Verizon is one of the phone companies currently being sued over its alleged disclosure of customer phone records to the NSA. In a response to the court last week, the company asked for the entire consolidated case against it to be thrown out—on free speech grounds.
The response also alleges that the case should be thrown out because even looking into the issue could violate state secrets, of course, but a much longer section of the response tries to make the case that Verizon has a First Amendment right to "petition" the government. "Based on plaintiffs' own allegations, defendants' right to communicate such information to the government is fully protected by the Free Speech and Petition Clauses of the First Amendment," argue Verizon's lawyers.
Essentially, the argument is that turning over truthful information to the government is free speech, and the EFF and ACLU can't do anything about it. In fact, Verizon basically argues that the entire lawsuit is a giant SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) suit, and that the case is an attempt to deter the company from exercising its First Amendment right to turn over customer calling information to government security services.
"Communicating facts to the government is protected petitioning activity," says the response, even when the communication of those facts would normally be illegal or would violate a company's owner promises to its customers. Verizon argues that, if the EFF and other groups have concerns about customer call records, the only proper remedy "is to impose restrictions on the government, not on the speaker's right to communicate."
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First Amendment of the Bill of Rights:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Umm....regardless on how you feel about the whole NSA phone stuff....saying that they can give whoever whatever they want under the First Amendment sounds pretty crazy to me.
I wonder if this tactic has been tested in the courts....if it hasn't, it will now.
Following this twisted logic, The Enron Corporation should have taken the 5th....and went out for drinks.
MINOR UPDATE - A friend pointed me to this.
But with the stroke of his pen, Court Reporter Davis moved corporations out of that "privileges" category - leaving behind all the others (unions, governments, and small unincorporated businesses still don't have "rights") - and moved them into the "rights" category with humans, citing the 14th Amendment which was passed at the end of the Civil War to grant the human right of equal protection under the law to newly-freed slaves.
On December 3, 1888, President Grover Cleveland delivered his annual address to Congress. Apparently the President had taken notice of the Santa Clara County Supreme Court headnote, its politics, and its consequences, for he said in his speech to the nation, delivered before a joint session of Congress: "As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."
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In the 1978 Boston v. Bellotti decision, the Court agreed, by a one vote majority, that corporations were "persons" and thus entitled to the free speech right to give huge quantities of money to political causes.
Where are we now? I couldn't tell ya, but it looks like this issue has been knocked around in the court system before.
The issue never played out in Kasky v. Nike (1998)
In a surprising development, the Supreme Court handed down a one sentence ruling stating that their decision to review the case had been “improvidently granted.” Basically, the Court changed its mind about hearing the case and side-stepped making a judgement on the free speech issue.
The case was then set to go to trial, but in September 2003, Marc Kasky and Nike announced a settlement stipulating that Nike would pay $1.5 million to the Washington, DC-based Fair Labor Association (FLA) for "program operations and worker development programs focused on education and economic opportunity." The case therefore came to a close, without the nature of Nike’s claims ever having been established.
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