Blog of Rights
Gabe
Rottman

Gabe Rottman is a legislative counsel/policy advisor in the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, focusing on the First Amendment. Gabe served as an attorney in private practice before coming back to the ACLU. Prior to law school, Gabe worked in the WLO as a senior writer and communications specialist. Gabe has a J.D. magna cum laude from the Georgetown University Law Center, where he was a notes editor of the Georgetown Law Journal, and a B.A. from McGill University in political science and history, where he was on the dean’s honors list.

08/02/2012
Freedom of Expression

English as a First Language

By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 2:40pm

Sigh. As if we don’t have enough divisiveness in this country, a familiar subset of Congressional Republicans are trotting out yet another discriminatory bill papered over with hollow rhetoric about “unity,” “commonality” and shared national vision, which will be the subject of a hearing in the House Constitution Subcommittee today. (Here’s the ACLU’s statement, which focuses mainly on the civil rights and immigration issues in the bill; I’m just covering the First Amendment in this post.)

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08/01/2012
Freedom of Expression

Constitution Doesn’t Need Purple Heart After Narrower Stolen Valor Bill Approved

By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 6:46pm

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a revamped version of the so-called Stolen Valor Act. The revamp responded to a Supreme Court decision that declared an earlier version of the legislation—which made it a crime to falsely claim to have a military medal—unconstitutional. Sponsors of that bill failed to learn the lesson of that decision (which was written, not incidentally, by the radical leftist Justice Anthony Kennedy, and joined by card-carrying ACLU member, Chief Justice Roberts). If the original Stolen Valor Act were a seven on the scale of unconstitutionality, the revamped version in the House went to 11. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and the initial H.R. 1775 was replaced by a far preferable version introduced by Rep. Tim Griffin (R-AR).

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07/11/2012
Freedom of Expression

“Stolen Valor” Bill Honorable Sentiment, But Bad Idea

By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:29pm

“Lying was his habit.”

That’s the first line from Justice Kennedy’s plurality opinion in United States v. Alvarez, last month’s Supreme Court decision striking down the “Stolen Valor Act,” which made it a federal crime to lie about having been awarded a military decoration.  

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06/21/2012
Freedom of Expression

Do Androids Dream of Electric Speech?

By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:23am

Professor Tim Wu at Columbia had an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday arguing against First Amendment protections for “automated” speech. Here’s the argument distilled:

As a matter of legal logic, there is some similarity among Google, Ann Landers, Socrates and other providers of answers. But if you look more closely, the comparison falters. Socrates was a man who died for his views; computer programs are utilitarian instruments meant to serve us. Protecting a computer’s “speech” is only indirectly related to the purposes of the First Amendment, which is intended to protect actual humans against the evil of state censorship. The First Amendment has wandered far from its purposes when it is recruited to protect commercial automatons from regulatory scrutiny.

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06/14/2012
Freedom of Expression

Selective Leaks Worst of All Worlds for Free Speech

By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 1:21pm

As the election summer heats up, Republicans in Congress are making hay with what they claim are selective leaks by the Obama administration, designed to bolster the president’s national security cred. At a Senate Judiciary hearing yesterday, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) went so far as to call for Attorney General Holder’s resignation in part because of the leak issue. While the jury is decidedly out on the merits of these claims, these questions do need to be asked. If there is one thing more dangerous than over-classification of government information, it’s selective declassification for political gain.

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05/25/2012
Freedom of Expression

New Government “Propaganda” Bill a Positive Step for First Amendment

By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:58am
Throughout the country, many of us have rightly been long concerned about the danger of the government using taxpayer funds to covertly influence public opinion.  This issue came up again recently as part of this year’s defense authorization bill, which passed the House of Representatives on Friday.  Reps.
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05/18/2012
Photographers' Rights

DOJ Defends Your Right to Record

By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:24pm

We haven’t pulled punches in our criticism of the Holder Justice Department, so it’s especially important that we give credit where credit is due. In support of an important case brought by the ACLU of Maryland defending the right to record, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division forcefully and unequivocally endorsed our view in an unusual (but welcome!) 11-page letter to the Baltimore Police Department.

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05/17/2012
Internet Free Expression

Buddhists, “True Threats” and Twitter

By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:55pm

One of the very few pleasant things about being an attorney is that even some of the most boring cases have wacky backstories. This post is about one of the wackiest--though the issues raised illustrate certain constitutional concerns with a very short section in the very long Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act, which just passed the House yesterday over ACLU opposition.

In February of last year, a federal judge in Maryland issued a criminal complaint against one William Lawrence Cassidy. Mr. Cassidy, it seems, had allegedly infiltrated a Maryland area Buddhist community by claiming to be a “tulku,” a high-ranking Buddhist religious figure who, unlike lay Buddhists and the lesser-ranked “lamas,” gets to choose the form of his reincarnation. Through this alleged ruse, Mr. Cassidy attempted to gain the trust of Jetsunna Ahkon Lhamo (born Alyce Louise Zeoli), the first Western woman to legitimately be enthroned as a tulku.

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05/14/2012
H.R. 347

Protesting NATO: What to Know About the Secret Service and H.R. 347

By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:58pm

Know before you go: what the newly passed H.R. 347 means for NATO protestors' rights.

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05/03/2012
Photographers' Rights

Police and Photography: Can’t Stop the Signal

By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:05pm

There’s been an uptick in protest activity this month around the country–May Day saw a resurgence in the Occupy movement, and further protests are expected around the NATO summit in Chicago, set for May 20th. It’s a safe bet that the vast majority of protesters, police and bystanders are going to have mobile phones (market penetration of the devices in the United States in 2011 was literally more than 100%, meaning lots of folks have more than one, which is so American). It’s also a safe bet that most of those phones will have cameras. Some of those cameras will even be able to take broadcast-quality video.

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