YouSaid · the spoken record

Jameel Jaffer

lines on the record: 76
first: 2018-11-19
most recent: 2018-11-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And there are many journalists and researchers who study the platform who've been able to do a lot of good work in spite of those restrictions. But these restrictions are increasingly limiting their ability to study, not just Facebook, but other platforms as well, which have similar restrictions.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure. So, as everybody knows, Facebook has or should know. Facebook has terms of service that restrict how users can use its platform. And the terms of service in many respects make sense. But one consequence of the terms of service is that journalists and researchers who want to study Facebook's platform are impeded from doing so. And they're impeded from doing so because Facebook bars them from using some basic digital tools. For example, scraping information from collecting by automated means information from the platform or using temporary accounts, temporary research accounts to prompt the platform or try to figure out how the platform will respond to certain kinds of prompts.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're here with Jamil Jaffer from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia. We've been talking about some of the things they're doing there, including a lawsuit against President Trump blocking people on Twitter, which is kind of a novel and unusual thing to talk about, but it's actually very important. Recently, been doing some things around Facebook. Can you tell people about”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's always something involving, or usually something involving his official work. But there are public officials all over the country that have adopted this practice of blocking critics on social media, and now people are writing to them, citing, among other things, or citing principally this decision that we got from the Southern District of New York here. It's very gratifying to see public officials, Democrats and Republicans reconsidering their social media policies in response to this litigation.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, it's already had a pretty significant effect around the country, which is very gratifying to see other public officials who have adopted this practice of blocking their critics from their social media accounts.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essentially, yes Yes, the argument is that, notwithstanding the fact that he uses it in the ways that he uses it, notwithstanding the fact that if you go to his profile page, the account is said to belong to the president of the United States and there's a big photograph of Air Force One on the page, notwithstanding all of that, their argument is that it's a personal account.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A couple months ago in our favor holding that this practice of blocking people on the basis of viewpoint is unconstitutional. And the Trump administration has now unblocked our clients and dozens of other people in response to that ruling. It is also appealing the ruling though. So we'll be in the second circuit. And then what?”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we made the argument that this was the president's Twitter account should be thought of as a public forum under the First Amendment with the consequence that if a public official blocked somebody from that forum, it's unconstitutional. It violates the First Amendment. And I think it took people a little bit of time to come around to that view. But now my impression is that most First Amendment advocates and scholars are on our side. More importantly, the district court is on our side and issued a ruling.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there is a principle Samsung is not only a principle. This is the way that public officials engage with their constituents now. It's not just President Trump. It's public officials all over the country engage with their constituents maybe principally through social media. And if you create a rule that allows public officials to block from their social media accounts, anyone who criticizes them, you're going to have a pretty dramatic effect on public discourse. Absolutely. I'm good with this lawsuit. Yeah, so we took on the lawsuit. Not everybody was, especially when we initially brought it. When we brought the lawsuit.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I guess that's true. You shouldn't be unfair. He's not special in that particular I've done. I'm like, you gone. Right. But you're not a government official. No, I'm not, but I'm just going to give”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From at Rio Donald Trump. He characterizes it as his personal account, but our complaint with that characterization is that he uses the account for official purposes. So, for example, to announce the appointment of people to government posts or to engage in international diplomacy, if that's the right phrase, or to defend”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We could use more if you're offering. We were established with an operational commitment from the Knight Foundation and Columbia $5 million from each of those over five years. So we had this sort of base generous base funding to start with.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Internet freedom agenda that the United States put forward, especially during the Clinton administration, has been a spectacular failure, and we now see that domestically as well as internationally. So that's an essay series that we're overseeing. We also did a not quite a colloquium, but a symposium a few months ago with the Columbia R review on the First Amendment and inequality. But the hope is that this research will inform our litigation decisions, and it already has, to some extent, but I think it'll become, the research will become even more important over time. The hope is that there's a relationship between the two. Right.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, apparently it does. Instead of having your henchmen go to somebody's door and threaten them, you just harass them on social media, right? So there are these kinds of threats to the First Amendment that the First Amendment isn't really well suited, at least in its current form, to address. And Tim's paper was about that, and that was the first one we published, but we published another paper by Heather Whitney about the search engines and the proper analogy you should use. Should we think of them as editors or should we think of search engines as more like shopping malls or should we think of them as something else? That was another one in that series. Recently we published one by Jack Goldsmith, who's a former Bush administration lawyer on what he calls the failure of internet freedom, because in his view,”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, yeah. One example we have an essay series called Emerging Threats where we're focused on emerging threats to the First Amendment or emerging threats to the system of free expression. We published a paper by Tim Wu. That was the first one we published called Is the First Amendment Obsolete. And he was thinking about new threats to the First Amendment, like instead of censorship, flooding, and information space, or instead of working.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, so she's Justice Kagan isn't the only one who's used those kinds of phrases in relation to some First Amendment arguments. And so there's this important question of what values the First Amendment is meant to.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So we have a research program and a litigation program. Those are the two main components of the institute. They do what you would expect them to do. The research program is an effort to understand these threats, to understand what opportunities and what threats are presented by new technology. And the litigation program is our way of defending free speech and the freedom of the press in relation to this new technology. And that, you know, maybe that already sounds complicated, but it's actually more complicated than it sounds because especially now there's a lot of disagreement about what the First Amendment means. So yeah, it's all, you know, it's great to defend the First Amendment, but first you have to decide, well, what is this thing that you're defending? There's a real debate about how closely you follow Supreme Court decisions relating to the First Amendment, but this recent case involving labor unions in which”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as you know, the national security has always been the kind of crucible of the First Amendment. And so being a national security lawyer can turn you into a First Amendment lawyer. Over time, I became a First Amendment lawyer too, and the opportunity to help start something new at Columbia with the resources of Columbia and the Knight Foundation and with people like Lee Bollinger and Alberto I Barguan and Steve Cole and Nick Lemon from the Journalism School involved. I mean, that was a very exciting thing.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Programs that he disclosed or helped disclose. And I argued some of those cases just down the block from here in the Second Circuit, and one of them went to the Supreme Court in 2012. And we're still now at the Knight Institute working on one of those cases with the ACLU where we represent Wikimedia in a challenge to a particular kind of NSA surveillance. And these turn out to be privacy cases, but also First Amendment cases. Yes.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we're trying to get documents about the treatment of prisoners in military and CIA custody. And the case was, as these kinds of cases go, a very successful one. It resulted in the release of what are sometimes called the torture members, the Bush administration's torture memos, a lot of information about maltreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo. Eventually this CIA Inspector General report that led to a prosecution criminal investigation by the Obama administration. So it was a relatively successful case. That's the one I spent most of my time on. But I did a lot of other cases involving the exclusion of foreign scholars from the United States because of their political views, a lot of cases involving government surveillance, especially post-Snowden. We represented Snowden when I was at the ACLU and we also brought a whole series of cases challenging the constitutionality of some of the surveillance programs.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, I became a First Amendment lawyer almost incidentally. I was, as I said, a kind of national security lawyer, but a lot of the national security cases I worked on turned out to be First Amendment cases. I worked on a lot of transparency cases. In fact, a case I probably spent most time on at the ACLU was a freedom of information act case involving interrogation under the Bush administration. In that case, we filed in 2004. It's still running today.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Columbia. It was really the project of Lee Bollinger, who's the president of Colombia, and Alberto E. Barguan, who's the president of the Knight Foundation. And they had had conversations over many years about the possibility of setting up something like this. And the main insight that they had was that the big Supreme Court precedents from the 1960s and 70s involving free speech were precedents created in an era that looked very, very different from the one we're in right now where the threats to the First Amendment were quite different from the ones we're facing right now. And all of the things that raise complicated free speech questions right now like the privatization of the public square or new surveillance technology, search engines, none of these things existed back when the Supreme Court decided the Pentagon Papers case or New York Times versus Sullivan or the cases, the big hits from the 60s and 70s.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I worked at the ACLU starting in 2002, so soon after 9 11, and mainly at the beginning on national security related cases, cases involving immigration detainees, cases involving Guantanamo, and then cases involving the Patriot Act and government surveillance, and First Amendment related questions. And that practice grew. It eventually became a formal project at the ACLU focused on national security issues, and I ran that project for a few years. And then when I left the ACLU a couple of years ago, I was the director of something called the Center for Democracy, which covered the national ACLU's work on free speech, privacy, national security, technology, and international human rights. Obviously, I was not doing all that work myself. There are a lot of people at the ACLU I was working with on it. But I was doing that, and then the night First Amendment Institute was created at...”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Heard of them, yeah, just down the street actually. When this building was Goldman Sachs, I was at the ACLU. So that was Goldman Sachs. It was Goldman Sachs, yeah, just until a couple of years ago. Oh, man.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I love all the things you're doing, and this is the reason I wanted to have you on here because there's so much interesting stuff you're doing there. So let's talk about how you got there. How did you get there and how did the night explain what the Knight First Amendment Institute is? But you first.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as someone who loves the First Amendment, but the number 19 is pretty good too. But in my spare time, I talk tech and you're listening, Jerico Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today, in the red chair is Jamil Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute. It's a group at Columbia University that defends the freedoms of speech and press in the digital age. And just recently they've challenged the way Facebook deals with journalists and scholars, and they were also bothering Donald Trump. Jamil, welcome to Rico Deco.”
2018-11-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT