The Speak Free Act of 2015 is a federal anti-SLAPP bill introduced in the House of Representatives on a bipartisan basis by Reps Anna Eshoo and texas republican Blake Farenthold.
SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation and describe lawsuits filed primarily to discourage, harass and intimidate public participation and free speech.
Anti-SLAPP laws provide a way for those targeted via SLAPP suits get the suits dismissed fairly rapidly and avoid being drained by long and resource-consuming lawsuits designed not to prevail on the merits, but to exhaust the target into silencing themselves to get out from under the lawsuit.
In the early hours of the morning of June 3, Oakland’s City Council, nearing the end of a 9 hour marathon meeting, approved unanimously the nation’s first citizen-developed privacy policy. Continue reading Oakland Passes Privacy Policy At 3:00AM→
On May 7th, a Federal Appeals Court in New York ruled that the bulk metadata collection program attached to Section 215 of the Patriot Act is “‘irreconcilable with the statute’s plain text’.
U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) reintroduced the Private Prison Information Act (PPIA) in Congress. The bill, HR 5838, requires non-federal correctional and detention facilities that house federal prisoners to comply with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), by making certain records available to the public.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is one of the most important tools for investigative journalism.
MA joined with over 50 civil liberties organizations to press Congress to reform and improve FOIA to facilitate government transparency and the informed consent of the American people to the actions taken in their name. Continue reading Improving FOIA→
From Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
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Members of Congress talk a lot about improving oversight of national security, but most do not do much to make it better. Just recently, the former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller, gave a speech where he said something remarkable. He spoke about the struggle Congress had with gathering information from the CIA for a report on its use of torture. “This study is … the story of the breakdown in our system of governance…. One of the profound ways that breakdown happened was through the active subversion of meaningful congressional oversight.” Continue reading Fixing Congressional Oversight of National Security→
