Media Law Blog Three

Think about the Six Clauses, or Six Freedoms, of the First Amendment and use the six freedoms as lenses as you read news items — any current news items — about the Black Lives Matter protests.  Think about all the things we've learned already in this class: The Six Freedoms, the Speech/Action Dichotomy, the Bedrock Principles, which state that the F.A. is not absolute and that F.A. protection is not a shield against Laws of General Applicability.  Can you relate any of those ideas to the news stories that you find?  (Try using Google News.)

    

    Breaking down "Federal Agents Tapped Protester's Phones in Portland," a recent story about the invasion of citizen privacy. It isn't the only story of Federal Agents abusing their power during the Portland protests and the riots that broke out after. This article also mentions the unmarked officers who abducted random protesters or citizens off the street. Reading about the situation there is almost surreal in a way, like I'm reading about a society on the verge of becoming a dystopian disaster.

    Obviously, citizens of the US are allowed to gather and protest the government, those are within the realm of peacefully gathering and using the free speech entitled to them by the First Amendment. In a way, they were allowed to do so during the peaceful protests, but that didn't stop the government from bugging their phones in an attempt to prevent riots that were normally driven over the edge by the Agents sent there to "control" the peaceful protests. The fact that the government felt empowered to impose itself on these citizens who hadn't yet committed a crime, is a clear infringement of American Rights. Freedom of religion doesn't come into play but the actions of the Government have certainly given the citizens a reasons to seek to petition them about their acts. Not even the press were safe from the impacts of these protests as some were targeted by protesters and others were targeted by police. The whole situation has ended with everyone pointing fingers at one another.

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