We’ve talked quite a bit around here about the saga of the Washington Redskins trademark cancellation. The long-held mark by the football team was cancelled after a group of Native Americans petitioned against it, claiming that the team’s name was disparaging of their people. After I, dare I say, flip-flopped from cheering on the cancellation to having the team itself change my mind with a delightfully vulgar ruling, which demonstrated that the USPTO grants all kinds of marks on “offensive” terms, the current status of the trademark remains cancelled. Well, the team has now appealed to the US Supreme Court, not only seeking to have its own case reviewed, but also seeking to tie their case to another that we’ve talked a bit about, that of the Asian music group, The Slants.
The Slants’ case is different from the Redskins’, with the music group never getting its trademark registration, also based on the notion that its name was disparaging of the very group of people who comprised the band. An appeals court declared the refusal of the band’s trademark applications was a First Amendment violation, rightly. But the USPTO has appealed to the Supreme Court. The Redskins, meanwhile, have petitioned the Supreme Court to take the two cases in tandem, arguing that the slight differences between the two would give the court a well-rounded look at the question of whether blocking disparaging trademarks was a constitutional violation.
If this Court grants certiorari in Tam, the Court should grant certiorari before judgment here to consider this case as an ideal and essential companion to Tam. This Court repeatedly has granted certiorari before judgment on those occasions, like this one, when the consideration of complementary companion cases offers the best way to decide important questions of constitutional law. As the government acknowledges, this case squarely presents the same First Amendment question presented in Tam, a question of undeniable, fundamental national importance.
Tam is the short-form reference to The Slants’ case. It’s a savvy move by the team, seeking to pair its case with that of The Slants, who by any measure ought to be seen as deserving of more sympathy generally than the football club. After all, there does seem to be a difference in texture between a group of Asian people who want to call their band The Slants and a football team owned by Dan Schneider that wants to have an admittedly racist term for Native Americans serve as its team’s name. But the question of law is certainly similar enough that I would agree it would make sense to review both cases together. Under the law, either refusing marks based on disparagement is constitutional or it isn’t. There’s no provision for who is applying for, or holding, the trademark in question.
Another reason it’s a savvy move by the Redskins is that The Slants are coming into the SCOTUS review having won its appeal. In their case, it’s the USPTO doing the appealing to SCOTUS. The team likely sees the band having an easier time getting a win before the court, having won on appeal, and is arguing that if The Slants’ case holds up, then the cancellation of the team’s trademark would make no sense.
And the Redskins are right. The team’s name may be antiquated, but under the law, the government has no business applying its schizophrenic sense of morality to speech under the First Amendment.
Lower courts appear to be taking the Supreme Court’s Riley decision seriously — give or take the occasional “there’s no Constitution at the border” decision. If the Supreme Court says there’s a warrant requirement for cell phone searches, there’s a warrant requirement for cell phone searches.
The Central District of Illinois has just handed down a decision that makes it clear, in no uncertain terms, that any examination of a cell phone’s contents, no matter how brief, is a search covered by Riley.
The Pekin Police Department participated in a couple of FBI-assisted controlled buys of weapons and drugs involving defendant Demontae Bell. Shortly thereafter, Bell was arrested.
Upon Bell’s arrest, a black mobile flip phone was located on his person. After Bell was arrested, he was transported to the Peoria Police Department and placed in an interview room. Shortly thereafter, Officer Sinks arrived at the police station (he was not the arresting officer). At the suppression hearing Sinks testified that before interviewing Bell with agent Nixon, he opened the door to the interview room, grabbed Bell’s cell phone from a bag or container outside the door, opened the phone (purportedly to turn it off) and showed the home screen depicting the rifle to Bell with an inquisitive look.
Officer Sinks then powered off the phone. He handed it over to FBI Special Agent Nixon and told him about the photo he had seen. Sinks then removed the phone’s battery and recorded the serial number. A little more than a week later, the FBI obtained a warrant to search the phone. Five months later, another search warrant was obtained specifically targeting date/time information related to the photo Officer Sinks saw on Bell’s phone.
Seems like a cursory examination of a flip phone would be covered, but Judge James Shadid points out the Supreme Court only allowed warrantless examination of cell phones if there were exigent circumstances or to ensure the phone did not pose a threat to officers (i.e., contain a concealed weapon). The government argued that opening a flip phone is not a “search” and that the photo of a gun the officer saw was in “plain view.” The court disagrees, pointing out that “plain view” means “plain view” without law enforcement interaction of any sort.
The government’s response to Bell’s Motion asserts that Officer Sinks’ opening of the flip phone did not constitute a search. While it is true that a “cursory inspection—one that involves merely looking at what is already exposed to view, without disturbing it—is not a ‘search’ for Fourth Amendment purposes,” Officer Sinks’ opening of Bell’s cell phone exceeded a “cursory inspection” because he exposed to view concealed portions of the object—i.e., the screen. See Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 328-29 (1987). The Supreme Court specifically addressed this issue in Hicks, noting that the “distinction between ‘looking’ at a suspicious object in plain view and ‘moving’ it even a few inches is much more than trivial for purposes of the Fourth Amendment.” Id. at 325. Officer Sinks’ opening of the flip phone, like the officer moving the stereo equipment in Hicks, “exposed to view concealed portions of the [object]” and thus “produced a new invasion of [defendant’s] privacy.”
Even though the court finds Bell to have a diminished expectation of privacy in the home screen of his phone (as opposed to its contents), that’s still not enough to ignore the stipulations of the Riley decision. Lock screens or homescreens may only show limited information in relation to the contents of a phone, but they can still display a wealth of information law enforcement can only obtain with a warrant.
The lens through which all information on a cell phone is observed is the screen. On both flip phones and more modern, advanced devices, “notifications” are regularly displayed on the home screen or lock screen indicating text messages, missed calls, and other alerts. The position that the government advances here—that officers can always open a phone and look at the screen to turn the phone off without conducting a “search” at all—is inconsistent with Riley’s requirement that “unlike the search incident to arrest exception, the exigent circumstances exception requires a court to examine whether an emergency justified a warrantless search in each particular case.”
Just as Riley analyzed and rejected California’s attempt to create across the board exceptions, such as a rule allowing police to search call logs, without a warrant, the Court sees no reason to allow law enforcement to circumvent the warrant requirement in every case under the guise that they discovered evidence when they opened the phone or turned on the screen to turn the phone off.
The government attempted to use two exceptions provided by the Riley decision: officer safety and threat of remote destruction of evidence. Both of these arguments are dismissed just as quickly and soundly as the government’s “plain view” argument. The court notes that Officer Sink’s actions gave no indication he was worried about a concealed weapon or data being wiped from the phone.
In any case, if remote wiping was a concern, officers could have removed the battery without opening the phone, as was clearly demonstrated by Officer Sinks himself.
Officer Feehan testified that the policy was put in place partly because snooping software could be used to listen in on conversations when the phone is turned off but still connected to the battery, and other methods could “compromise data” on the phone. While the procedure may be outdated as applied to modern cell phones that lack removable batteries, that problem was not present here, and the video later showed Officer Sinks removing the battery. Where officers have two equally effective options to turn off a phone, they should choose the less intrusive option. That was not done in this case, and as a result, incriminating evidence was found.
The result is suppression of the evidence specific to the Constitutional violation: the picture of an AK-47 Officer Sinks saw when he opened the phone. Because warrants were obtained for a more thorough search, supported by probable cause unrelated to the photo Sinks saw, the suppressed evidence is pretty much reinstated in whole as the incriminating photo was located on Bell’s phone. While it doesn’t do much for Bell, it does at least send a message to law enforcement that the Riley decision is to be respected and that cutting corners or skirting around the edges of the ruling won’t be tolerated.
The Supreme Court declared in 2014 that law enforcement could no longer perform searches of cellphones incident to arrest without a warrant. The exceptions to this ruling are making themselves apparent already.
The area of the United States where the Constitution does not apply — while still being fully within the borders of the US — apparently exempts law enforcement from following this ruling in regards to cellphone searches. The Southern District of California has come to the conclusion that border searches are not Fourth Amendment searches and that the government has no need to seek a warrant before searching a cellphone.
The court notes the Riley decision says one thing but the “border exception” says another.
Heading in one direction is the Supreme Court’s bright line rule in Riley: law enforcement officers must obtain a warrant to search a cell phone incident to an arrest. Heading on a different course is the border search exception. The border search exception describes an exception to general Fourth Amendment principles. It is the notion that the government may search without a warrant anyone and anything coming across its border to protect its national sovereignty.
Balancing the two competing interests in this case, the court ultimately finds the government’s national security interest outweighs citizens’ privacy interests. As it weighs this against cases dealing with more elaborate and lengthy device searches at the border, the court basically finds that if the Fourth Amendment is violated by “cursory” searches of devices, it is only violated a little.
Reviewing the totality of the circumstances, the Caballero cell phone search: (1) took place at a port of entry; (2) was based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity; (3) was conducted manually and appeared to be a cursory search of the device’s contents; (4) did not involve the application of forensic software; (5) did not destroy the cell phone; (6) was performed in minutes, as opposed to hours or days; (7) was performed upon a device being brought into the country, rather than being taken out of the country; and (8) was performed approximately four hours after Caballero was placed under arrest. Other than the last factor, each of these factors was either similar to or less intrusive than the warrantless search Cotterman decided was reasonable.
The “border exception” the court carves out for a warrantless search of cellphones at the border somehow relies on exceptions carved out in the original Riley decision, despite saying Riley doesn’t control border searches.
The two cases can be reconciled. The most obvious path for reconciliation is to conclude that the border search exception is among the traditional exceptions to which Riley’s warrant requirement does not apply. This approach finds safe footing in the Supreme Court’s statement that “other” “exceptions” may continue to justify a warrantless search. Riley, 134 S. Ct. at 2494 (“Moreover, even though the search incident to arrest exception does not apply to cell phones, other case-specific exceptions may still justify a warrantless search of a particular phone.”). It also is consistent with the observation from Montoya de Hernandez, (473 U.S. at 539), about when balancing individual privacy rights against rights of the sovereign, the balance “is qualitatively different . . . than in the interior” and the balance is “struck much more favorably to the Government.” This approach also avoids the spectacle of deeming that Riley undercut 200 years of border search doctrine without even a mention.
Not as much of a “spectacle” as the California court would think, considering the Riley decision set aside years and years of the government relying on dubious analogies like “containers” or “pair of pants” to justify the search and seizure of anything carried on or near a person (like in their vehicle) incident to arrest. It may not date back 200 years, but it does date back to the Fourth Amendment itself, which is a controlling authority with more than 200 years worth of history.
The case here deals with an actual border crossing (Calexico, California) but the government has basically declared any area within 100 miles of a border can be called “the border” for the sake of searches and detainments predicated on reasonable suspicion or, in many cases, law enforcement hunches.
As for this case, it’s hardly the ideal test for balancing Riley against the border search exception. For one, the defendant challenging the warrantless cellphone search was already neck-deep in reasonable suspicion, thanks to the discovery of drugs in his vehicle. Officers on scene had more than enough reason to detain him and likely had uncovered enough damning evidence to support a warrant affidavit. Of course, they did not seek one. Instead, they briefly browsed his phone until they found further suspicious content.
Some courts refuse to give officers a pass when they could have gotten a warrant but choose not to. Those courts are in the minority. This court is part of the majority.
Here, illicit narcotics had been discovered. Caballero had been arrested. Reasonable suspicion had jelled into probable cause. For the time being, he and his cell phone were safely in the hands of government agents. Other than the increased administrative work required, there is no apparent reason why Riley’s search warrant requirement could not be applied without undercutting the interests supporting the border search doctrine. One can certainly say that Riley casts doubt on Cotterman’s approval of warrantless searches where an arrest is made. Nevertheless, as long as this Court can apply circuit precedent without running afoul of intervening authority, it must do so.
Being within 100 miles of the border means never having to seek a warrant, even if the government has both the time and the probable cause to do so… at least until someone manages to push a challenge up to the appeals court level or beyond.
Yesterday we wrote about the fairly unsurprising, but still good, news that the Supreme Court had rejected an attempted appeal by the Authors Guild of the really excellent fair use decision by the 2nd Circuit appeals court over whether or not Google scanning books to build a giant, searchable index was fair use.
It’s no surprise that the Authors Guild — which has been tilting at this particular windmill for over a decade — was upset about the refusal to hear the case, but I wasn’t quite expecting the level of ridiculous sour grapes that were put on display:
?Blinded by the public benefit arguments, the Second Circuit?s ruling tells us that Google, not authors, deserves to profit from the digitization of their books,? said Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild.
Did you get that? The Authors Guild is so completely out of touch that it actually thinks that “public benefit arguments” have no place in copyright disputes, despite the very fact that the Constitutional underpinnings of copyright law is to maximize the public’s benefit. And, of course, this all ignores the fact that the vast, vast majority of authors greatly benefit from such a searchable index in that it drives more sales of books.
But, on with the hyperbole:
?Today authors suffered a colossal loss,? said Authors Guild president Roxana Robinson. ?We filed the class action lawsuit against Google in September 2005 because, as we stated then, ?Google?s taking was a plain and brazen violation of copyright law.? We believed then and we believe now that authors should be compensated when their work is copied for commercial purposes.?
What you believe, and what the law says, are different. And that was the case back in 2005 when you filed the suit just like many of us said at the time.
?The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture,? continued Rasenberger. ?Authors are already among the most poorly paid workers in America; if tomorrow?s authors cannot make a living from their work, only the independently wealthy or the subsidized will be able to pursue a career in writing, and America?s intellectual and artistic soul will be impoverished.?
This is ridiculous on so many levels. First, most authors cannot make a living today because most books don’t sell. That’s not the fault of Google Books. In fact, as noted time and time again, Google Books acts as a discovery mechanism for many books and increases sales (I’ve bought dozens of books thanks to finding them via Google Book Search). Second, the gloom and doom predictions of legacy industries over new technologies is time-worn and has never been even remotely correct.
What Rasenberger leaves out of her ignorant whine is the fact that in the time that Google Books has existed, the number of authors has increased massively. No, they’re not all making a living, but the purpose of copyright law is to incentivize the creation of new works for the public, and the public is getting an astounding amount of new works — a totally unprecedented amount of new works actually — and it’s got nothing to do with anything the Authors Guild has done.
And, of course, the Authors Guild still won’t give up, promising to fight this issue in other courts, hoping to get a circuit split that the Supreme Court will review:
Following the Supreme Court?s order, the Guild vowed to remain vigilant to ensure that the Second Circuit?s ruling is not taken as carte blanche for unfettered digitization of books. ?The Second Circuit decision took pains to highlight that fair use was found based on the strict display restrictions and security measures currently employed by Google,? said Authors Guild general counsel Jan Constantine. ?We?ll continue to monitor Google and its library partners to ensure these standards are met, as we will take appropriate action to ensure that fair use isn?t abused.?
To ensure that fair use isn’t abused? Lovely people at the Authors Guild who outright declare themselves against public benefit, and then worry about the “expansion” and “abuse” of fair use. Does no one at the Authors Guild recognize that their authors are protected by fair use as well and many of them rely on it all the time? Who would ever join such a backwards looking and thinking organization?
Last fall, the 2nd Circuit appeals court gave a clear and convincing win to Google in the long-running Authors Guild case against Google’s book scanning program. And, really, the decision was a massive win for the public, in that it was a strong defense of fair use (even in commercial settings). But, of course, the still clueless Authors Guild — which doesn’t seem to actually represent the interests of most authors (many of whom have found Google Books to be a profoundly useful tool) — decided to ask the Supreme Court to overturn the case.
That request has now been rejected. As is standard with the Supreme Court, no reason is given:
If you can’t read that, it just says that the petition for cert is denied and that Justice Kagan “took no part in the consideration.” I’m not exactly sure why Kagan abstained — I thought perhaps she had weighed in on earlier rounds of the case as Solicitor General, but can’t find anything.
Either way, this is a very good thing. The excellent 2nd Circuit ruling stands. And while it technically only applies to cases in that circuit, it will most likely influence cases elsewhere. Also, the Supreme Court has a long, and unfortunate, history of coming up with nutty decisions in big copyright cases.
This decision was handed down by the Supreme Court more than a week ago, but it’s worth reporting. Late last year, the Court decided to take a look at an issue related to asset forfeiture and the implications it has for the Sixth Amendment.
In this case, the defendant, Sila Luis, argued that the government’s seizure of her assets — pre-conviction — denied her the right to defend herself fully against its charges. She could still use an attorney, but it would have to be one appointed to her or one willing to work for deferred compensation (in the hopes that assets would eventually be returned).
The problem here isn’t a small one. The government has the power to seize assets pre-conviction using nothing more than a grand jury’s indictment as the basis. This is done to provide some sort of assurance that the accused can compensate those wronged (as well as pay any fines, fees, etc. associated with the conviction) when the trial is concluded.
But this assumes the government will win its case, even before it heads to trial. And, by freezing/seizing funds, the government can increase the chances of a decision in its favor by limiting the defendant’s choice of representation.
The government doesn’t mind playing with a stacked deck and it justifies this hobbling of defendants by pointing out that earned cash is almost impossible to separate from cash acquired through criminal means. It’s correct, of course, but it makes this assertion before a verdict has been reached — presuming both the defendant and their money to be guilty.
The government — along with the dissenting justices — argue that allowing defendants to pay for representation out of funds on hand will only encourage criminals to spend ill-gotten gains faster in hopes of denying sought retribution while availing itself of the most expensive defense lawyers they can afford. While there undoubtedly is a chance something like that will happen, the alternative — seriously diminishing defendants’ representation options — is pretty much a violation of their Sixth Amendment rights.
The Supreme Court — in a 5-3 decision — noted that the seizure of untainted assets is a violation of Sixth Amendment rights when it prevents defendants from seeking the best possible representation. It’s somewhat of a limited win, as it relies on the specifics of this case, where seized assets were deemed by the government to be “untainted.” That didn’t stop it from seizing them, though, as it was holding them for expected future repatriation when Luis was found guilty. That it did so before even going to trial is where the problem lies.
[T]he nature of the competing interests argues against this kind of court order. On the one side we find, as we have previously explained, a Sixth Amendment right to assistance of counsel that is a fundamental constituent of due process of law. And that right includes “the right to be represented by an otherwise qualified attorney whom that defendant can afford to hire.” The order at issue in this case would seriously undermine that constitutional right.
On the other side we find interests that include the Government’s contingent interest in securing its punishment of choice (namely, criminal forfeiture) as well as the victims’ interest in securing restitution (notably, from funds belonging to the defendant, not the victims). While these interests are important, to deny the Government the order it requests will not inevitably undermine them, for, at least sometimes, the defendant may possess other assets—say, “tainted” property—that might be used for forfeitures and restitution.. Nor do the interests in obtaining payment of a criminal forfeiture or restitution order enjoy constitutional protection. Rather, despite their importance, compared to the right to counsel of choice, these interests would seem to lie somewhat further from the heart of a fair, effective criminal justice system.
It seems to be a very obvious conclusion. As legal blog Grand Jury Target points out, the point at which the assets are seized is far in advance of the guilty verdict the government believes it will obtain.
There is a very real and very important difference between seizing assets that are tainted and assets that are not tainted when the seizure happens before trial: At that point, the government has proven nothing. It has merely run the false “gauntlet” of a grand jury. Before a fact-finder has heard the case, the defendant should have every opportunity to hire her counsel of choice to defend against the indictment.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court did a thing that my every instinct tells me that the Supreme Court shouldn’t have to do. But apparently, the United States, a country with a Bill of Rights that you can buy at the gift shoppe on your way out, needed clarification on the subject of whether or not you can pauperize a criminal defendant as a way of making sure this person’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel is a sad and tattered joke.
The dissenting opinions seem to believe a sad and tattered joke is better than the alternative: criminal defendants blowing through “guilty money” while socking away the legit stuff in order to mount a better defense in the future. The dissent envisions a world where the government wins every case, so it makes no difference whether it seizes the money pre- or post-conviction, just so long as no one accused of anything avails themselves of the best defense possible.
We wrote last year about a copyright dispute between DC Comics and guy by the name of Mark Towle, who had been custom producing Batmobiles for Batman fans. Mike’s analysis in that post is wonderfully detailed and you should read it if you want a deep dive into the specifics of how the court ruled, but I will summarize it here for you as well. The 9th Circuit ruled that the Batmobile was deserving of the same copyright protections as other fictional characters, despite it being a depiction of an inanimate object, and it completely ignored the entire expression/idea dichotomy that is supposed to govern copyright law. That dichotomy can be explained as giving copyright protection to specific expressions of an idea without protecting the idea itself. For instance, the depiction of HAL the homicidal computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey may be covered under copyright, but the idea of a homicidal artificial intelligence is not.
Yet, despite the Batmobile’s ever-changing appearance and functionality, and despite its expression in comic and film form not being identical to custom real-life productions by a car enthusiast, the court ruled against Towle and essentially claimed the very idea of the Batmobile was deserving of copyright protection. The last remaining opportunity to have the courts specifically weigh the idea/expression dichotomy in this case would have been the Supreme Court, but SCOTUS has apparently declined to take the case up.
The Supreme Court is staying out of a copyright dispute involving a California man who produced replicas of the Batmobile for car-collecting fans of the caped crusader. The justices on Monday let stand a lower court ruling that said the Batmobile’s bat-like appearance and high-tech gadgets make it a character that can’t be duplicated without permission from DC Comics, the copyright holder.
It’s cases like this in which the Supreme Court refuses to weigh in that allows courts like the 9th Circuit to seemingly specialize in wacky copyright and intellectual property rulings. One hopes that other cases in other circuits will raise similar issues enough that SCOTUS decides to step in at a later date, rather than let this be the last word on this issue. I would have thought that a court ruling that fails to even mention the idea/expression dichotomy would have been one that SCOTUS would have found ripe for comment, but apparently not. All hail the Batmobile, a character on par with Batman himself, apparently.
The deeper you dive into the various DOJ filings to try to use the All Writs Act to force Apple to hack into encrypted iPhones, the more and more dishonest they seem. We already covered some of the misleading claims in the DOJ’s latest filing in NY, including pointing to a 2012 case as evidence that the All Writs Act can be used to force Apple to break into a phone, when the actual ruling in that case said only that Apple had standing to oppose an All Writs Act order.
However, buried in an excellent article by Sarah Jeong at Vice’s Motherboard
about that same filing, there’s another interesting tidbit that seems worth exploring: in both the NY and California cases, the DOJ has repeatedly pointed to a so-called “three factor test” under United States v. New York Telephone Co., which is the key case that established that it’s acceptable, under the All Writs Act, for the FBI to force a telephone company to install and use a “pen register” device on telephone lines (to track who they call). In the original motion for the order in the San Bernardino case, here’s the DOJ’s argument on page 14 and 15 of that document:
In New York Telephone Co., the Supreme Court considered three
factors in concluding that the issuance of the All Writs Act order
to the phone company was appropriate. First, it found that the
phone company was not “so far removed from the underlying
controversy that its assistance could not be permissibly compelled.”
… Second, it concluded that the order did not place an
undue burden on the phone company…. Third, it
determined that the assistance of the company was necessary to
achieve the purpose of the warrant…. Each of these factors
supports issuance of the order directed to Apple in this case.
The DOJ repeated this paragraph verbatim in its motion to compel (on page 15) and again (verbatim) in the filing in NY (page 38).
The magistrate judge in NY, James Orenstein, accepted this three factors test, and used it to argue that the DOJ’s application actually failed to meet the requisite factors (starting right on page 1):
In addition, applicable case law requires me to consider three factors in deciding whether to issue an order under the AWA: the closeness of Apple’s relationship to the underlying criminal conduct and government investigation; the burden the requested order would impose on Apple; and the necessity of imposing such a burden on Apple. As explained below, after reviewing the facts in the record and the parties’ arguments, I conclude that none of those factors justifies imposing on Apple the obligation to assist the government’s investigation against its will.
There’s just one problem in all of this — as highlighted in Jeong’s article linked above, and discussed in more detail by Orin Kerr last month: there is no three factors test in the US v. NY Telephone case. As Jeong summarizes:
You could argue it?s three factors, or maybe four, or even five. The point is, NY Telephone isn?t as easy to apply as the government makes it out to be. Everyone in the Apple case is playing in uncharted waters.
Kerr notes that the paragraph in the Supreme Court’s ruling, far from laying out a “three factor test” appears to be “frustratingly murky.”
The tricky part of New York Telephone is that the Court left the actual test for what the AWA allows frustratingly murky. The Court was comparatively clear about one essential limit on a Court?s power under the AWA: ?We agree that the power of federal courts to impose duties upon third parties is not without limits; unreasonable burdens may not be imposed.? Okay. But the rest of what the Court says is really unclear.
Here are the key paragraphs from the Supreme Court ruling:
Turning to the facts of this case, we do not think that the Company was a third party so far removed from the underlying controversy that its assistance could not be permissibly compelled. A United States District Court found that there was probable cause to believe that the Company?s facilities were being employed to facilitate a criminal enterprise on a continuing basis. For the Company, with this knowledge, to refuse to supply the meager assistance required by the FBI in its efforts to put an end to this venture threatened obstruction of an investigation which would determine whether the Company?s facilities were being lawfully used. Moreover, it can hardly be contended that the Company, a highly regulated public utility with a duty to serve the public, had a substantial interest in not providing assistance. Certainly the use of pen registers is by no means offensive to it. The Company concedes that it regularly employs such devices without court order for the purposes of checking billing operations, detecting fraud, and preventing violations of law. It also agreed to supply the FBI with all the information required to install its own pen registers. Nor was the District Court?s order in any way burdensome. The order provided that the Company be fully reimbursed at prevailing rates, and compliance with it required minimal effort on the part of the Company and no disruption to its operations.
Finally, we note, as the Court of Appeals recognized, that without the Company’s assistance there is no conceivable way in which the surveillance authorized by the District Court could have been successfully accomplished. The FBI, after an exhaustive search, was unable to find a location where it could install its own pen registers without tipping off the targets of the investigation. The provision of a leased line by the Company was essential to the fulfillment of the purpose? to learn the identities of those connected with the gambling operation?for which the pen register order had been issued.
So yeah, it mentions the three things the DOJ keeps insisting are the “three factor test” (if the third party is not “so far removed,” if there is no “undue burden” and if the assistance was deemed “necessary”). But there’s a hell of a lot of other stuff in there as well, including the fact that in that case, NY Telephone was “a highly regulated public utility.” So that seems like a relevant “fourth” factor that weighs against the DOJ (and they conveniently skip over).
And, as Kerr notes, unlike basically any judicial “test,” this one fails to lay out any of the ground rules:
The paragraph above is pretty confusing. It begins with the idea that the AWA doesn?t apply to someone ?so far removed? from the controversy; then turns to the need for the phone company?s help; then talks about what is ?offensive? to the company; and then covers the burden to the phone company, focusing on how much it cost the business and interfered with it. But the paragraph doesn?t link these ideas or say how they relate to one another. It doesn?t say what the standard is for each idea or how much weight to give it.
In other words, this was just a way for the Court to get the case off the docket, not to set a “test” that would be applied 40 years later. Kerr later expands:
We?re mostly left with the uncertainty of the New York Telephone case itself. Beyond the ?unreasonable burden? test, it?s not clear what to make of the other matters that the court mentions. Are they all just factors in a grand multi-factor test? Are they actually parts of the undue burden standard, just not explicitly labeled that way? Are they parts of what makes the order ?appropriate??
Once you figure that out ? if you can ? there?s the uncertainty about what each mentioned standard means.
Kerr then spends a lot of time noting that even with the actual establishment of the “unreasonable burden” test, there are no actual details or explanations to go with it and you can come up with a wide variety of possible interpretations that would lead to very different results. In short, there’s no big “test” developed here, and despite nearly four decades, there’s no evidence that anyone else has really made use of this “test” to determine the ground rules for it.
Either way, it seems clear that the DOJ keeps making some pretty direct claims in its filings that are based on either direct misreadings of things, or deliberately misleading the courts about these things. That seems like a dangerous game to play.
This isn’t a huge surprise, but this morning the Supreme Court refused to hear Apple’s appeal of its loss in the case brought by the Justice Department for engaging in price fixing on ebooks with the big book publishers. During the course of the case and appeals, Apple worked out a settlement, agreeing to pay $450 million — but only after the appeals process was exhausted. And, that’s now happened. As with basically all appeals rejected by the Supreme Court, the court gave no reason. It just denied cert. Meanwhile, even as Apple has now lost the case, it did still succeed in forcing the price of many ebooks much, much higher.
A few weeks ago, Donald Trump’s spokesperson claimed that he had “single-handedly brought back free speech.” It was an odd thing to say for a variety of reasons. First, the US has really strong free speech protections and they haven’t gone away (even if there are some threats to them). That is, free speech doesn’t need to be “brought back” because it’s already here. Second, Trump himself, just a few weeks earlier was quoted deliberately mocking free speech, claiming that people who support it are “foolish people.” And then, of course, there’s the fact that Trump has a very, very long and detailed history of both threatening to sue, and actually suing, over the speech of others. As Walter Olson noted:
Donald Trump has been filing and threatening lawsuits to shut up critics and adversaries over the whole course of his career. He dragged reporter Tim O?Brien through years of litigation over a relatively favorable Trump biography that assigned a lower valuation to his net worth than he thought it should have. He sued the Chicago Tribune?s architecture critic over a piece arguing that a planned Trump skyscraper in lower Manhattan would be ?one of the silliest things? that could be built in the city. He used the threat of litigation to get an investment firm to fire an analyst who correctly predicted that the Taj Mahal casino would not be a financial success. He sued comedian Bill Maher over a joke.
That first case is instructive. I highly recommend reading the details. O’Brien wrote a biography of Trump which was mostly favorable to Trump, but which briefly mentioned that he might only be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than billions, and Trump sued him over that claim. And as that link notes, Trump didn’t just lose, he was “humiliated” by the courts. Incredibly, Trump still seems to insist that he “won” the case by basically redefining having the case totally tossed out of the courts as winning:
@julesmattsson Wrong, totally proved my case but didn't get damages because the libel laws in this Country suck!
And that leaves out plenty of other threats, such as threatening to sue Rosie O’Donnell for mocking him, threatening to sue competitor Ted Cruz for challenging his political views or actually suing Univision claiming that because its President of Programming posted an Instagram picture showing Trump next to Charleston, South Carolina, shooter Dylann Roof, with the text “No comments,” that was somehow “defamatory.” That lawsuit was just settled a few weeks ago, which is interesting because, as John Oliver recently noted, Trump insists he refuses to settle lawsuits.
Anyway, last Friday Trump made even more news, saying that if he wins he’s planning to “open up” libel laws to make it even easier to sue. Given his statement in the Tweet above about how he won… except for what libel laws actually say, it’s not surprising that he wants to change such laws.
Here are the key points. After talking about how he hates the Washington Post, and thinks Jeff Bezos just bought it for political influence, he notes:
If I become President, oh, are they going to have problems. They’re going to have such problems.
… One of the things I’m going to do if I win, and I hope we do and we’re certainly leading. I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.
…. So we’re going to open up those libel laws, folks, and we’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before…
That last line is said pointing to the media. Trump followed that up by extolling the virtues of libel law in the UK, which is famous for how horrible they are and how they’re abused to silence speech around the globe.
Well, in England, I can tell you, it’s very much different and very much easier. I think it’s very unfair when the New York Times can write a story that they know is false, that they virtually told me they know it’s false, and I say, why don’t you pull the story, and they say, we’re not going to do that, because they can’t basically be sued. And you can’t be sued because can you say anything you want, and that’s not fair.
Of course, as Politifact noted, Trump is flat out wrong (shocker there) in saying that the NY Times can’t be sued if it knowingly publishes a false story. That is, in fact, the standard necessary for defamation in this country.
Many others rushed in to point out something that seemed even more fundamental, which is that libel law is based entirely on state, rather than federal, statutes leading some, like Mathew Ingram at Fortune, to claim that Trump really can’t do much to carry out those threats. Indeed, many commentators are treating Trump’s confusion over the difference between state and federal laws (and his apparent confusion over key First Amendment precedents that would mean even if it were a federal issue, he couldn’t just change the law the way he wanted to) as yet another example of Trump being ridiculously clueless on policy matters he’s discussing.
And, of course, it is true that Trump appears to not understand NY Times v. Sullivan, one of the most important cases on the intersection of defamation and the First Amendment, which found that for public figures there is tremendous leeway in allowing speech, such that it is only defamatory if statements are not only false, but made with “actual malice.” Trump, obviously, doesn’t like this, but seems to think you can just “open up” the law, ignoring that the issue is not the law, but the 1st Amendment of the Constitution and First Amendment precedent.
That said, this is not a situation where you can just wave this off and say, “Oh, clueless Trump, he can’t really impact free speech like that.” As Marc Randazza explains in a CNN story, Trump can actually still create tremendous damage to the First Amendment if he were to become President. First off, you may have noticed that there’s a vacancy on the Supreme Court, and a Senate insisting it won’t look at any nominees until the next President comes into office. If that’s the case, then it’s entirely possible Trump could appoint someone willing to overturn NYT v. Sullivan. That might be difficult to do with the rest of the court, but it’s not impossible.
On top of that, though, there are federal laws related to defamation that Trump could harm. For years we’ve talked about the importance of anti-SLAPP laws, which allow people sued for defamation, where it’s clearly designed to just shut them up, to get those lawsuits tossed quickly and (often) to get their legal fees paid for. People who file SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) hate these laws, and Trump appears to be a serial SLAPP filer. And, as we’ve been discussing, there’s an ongoing push for a federal anti-SLAPP law that may have some real momentum. Yet, if that law actually passes Congress under a President Trump, it seems pretty obvious that it will be vetoed.
So, yes, it’s easy to just mock Trump as clueless on this particular subject, and to note that it’s not nearly as easy as he seems to think to just “open up” libel laws. But don’t be fooled: if he were to become President, rather than “bringing free speech back,” he will have plenty of power to create a serious chill on free speech in this country.
