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On March 18th in Cape May, participants ran into the Atlantic Ocean for the annual St. Paddy's Day Plunge.

CAPE MAY An ordinance recommended by City Council member Shaine Meier proposes new restrictions on public access to some areas of municipal buildings.

The proposal is not in response to any issue within the city, but rather in preparation for what are known as First Amendment audits, in which activists or self-identified citizen journalists video record interactions in public areas, including in city halls or other public buildings.

In multiple instances, people have posted video of interactions that arise when they take video in public areas, occasionally including confrontations or arguments. There are videos of audits in Vineland City Hall and another in Lower Township, which was posted in December.

That video has been viewed more than 340,000 times, and there is a phone number for Lower Township Hall included in the description. Employees at Township Hall said there was a flood of calls after the video was posted.

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Meier said he wants Cape May to be ready for a similar visit.

The ordinance, which still requires a public hearing and final vote, would add a new section to the city code, municipal buildings, restricted areas to safeguard records. It would prohibit public access to some areas of City Hall and other city buildings, citing the requirement to protect public records under New Jerseys Open Public Records Act.

The ordinance states that city employees cannot be expected to physically intervene to protect records. It lists multiple offices as restricted areas, including exceptions for the lobby and help desk areas. It also calls for signs that identify areas as restricted, stating Authorized employees only.

After the meeting, Meier said the ordinance grew out of concerns brought up through the Joint Insurance Fund, which provides insurance coverage for several communities, including Cape May.

CAPE MAY With a new fire station underway on Franklin Street and a new library due next do

City attorney Christopher Gillin-Schwartz said those who want to access public records are free to fill out a request under the Open Public Records Act, often referred to as OPRA. There are rights of public access, he said, but they are not unlimited.

Although a public building may be a public building, that doesnt mean that its a complete free-for-all, he said. In this room (council chambers), people are free to walk in and if they want to take an iPhone video they can go for it.

Extensive case law has found that people have a right to take video of public meetings, and that there is no legal expectation of privacy in a public place. In the video taken in Vineland, a security guard at City Hall insists he should not be recorded if he does not want to be, but the poster keeps taking video.

SeanPaul Reyes, who posts video to YouTube as Long Island Audit, objected as another guard reached out to grab his phone.

You cannot video tape in here. This is a government building, a security guard states.

Youre in public, that means you have no expectation of privacy, Reyes says in the video.

Lower Township Manager Michael Laffey questions Reyes as he records video in the otherwise empty meeting room at Township Hall.

Who are you here to see? This is a township hall, Laffey says in the video.

ATLANTIC CITY With a crowded agenda and two new members, the Casino Reinvestment Developme

Im not here to see anybody, Reyes responds. He said his reason to visit Township Hall was to take photos and video as an independent journalist. Theres nothing nefarious going on here.

Reyes said he is working on a story but did not give any details on the story or provide identification.

Laffey said he had security concerns and asks him to leave the room.

Contacted on Friday, Laffey said Reyes was wearing a fanny pack and would not answer questions, prompting security concerns. He said since Sept. 11, 2001, all municipal officials have been urged to remain vigilant.

Laffey said Reyes was not confrontational and remained in the building for about 45 minutes.

Were pretty transparent in government. We have nothing to hide, he said. Police officers were in Township Hall for another purpose, and spoke with Reyes.

They just happened to be in the building at the same time. We didnt call the police because he was here, Laffey said.

On the video, one Lower Township officer said there can be trespassing charges on public property.

LOWER TOWNSHIP Nothing good happens after midnight, at least according to Police Chief Kev

Youre making everybody nervous, the officer said.

Anybodys allowed in the building here, Reyes said.

Later in the video, Sgt. Jason Felsing arrives, asking, Are you exercising your First Amendment right?

He suggests he will hang out with Reyes while he takes video and images.

Several of the doors in Lower Township have authorized personnel only signs. Reyes fills out an OPRA request for the names, salaries and email addresses of all township employees for 2022 and then leaves.

The safety directors office of the Municipal Excess Liability Joint Insurance Fund, which can be thought of as a JIF for JIFs, put out a best practices statement in December 2019 for handling First Amendment audits.

It advises to prevent entry to restricted areas, and to instruct employees to remain calm and professional.

In many instances, the auditor will refuse to identify themselves, and may edit the video before posting, the notification warns.

Cape May County Republicans are touting the diversity of their ticket this year, endorsing a

The attitude and demeanor of some of these people can be unnerving, annoying, flippant, aggressive, and on occasion, they may use foul and abusive language, it states. Unfortunately, many of these audits may become confrontational in nature.

Laffey said he plans to arrange a training session with the MEL, open to all county municipalities, with information on how to deal with First Amendment auditors.

In my opinion, they are doing this for a money grab, he said, both seeking donations and potentially seeking financial settlements in cases where they are removed from public buildings or confronted.

In other states, auditors have faced charges, or been detained or assaulted, and even shot. In 2019, a YouTube poster was shot in the leg by a security guard while taking video outside a Los Angeles synagogue, and in other instances, police have drawn their weapons on auditors.

Dekon Fashaw, the Cape May police chief, said his officers have had training from the state Attorney Generals Office in the First Amendment, and in responding to similar audits.

The Long Island Audit is one of multiple audit-oriented channels on YouTube. Some of Reyes videos have received millions of views, and he includes links to GoFundMe pages as well as to his Venmo, PayPal and other accounts seeking donations. He also offers T-shirts and other merchandise.

Reyes did not respond to an emailed request for an interview.

Reyes has faced charges in Maryland, where he recorded a police traffic stop, and in Connecticut, where he was cited on trespassing charges. According to media reports, Reyes has filed a lawsuit against the city of Danbury, Connecticut, alleging his Constitutional rights under the First and Fourth amendments were violated.

Heres an update of the COVID-19 numbers in the state.

In the Maryland instance, he wrote an apology and said his rights were not violated, according to news reports. In the statement, he said the officer who had stopped another driver had said he could record the stop, but told him to do it from a different location.

In an interview posted to YouTube in January, Reyes said he had been convicted of a felony 10 years ago.

The Cape May ordinance still needs a public hearing and final vote before it is official. Those are planned for the April 18 City Council meeting, 5 p.m. at City Hall, 643 Washington St.

Contact Bill Barlow:

609-272-7290

bbarlow@pressofac.com

Twitter @jerseynews_bill

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Cape May takes steps to head off 'First Amendment audits' - Press of Atlantic City

The co-hosts of ABCs The View took up the topic of Fox News coverage during a recent show specifically its coverage of former President Donald Trumps false assertions that the 2020 election was fraudulent and its reports about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Co-host Whoopi Goldbergasked whyFoxs coverage isnt considered tantamount to recruiting and radicalizing.

To me, this should be against the law, Goldberg said March 8. You should not be able to lie to the American people knowingly. And, you know, its one thing if you made a mistake and you didnt know. But weve heard for five or six years now, you know, the media was a lying sack of doo. They were fake news. So how come? What do we do as Americans to say this is not okay?

Another co-host, off-camera, responded, Its the First Amendment.

Goldberg countered, The First Amendment doesnt allow you to willingly lie.

Goldbergs comments came as Dominion Voting Systems issuingFox News for defamation over some of its hosts comments questioning the reliability of Dominion voting machines following the 2020 election.

A reader asked us to look into whether Goldberg was right on the constitutional question. Legal scholars told us that she is mostly off base.

Lies, including knowing ones, do not lose First Amendment protection simply for their untruth, said Howard M. Wasserman, a law professor at Florida International University.

A spokesperson for The View did not respond to PolitiFacts inquiry.

Experts said that for some types of speech, lying is not constitutionally protected, but these are relatively narrow exceptions. Examples include:

Beyond these categories, though, everyday lying has generally been found to be protected by the Constitution.

In the 2012 Supreme Court caseUnited States v. Alvarez, the justices ruled that content-based restrictions on speech are almost always invalid. In Alvarez, the high court struck down a law that had made it a crime to fraudulently claim to have received certain military awards for valor.

Five of the justices agreed that lies about philosophy, religion, history, the social sciences, the arts, and the like are generally protected, said Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor.

Volokh said that a separate holding of the Sullivan case was that even deliberate lies, said with actual malice, about the government are constitutionally protected.

State-level laws targeting false political speech have also run into turbulence in the courts. In 2016, an appeals court ruledunconstitutionalan Ohio law that prohibited the dissemination of false information about a political candidate in campaign materials during the campaign season. The decision said that the law amounted to content-based restrictions targeting core political speech that are not narrowly tailored to serve the states admittedly compelling interest in conducting fair elections.

A major reason for protecting lies, experts said, is that the government will not necessarily be an honest judge of what is truth and what is a lie. Volokh said there is continuing concern among jurists about following in the path of the Sedition Act of 1798, a law that banned malicious lies about the government.

The Sedition Act, whichwas allowed to expirein 1801, would be viewed as unconstitutional under modern First Amendment law, Volokh said, because it requires the government to decide whats a lie about it and whats not a decision that will often be made inaccurately and self-servingly.

Wasserman agreed. We do not want to empower the government to decide what is truth, he said. It would be too easy to label certain political opinions or framings as untrue and subject to government silencing.

A broadcaster like Goldberg benefits significantly from protections for lying, Ligon said.

Talk show hosts are often given leeway, consistent with the First Amendment, when it comes to their speech, in part because they are understood to be entertainers, Ligon said.

Ligon said that both Tucker Carlson on the right and Rachel Maddow on the left have successfully defended defamation claims.

In the 2021 caseHerring Networks v. Maddow, a federal appeals court ruled on a defamation claim stemming from a segment Maddow had aired on her MSNBC show. The segment contained the claim that an employee of One America News Network was also being paid by the Russian government to produce government-funded, pro-(Vladimir) Putin propaganda for a Russian government funded propaganda outfit called Sputnik.

The court ruled that the statement was obvious exaggeration, cushioned within an undisputed news story. The ruling went on to say that Maddows statement was well within the bounds of what qualifies as protected speech under the First Amendment. No reasonable viewer could conclude that Maddow implied an assertion of objective fact.

Goldberg said, The First Amendment doesnt allow you to willingly lie.

For the vast majority of speech, the First Amendment considers lies to be protected speech.

There are exceptions to this general rule, but they are limited. In libel and incitement cases, for instance, the judicial bar for proving harm is high, meaning that most types of political speech cannot be challenged successfully in court.

We rate the statement Mostly False.

This fact check was originallypublished by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here.

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Whoopi Goldberg said the First Amendment 'doesn't allow you to ... - Poynter

SALEMAs WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's father told a crowd at Cinema Salem Thursday night, there is no free America without a free press.

The 2021 film "Ithaka" was created by Assange's brother, Gabriel Shipton, and focused on Assange's story through the eyes of his father, John Shipton, and wife, Stella Assange. It was shown at Cinema Salem on opening night of the 2023 Salem Film Festival, which runs through April 2.

Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 and gained notoriety in 2010 when the outlet leaked hundreds of thousands of documents provided by former U.S. Army Intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

The documents showed that war crimes were committed with the knowledge of the U.S. during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and set off over a decade of intense criticism from the U.S. government toward Assange. The Australian publisher and journalist has since received dozens of journalism awards and was nominated multiple times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Assange found asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in the United Kingdom from 2012 to 2019, at which time he faced sexual misconduct charges in Sweden, which were later dropped, and extradition to that country and, likely, the U.S. Since April 11, 2019, Assange has been imprisoned in the max security prison H.M Belmarsh in London and faces extradition to the U.S. on 17 counts of espionage.

If found guilty, he could receive a max sentence of 175 years under the Espionage Act of 1917. That act was signed into law by the U.S. government during World War I as a controversial measure to limit criticism of the American government.

While whistleblowers have been sentenced under the act, Assange would be the first journalist it has ever officially punished.

It seems to me and many other commentators that what the United States Department of Justice, in particular, the national security section, have embarked upon, in this matter, with encouragement from other institutions of state, that this is utterly ruinous, John Shipton said at the screening Thursday night.

"Ithaka" explores the danger Assange's possible conviction poses for the free press, and anyone who aims to hold the government accountable for injustice.

If you imagine just for a moment the removal of the First Amendment, then the people of the United States have lost the fundamental guide to the origination of a culture thats now grown up with 250 years, Assanges father said.

The film also documents the emotional toll Assange's ongoing imprisonment has taken on him and his family. As shown in the film, Assange has struggled with severe depression throughout adulthood, which has only gotten worse since hes been in prison, and in October 2021, suffered a stroke in prison.

With the Biden administration still pursuing the extradition that President Donald Trump initially called for, and with the U.S. appealing a British judges decision to not extradite Assange in 2021, his time in prison is far from over.

"I dont think that people who exposed war crimes should go to prison for the rest of their lives, his wife said in the film. The injustice is overwhelming.

The five media organizations that collaborated on the WikiLeaks U.S. war crimes publications include the New York Times, Der Spiegel in Germany, The Guardian in the U.K., El Pas in Spain and Le Monde in France. The outlets published a letter on the 10th anniversary of the U.S. war crimes leak calling for the end of Assange's persecution.

While the U.S. is still seeking Assange's extradition, support for Assange has grown over the years across the world, his brother said.

These prestigious media organizations, these corporations, now are concerned of what this prosecution means to their position in our societies. And so they're now coming forward, Gabriel Shipton said Thursday.

His father made that message even clearer in the film.

If he goes down, so will journalism, John Shipton said.

More than 70 documentaries, filmmaker question-and-answer sessions, student film competitions, panel discussions and parties will be held in Salem and Beverly as part of the festivals 16th year.

For more information on the festival, visit http://www.salemfilmfest.com/.

Contact Caroline Enos atCEnos@northofboston.comand follow her on Twitter@CarolineEnos.

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Assange's family speak on threat to 1st Amendment at Salem Film Fest - The Salem News

SOUTHWICK In an effort to avoid unwanted litigation, Select Board member Jason Perron has been working for several months on language to create a policy that would guide the town on flags that could be flown in front of Town Hall.

Its a work in progress, Perron said about the proposed policy.

He said the motivation for drafting a policy outlining what flags can be flown on the single pole at Town Hall came from a lawsuit filed against the city of Boston in 2017. A Christian group sued after Boston officials refused to fly its flag on one of three poles at Boston City Hall.

It was the first time Boston had denied a flag flying request. The city said flying a Christian flag would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from making any law respecting an establishment of religion.

The group appealed: first to state District Court and a U.S. Appeals Court, which both upheld the lower courts ruling, and then to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled the groups First Amendment rights had been violated.

With that history, Perron said that during a meeting of the Massachusetts Municipal Association in January, it was suggested that all towns and cities establish a policy that clearly outlines the circumstances under which flags can be flown on municipal government property.

When discussing the proposed flag policy this week, Perron stressed to residents that it is still being developed and tweaked.

Were going to have to dance around it and be careful it is a work in progress, Perron said, adding that the number of days a flag might fly has yet to be determined.

According to the proposal: The choice of which flag to raise on town-owned property is hereby declared to be governmental speech, communicating a message to the public, to which the strictures of the First Amendment do not apply.

The town does not, nor has it ever, intended to designate the flying of flags on town-owned property as a public forum by permitting a non-governmental party to raise a particular flag.

The operative term in the proposed policy is public forum.

A strict interpretation of public forum means speech that occurs on governmental property, on which the government cannot place content-based restrictions.

If it can establish that flying a flag at Town Hall is not defined as a public forum, the Select Board can choose to raise, or decline to raise, a flag without running afoul of the First Amendment, according to the fourth sentence of the proposed policy: Accordingly, the Select Boards choice of whether to raise, or decline to raise, a flag on town-owned property, the process for such a decision, and the adoption of the policy shall not be interpreted as designating any town-owned property as a public forum for the flying flags.

The flags currently approved to fly on town-owned property are the U.S. flag, the state flag, the town flag, flags of branches of the U.S. military, the prisoners of war and missing in action (POW/MIA) flag, or flags of officially recognized veterans organizations, such as Disabled American Veterans flag and similar.

For any other organization that wants to fly its flag at Town Hall, the proposed policy will require a written request and paying a fee that has yet to be determined.

The applications will be reviewed by the Select Board and if the request is denied, a written explanation will be provided to the organization or group.

The policy provides the type of flags that may be flown: Those related to special circumstances; town-based events; recognition of days of honor that might include Autism awareness, Armed Forces Day, Pearl Harbor Day, 9/11 Remembrance Day, or flags supporting nonprofit organization.

No commercial business flags or promotional flags or banners may be flown, according to the proposed policy.

There is no time frame for adoption of the policy, but it has been included for several weeks on the Select Boards agenda.

Link:
Flag flying policy a work in progress, says Southwick Select Board member - MassLive.com

Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit held that Twitter did not act as the government by banning a user months after a government agency flagged for Twitter one of his tweets on alleged election fraud. OHandley v. Weber is the latest decision rejecting social media users attempts to hold platforms liable for deleting, demonetizing, and otherwise moderating their content.

Twitter is a private entity, so the government and the courts cannot tell it what speech it must remove or what speech it must carry. The First Amendment restricts censorship only by the government, not private entities, unless those entities are using government power or otherwise effectively acting as the government. But in OHandley, even if Twitter and the government were generally aligned in their missions to limit the spread of misleading election information[, s]uch alignment does not transform private conduct into state action.

Moreover, as we argued in our amicus brief in the case, holding Twitter liable for content moderation would likely violate the platforms own First Amendment rights. For example, when Twitter took down plaintiff Rogan OHandleys tweets and then his account, it made an editorial decision about what content it would publish.

OHandleys lawsuit, relied on the fact that the California Office of Election Cybersecurity flagged one of OHandleys tweets for supposedly violating Twitters misinformation policy. But as the Ninth Circuit explained, Twitter developed and applied that policy at its discretion, and the government did not order Twitter to take any action. The court said, and we argued in our brief, that Twitter is not a state actor unless it ceded control over its content moderation process to the government. In general, the government is free to talk to Twitter, and Twitter is free to listen (or not listen).

The Ninth Circuit pointed specifically to Twitters user agreement with OHandley as justifying the content moderation, and declined to say whether the First Amendment also protects that moderation. But many other courts have dismissed these must carry lawsuits under the First Amendment, including the lower court in this case. OHandley is the Ninth Circuits second published decision rejecting a must carry lawsuitthe first being Prager v. Googleand provides clear precedent for other courts considering these cases.

Finally, the court said OHandley had standing to sue the California government for flagging his tweet, but that it ultimately did not violate his First Amendment rights because flagging a tweet was mere government speech and not coercion.

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Victory at the Ninth Circuit: Twitter's Content Moderation is Not State ... - EFF