__ Supreme Court

Regular Member Posts : 7317 Join date : 2014-07-29

10-3-2022

Supreme Court to scrutinize U.S. protections for social media.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a challenge to federal protections for internet and social media companies freeing them of responsibility for content posted by users in a case involving an American student fatally shot in a 2015 rampage by Islamist militants in Paris.

The justices took up an appeal by the parents and other relatives of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old woman from California who was studying in Paris, of a lower court's ruling that cleared Google LLC-owned YouTube of wrongdoing in a lawsuit seeking monetary damages that the family brought under a U.S. anti-terrorism law. Google and YouTube are part of Alphabet Inc.

The Supreme Court also agreed to hear a separate appeal by Twitter Inc of the lower court's decision to revive a similar lawsuit against that company, though not on the basis of Section 230.

The lawsuit against Google accused it of materially supporting terrorism in violation of the Anti-Terrorism Act, a federal law that allows___
Americans to recover damages related to "an act of international terrorism."
The lawsuit alleged that YouTube, through computer algorithms, recommended videos by the Islamic State militant group, which claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, to certain users.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021 dismissed the lawsuit in a ruling relying largely on another law, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Section 230, enacted before the rise of today's major social media companies, protects "interactive computer services" by ensuring they cannot be treated as the "publisher or speaker" of any information provided by other users.

The lawsuit argued that such immunity should not apply when the company's platform recommends certain content via algorithms that identify and display content most likely to interest users, based on how people use the service.

Section 230 has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum. Democrats have faulted it for giving social media companies a pass for spreading hate speech and misinformation.
Republicans painted it as a tool for censorship of voices on the right.

The plaintiffs said that YouTube's algorithm helped Islamic State spread its militant message by recommending to users the group's videos including those aimed at recruiting jihadist fighters, and that the company's "assistance" was a cause of the 2015 attacks.

Gonzalez's family appealed the 9th Circuit ruling to the Supreme Court, noting that while algorithms may suggest benign dance videos to some, "other recommendations suggest that users look at materials inciting dangerous, criminal or self-destructive behavior."

The family added that removing Section 230 protections would prompt websites to stop recommending harmful materials, while saying that allowing the immunity "denies redress to victims who could have shown that those recommendations had caused their injuries, or the deaths of their loved ones."

In the case against Twitter, American family members of Nawras Alassaf, a Jordanian citizen who died in a nightclub mass shooting in 2017 in Istanbul also claimed by Islamic State, accused that social media company of violating the anti-terrorism law by failing to police the platform for Islamic State accounts or posts.

The 9th Circuit in the same ruling reversed a federal judge's decision to throw out the case against Twitter, but did not assess Twitter's claim of immunity under Section 230.

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Subject: Re: __ Supreme Court Tue Oct 04, 2022 10:04 am

I'm torn on this one -

- If social media is knowingly pushing content onto users then they do bear some responsibility for what happens at a result...

- But then again social media can better serve it's users by recommending things which might interest them...

Maybe it should be an opt-in thing where agreeing to receive content places all responsibility on the user.

Regular Member Posts : 7317 Join date : 2014-07-29

12-10-2022

Dark money groups pump nearly $90 million into Supreme Court case.

A report released this week by the nonpartisan watchdog group Accountable.US revealed a network of dark money groups that have donated nearly $90 million to organizations actively supporting the plaintiffs in Moore v. Harper —

A bombshell case now before the Supreme Court that could alter the way federal elections are conducted across the country.

The landmark case hinges on the "independent state legislature" theory brought by North Carolina legislators, who want to eliminate the system of checks and balances governing federal elections and appropriate full power themselves.
This could mean, for example, that state legislatures are free to appoint a slate of presidential electors as they see fit, regardless of which candidate a state's voters favored.

The theory asserts that under the U.S. Constitution, state legislatures have full authority to set the rules when it comes to making state laws that apply to federal elections, and that state constitutions and state courts have no power or authority over them.

If the Supreme Court affirms the theory in deciding the Moore case, state legislatures will effectively be freed to gerrymander electoral maps and pass restrictive voting laws with little to no supervision by state courts or other entities.

Some legal experts have even suggested that the independent state legislature theory could create a pathway for election subversion.
Legislators could throw out election results they don't agree with, as mentioned above, and appoint their own presidential electors.

But others are concerned about where the money is coming from in backing the theory.

"It's obviously a fringe, extremist legal theory that's being funded by these wealthy conservative donors,
and these are people who know their extreme agenda isn't popular," said Kayla Hancock, director of power
and influence at Accountable.US.

"So they're spending millions of dollars to stack the Supreme Court and chip away at our democratic rights and freedoms by influencing these institutions."

The independent state legislature theory has previously been rejected by a majority of Supreme Court justices and is widely viewed as well outside the mainstream of legal thought, even for high-profile judicial conservatives.

But over the last two years, that changed with the founding of a nonprofit called the Honest Elections Project, which has promoted the theory extensively.
The group is closely linked to Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo, seen as immensely influential
in building the current Supreme Court's conservative supermajority.

Leo has a history of operating a network of interlocking nonprofits that support right-wing advocacy and lobbying.
He helped conservative nonprofits raise $250 million from mostly undisclosed donors to promote conservative judges and causes.
He advised Donald Trump during the nominations of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, according to Accountable.US.

"It's interesting to see that this man, who has all this power in influencing the court and the structure of the court, is also funding groups that are filing amicus briefs to try and influence that same court," Hancock said.

"A lot of these groups that Leo is funding are also engaging in advocacy work to place restrictions on ballot access and gerrymandering. So I think it's broader than just this legal theory. It's an all-out assault on our elections."

The Honest Elections Project stoked fears about voter fraud prior to the 2020 election and even wrote letters to election officials in Colorado, Florida and Michigan that relied on misleading data to accuse jurisdictions of having bloated voter rolls and threaten legal action, the Guardian reported.

The group also spent $250,000 on ads against mail-in voting, calling it a "brazen attempt to manipulate the election system for partisan advantage."
In fact, there have been almost no verified cases of fraud in voting by mail anywhere in the country, and many Republicans have blamed their party's relatively poor showing in the 2022 midterms on a reluctance to encourage mail-in voting

Since its founding, HEP has advocated against laws designed to expand voting access. It also sued the state of Michigan, forcing the state to clean up its list of registered voters, and blocked a settlement in Minnesota that eased absentee voting rules.

"These groups that operate behind the scenes, they know their agendas are unpopular. ... They're going in front of the courts because they know they're not going to be able to enact these policies otherwise."

Referencing the U.S. Constitution's Elections Clause and Electors Cause, the Honest Elections Project argued that state legislatures are "vested with plenary authority that cannot be divested by state constitution to determine the times, places, and manner of presidential and congressional elections."

DonorsTrust, which has been described as the "dark money ATM" of the conservative movement, has funded a majority of the donations, giving almost $70.5 million to these groups, according to the Accountable.US report.

The group funnels anonymous donations to hundreds of organizations, including several right-wing legal and policy groups favored by the Koch network as well as other mega-donors, according to Sludge.

"These groups that operate behind the scenes, they know that their agendas are unpopular and so they're using broad networks of right-wing organizations to try to influence the courts," Hancock said.

"In this specific instance, these people are going in front of the courts in order to advance their fringe agenda from the shadows, because they know they're not going to be able to enact these unpopular policies otherwise."

Three Supreme Court justices have signaled apparent support for the independent state legislature theory, but North Carolina legislators would need at least two more votes to prevail.
Voting rights advocates have warned that the theory could fundamentally reshape the mechanisms
of American politics and bring immense chaos to the electoral process.
The court is expected to issue a ruling next summer.

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Regular Member Posts : 549 Join date : 2022-12-10

Your subject line is misleading.

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Regular Member Posts : 7317 Join date : 2014-07-29

12-27-2022

Trump's court rolling back decades of progress based
on MAGA fantasies about a past that never existed.

Donald Trump's three appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court launched a judicial revolution
this year rolling back the past half-century of constitutional advancements.

The Trump-shaped right-wing majority reversed abortion rights
declared the separation of church and state dead and decided
the Second Amendment blocked state concealed-carry laws
and seems poised to steer the court in an even more radical direction in
next year's decisions, according to Bloomberg.

"What unifies this conservative revolution is a radical vision of the restoration of constitutional law to the state it was in before the liberal decisions of the Warren court created modern constitutional law more than 50 years ago," Feldman wrote.

"But this conservative court doesn’t only want to roll back the clock.
They also want to change how judicial decisions are made:
Instead of relying on precedent and principle, they insist on using a nostalgic version of history to decide major cases. And like most forms of nostalgia, the court’s approach is less historical than pseudo-historical."

The conservative majority based their radical decisions on loosely defined "historical practices"
that reflect the idealized fantasy of Trump's worldview more than the actual historic record, which numerous historians have tried to correct in filings before the court.

"What makes this conservative majority the Trump court is of course partly the fact that Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh were appointed by Trump," Feldman wrote.

"But the better reason to identify the revolutionary conservative majority with Trump
is the similarity between its pseudo-historical nostalgia and Trump’s
own rebarbative slogan, Make America Great Again.

The MAGA ideology, at its core, is very obviously its nostalgic appeal for an English-speaking, Christian America full of manufacturing jobs for White men, homemaker status for White women, and subordinate or invisible status for people of color."

"The current conservative majority’s constitutional philosophy, like MAGA, invents an idealized past and strives to bring it back," he added.
"It talks the talk of history without being responsible to reality — and without considering seriously the ways our country and our Constitution are in fact much greater now than they were in the old days.

They often use the term 'historical test,' but it would be more accurate to call it a doctrine of nostalgia."

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Regular Member Posts : 7317 Join date : 2014-07-29

1-19-2023

Legal experts slam Chief Justice Roberts 'sham' leak investigation.

Legal and political experts are blasting the U.S. Supreme Court's investigation that failed to determine who leaked the draft opinion in the Dobbs case that ultimately served to overturn Roe v. Wade and void the decades-old previously-constitutional right to abortion.

Some, having read the Court's report on the investigation, state it appears the Justices and their spouses were not interviewed or investigated.

In an unsigned statement Thursday the Court announced after a long investigation, “to date" it had been "unable to identify a person responsible by a preponderance of the evidence.”

Frank Figliuzzi, the well-known former FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence served up strong contempt for the process chosen by the Court, and
what he suggested was the underlying reason the investigation failed to produce the leaker.

Noted national security attorney Mark S. Zaid, who also handles government investigation cases, says investigators did not interview or investigate the
Justices or their spouses.

"Having read [the] investigative findings, I am completely struck by the fact does not appear Justices (or their families) were interviewed, much less investigated," he tweeted.

"When is an investigation really not an investigation?" "When you're told what you can and can't do, you can't do what you need to do or talk to the people you need to talk to solve the investigation, and, when the investigation isn't conducted by professional investigators."

Figliuzzi, himself an expert investigator who served as the Bureau's chief inspector, blasted the decisions made about how the investigation would be conducted and who would conduct it.

"The U.S. Marshal Service did not conduct this investigation.
This investigation was conducted by someone called the Marshal of the Supreme Court. I'm sure she's a wonderful person.

She has no law enforcement training or experience. She's in charge of securing the building called the Supreme Court building and its justices.
That's what she does."

He also criticized who he says was not investigated: former clerks and current Justices.

"If you want to do real serious leak investigation, you're going to talk literally to every person who may have had access to whatever it is that leaked.
From what we can see so far, while they may have talked one hundred people, they didn't talk to ex-clerks.
They didn't talk to the very universe of people who may have done the leaking and then left the court,"
he noticed.

"They didn't call the FBI, because you know what would happen, then a real case would have happened. They wouldn't have actually had the criminal process."

"Someone stole government property, someone mishandled government records, potentially a crime. They could have had subpoenas of former clerks and former employees they would have had that leverage over them.
They could have subpoenaed phone carriers and internet providers, and they could have see who was talking to whom and when, at the media platform that obtained this information," he said, presumably referring to Politico which obtained and published the leaked draft opinion. "All of that could have been done."

"We still have, according to The New York Times reporting today, we have no evidence that the justices themselves were interviewed."

There was "no serious intent to get to get to the bottom of it, in my opinion," Figliuzzi added.

Former Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, Peter Strzok, also points to the fact, based on the report from the Marshal of the Supreme Court, that the Justices and their spouses were not investigated, and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's claim affirming the quality
of the investigation.

"Kind of blows a huge hole in Chertoff’s statement that he '[could] not identify any additional useful investigative measures,'" Strzok wrote

Figliuzzi said that sometimes someone doesn't want to get the answer because it would kill their stock or hurt the company. That's why quiet internal investigations happen instead of serious, professional ones.

"You're going to put band-aids over the holes and hope this goes away. If you want to use that analogy to the Supreme Court, maybe they really don't want the public to know the answer because the public perception is already at a low," he said,
that he suspects they know who it was already.

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Posts : 2495 Join date : 2017-09-09

From Temples article;

Quote :: Noted national security attorney Mark S. Zaid, who also handles government investigation cases, says investigators did not interview or investigate the
Justices or their spouses.

(-snip-)

Quote :: Peter Strzok, also points to the fact, based on the report from the Marshal of the Supreme Court, that the Justices and their spouses were not investigated

Haa! .. Strzok .. That worthless, lying fuck should be in prison... If not, flipping burgers at McD's or some shit

From the SCOTUS Marshall

Quote :: During the course of the investigation, I spoke with each of the Justices, several on multiple occasions. The Justices actively cooperated in this iterative process, asking questions and answering mine. I followed up on all credible leads, none of which implicated the Justices or their spouses

Also;

Quote :: After months of diligent analysis of forensic evidence and interviews of almost 100 employees(-snip-)

I believe "employees" would include the court clerks .. They were interviewed ..It wouldn't be necessary to subpoena them

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2023/01/21/theres-been-an-update-in-the-supreme-court-leak-investigation-n2618576

Regular Member Posts : 7317 Join date : 2014-07-29

1-21-2023

Supreme Court says justices 'actively cooperated' in leak probe.

Unlike clerks and staff, members of nation's highest court were not asked to sign affidavit, marshal says.

A 20-page report the court released Thursday from Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley made no mention of any questioning of justices during the eight-month-long probe, prompting questions about the fairness and thoroughness of the investigation.

A court spokesperson did not respond Thursday to questions from POLITICO and other news organizations about whether the justices had been interviewed.

However, in a four-sentence statement Friday afternoon, Curley said she’d interacted with each justice during the inquiry__
although she stopped short of describing that as formal questioning of the justices and she acknowledged the justices__
were not asked to take the same steps other employees were to confirm their statements under oath.

Supreme Court staffers bitter over justices getting a pass during leak investigation.

According to a report from the New York Times' Jodi Kantor, court employees feel they were unfairly interrogated while the nine justices sat on the sideline and faced far less scrutiny.

Legal experts are questioning the thoroughness of the investigations, with one pointing out, "Whether the ‘employees’ who were subjected to the investigation includes the justices themselves remains unclear___
and the speculation amongst legal industry commentators is that the nine were not included in the search for the leaker —
and it certainly doesn’t include any of their spouses,” and those staffers are now raising the same concerns.

According to the Supreme Court marshal who headed the investigation, the justices were questioned --
but not asked to sign sworn affidavits.
(((uder oath)))

In an interview with the Times, one court staffer complained, "They weren’t subjected to the same level of scrutiny. It’s hard to imagine any of them suffering meaningful consequences even if they were implicated
in the leak.”

Attorney Mark Zaid agreed, saying failure to adequately press the justices, "just completely undermines the court’s credibility.
It sends a message of superiority that does not exist under the eyes of the law.”

According to the Times' Kantor, the investigation
has left wounds that won't soon heal.

"In interviews, some employees said the leak and investigation further tainted the atmosphere inside a court that had already grown tense with disagreement.

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