupt public officials have realized that they can abuse their power to
pressure corporations to “suffocate” private actors whom they dislike but who
are breaking no laws.
The
most notorious, most dangerous case was in late 2010, when Joe Lieberman
blatantly abused his power as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security
Committee to implicitly threaten and coerce
companies like Amazon to terminate website hosting and payment
processing services to WikiLeaks, which had just published the Afghanistan and
Iraq war logs and diplomatic cables. That quickly led other companies, including
Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America and PayPal, to terminate credit card processing for
the group, driving them close to bankruptcy. In other words, Joe Lieberman
almost completely destroyed a media and political organization group he
disliked not through prosecution but with nothing more than thuggish
threats to the companies that serviced it.
Just
as was true of the compliant companies in the WikiLeaks case, Visa and
MasterCard denied that they terminated Backpage’s accounts due to government
pressure, but the 7th Circuit saw right through that falsehood: “It’s
true that Visa filed an affidavit stating that ‘at no point did Visa perceive
Sheriff Dart to be threatening Visa.’ But what would one expect an executive of
Visa to say? I am afraid of the guy?” The court added that “Visa and
MasterCard were victims of government coercion aimed at shutting up or shutting
down Backpage’s adult section (more likely aimed at bankrupting Backpage — lest
the ads that the sheriff doesn’t like simply migrate to other sections of the
website).”
As
I wrote at the time of the WikiLeaks blockade,
“Any attempt by political officials to start blocking Americans’ access to
political content on the internet ought to provoke serious uproar and unrest.”
That’s because: “no matter what you think of WikiLeaks, they have never been
charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime; Lieberman literally wants to
dictate — unilaterally — what you can and cannot read on the internet, to
prevent Americans from accessing documents that much of the rest of the world
is freely reading.”
As a
result of that incident, Daniel Ellsberg, The Intercept’s
co-founding editor Laura Poitras, John Cusack, Xeni Jardin, and various EFF
personnel such as J.P Barlow, along with myself, created a group —
Freedom of the Press Foundation — driven by concern over how dangerous these
threat-based blockades can be. The initial goal was to circumvent and
destroy the Lieberman-led blockade of WikiLeaks by raising money for the group ourselves (which
we did in substantial amounts), but the broader goal “was to block the U.S.
government from ever again being able to attack and suffocate an independent
journalistic enterprise the way it did with WikiLeaks.”
This
new ruling from the 7th Circuit highlights how dangerous such extra-judicial
pressure campaigns can be, and makes them much more difficult by clearly ruling
them to be unconstitutional. As the court explained:
In his public capacity as a sheriff of a major county (Cook County
has a population of more than 5.2 million), Sheriff Dart is not permitted to
issue and publicize dire threats against credit card companies that process
payments made through Backpage’s website, including threats of prosecution
(albeit not by him, but by other enforcement agencies that he urges to proceed
against them), in an effort to throttle Backpage. See Bantam Books, Inc. v.
Sullivan, supra, 372 U.S. at 67. For where would such official bullying end,
were it permitted to begin?
To
permit such pressure tactics against organizations disliked by political officials
is to endorse “a formula for permitting unauthorized, unregulated, foolproof,
lawless government coercion. The formula consists of coupling threats with
denunciations of the activity that the official wants stamped out, for the
target of the denunciation will be reluctant to acknowledge that he is
submitting to threats but will instead ascribe his abandonment of the activity
to his having discovered that it offends his moral principles.” Anyone who
would approve of such tactics, said the court, is “giving official coercion a
free pass because it came clothed in what in the absence of any threatening
language would have been a permissible attempt at mere persuasion.”
Very
few large media outlets objected to Lieberman’s tyrannical coercion campaign against
WikiLeaks, even though it so obviously can threaten them as well, because of
competitive and ideological dislike for the group. This new judicial ruling
underscores why that campaign was so dangerous, and so clearly illegal. As the
court concluded about the sheriff’s threats with reasoning perfectly applicable
to Lieberman’s: “Those threats were not protected by the First Amendment; they
were violations of the First Amendment.“
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment