August 29, 2025| Knight First Amendment Institute
Aryeh Neier was the national director of the ACLU in 1977 when American Nazis demanded the right to march through Skokie, Illinois—a town with a large population of Holocaust survivors. Neier was himself a Holocaust survivor and found the Nazis’ ideology repugnant, but the ACLU nonetheless took on the group’s case and argued, successfully, that the First Amendment required that they be permitted to march. The intensely controversial case cost the ACLU thousands of members but became emb...| Knight First Amendment Institute
WASHINGTON—According to news reports, a $2 million contract between the U.S. branch of the Israeli spyware vendor Paragon Solutions and the cyber division of U.S. Homeland Security Investigations was quietly reenabled over the weekend. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a contract with the spyware maker last year, which had been under a stop work order pending review. The following can be attributed to Nadine Farid Johnson, policy director at the Knight First Amendment ...| Knight First Amendment Institute
This blog post is part of the Just Security series, “Legal Frameworks for Addressing Spyware Harms.” The proliferation of spyware poses a serious threat to civil rights and civil liberties with few avenues for accountability. Despite representative promises by industry entities that the technology is provided to governments for uses limited to “preventing and investigating serious crime, including terrorism,” the technology has been used to target journalists, human rights defender...| Knight First Amendment Institute
BOSTON—Below are highlights from today’s proceedings in the trial before Judge William G. Young in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in a case challenging the Trump administration’s policy of ideological deportation.| Knight First Amendment Institute
Cristian Farias: This is it, the final episode of this season of The Bully’s Pulpit, Trump versus the First Amendment. Over the last 12 episodes, we have run the gamut, that many, many ways the current president is challenging our understanding of the First Amendment, the winners, the losers, the fighters, the folders. We began the arc of this series with Rümeysa Öztürk, one of the faces of Trump’s campaign of terror against international students who believed the war in Gaza must end....| Knight First Amendment Institute
Cristian Farias: This is Cristian Farias. I’m a legal journalist and your host on the Bully’s Pulpit. This is our second to last episode of the season and true to form we’re going deep on a topic that has been troubling us for quite some time. Donald Trump’s attacks on lawyers and the legal profession and specifically, big law. At first blush, you may think, “What’s the big deal? Lawyers at big corporate law firms, after all, make a lot of money. They can sue and defend themselves...| Knight First Amendment Institute
BOSTON—The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University yesterday filed and today made public an almost-two-hundred-page brief describing evidence presented during trial in a case challenging the Trump administration’s policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizen faculty and students for their pro-Palestinian advocacy. The case was filed in the spring on behalf of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), AAUP’s Harvard, NYU, and Rutgers campus cha...| Knight First Amendment Institute
After months of negotiation, Columbia University announced on July 23 that it had reached an agreement with the Trump administration to resolve investigations into alleged violations of federal anti-discrimination laws. The settlement provides that Columbia will pay fines of $221m over three years, and that in consideration for these payments and other concessions—including concessions made by Columbia as a precondition to the negotiations1. After it canceled $400m in grants to Columbia in...| Knight First Amendment Institute
Cristian Farias: Did you know that colleges and universities have First Amendment rights? This is Cristian Farias, and on this week’s episode of The Bully’s Pulpit, we’re taking a hard look at how Donald Trump’s campaign of extortion against colleges and universities, which he’s threatened to defund, is incompatible with freedom of speech and academic freedom. All the chaos we’re seeing with Trump’s supposed concern for anti-Semitism, the mass cancellations of student visas, the...| Knight First Amendment Institute
Introduction Could existing democratic institutions and processes be improved by AI? A burgeoning body of scholarship asks how AI-driven machine learning can improve—or even replace— democratic institutions that aggregate opinions and beliefs (Ovadya 2023, Jungherr 2023). This literature makes strong, but often unstated assumptions about how democracy works, and where it can go wrong, creating a tacit paradigm that guides scholars to focus on some questions, problems, and hypotheses at th...| Knight First Amendment Institute
Abstract The strength of democracy lies in the free and equal exchange of diverse viewpoints. Living up to this ideal at scale faces inherent tensions: broad participation, meaningful deliberation, and political equality often trade off with one another (Fishkin, 2011). We ask whether and how artificial intelligence (AI) could help navigate this “trilemma” by engaging with a recent example of a large language model (LLM)-based system designed to help people with diverse viewpoints find co...| Knight First Amendment Institute
Abstract Autonomy is a double-edged sword for AI agents, simultaneously unlocking transformative possibilities and serious risks. How can agent developers calibrate the appropriate levels of autonomy at which their agents should operate? We argue that an agent’s level of autonomy can be treated as a deliberate design decision, separate from its capability and operational environment. In this work, we define five levels of escalating agent autonomy, characterized by the roles a user can take...| Knight First Amendment Institute
Cristian Farias: Hi there, Cristian Farias here with the Bully’s Pulpit. It’s been a rough week for the First Amendment. The lawlessness, the attacks from the free press. Another moves by Donald Trump and its administration continue to strain people and institutions committed to free expression and the health of our democracy. And one agency that’s key to our society’s slow descent into autocracy is immigration and customs enforcement, ICE. This entity who just got a huge boost from C...| Knight First Amendment Institute
On March 25, 2025, the Knight Institute filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizen students and faculty who participate in pro-Palestinian activism. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), AAUP’s Harvard, NYU, and Rutgers campus chapters, and the Middle East Studies Association, argues that the policy chills noncitizens from speaking and, by extension, robs these organiza...| Knight First Amendment Institute
WASHINGTON—The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals today denied The Associated Press's request that the entire court review a June 6, 2025 ruling from a three-judge panel that partially stayed a district court injunction effectively allowing the White House to continue excluding AP reporters from the Oval Office and other restricted spaces based on the news organization's refusal to use "Gulf of America" instead of "Gulf of Mexico" in its reporting. The following can be attributed to Katie Fallow...| Knight First Amendment Institute
BOSTON—Lawyers for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) are set to deliver closing arguments this morning in a case challenging the Trump administration’s policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizen faculty and students for their pro-Palestinian advocacy. The arguments follow a two-week trial overseen by Judge William G. Young in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. This was the first maj...| Knight First Amendment Institute
After two weeks of trial before Judge William G. Young in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the case challenging the Trump administration’s policy of ideological deportation is drawing to a close. This was the first major trial of President Trump’s second term. Over eight days of witness testimony, it uncovered a wealth of new detail about the ideological-deportation policy and its effects on campuses across the country. Government officials traced the implementat...| Knight First Amendment Institute
Cristian Farias: Welcome to The Bully’s Pulpit: Trump vs. The First Amendment. I’m your host, Christian Farias. Freedom of the press is under attack like never before, and the journalists and news organizations that are helping to make sense of the chaos of the second Trump presidency are on the front lines. Their fight isn’t just to keep everyone informed while making sense of the fire hose of information and misinformation coming from the White House. But under this administration, th...| Knight First Amendment Institute
BOSTON—Below are highlights from today’s proceedings in the trial before Judge William G. Young in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in a case challenging the Trump administration’s policy of ideological deportation. John Armstrong, the most senior official at the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, testified that he either gave final approval or passed to Secretary Rubio the “action memos” approving Rümeysa Öztürk’s visa revocation and Mahm...| Knight First Amendment Institute
WASHINGTON—Congress passed a measure late last night cutting over $1 billion in federal support for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting (CPB). The measure rescinds nearly $1.1 billion previously allocated by Congress to the CPB, which distributes funds to National Public Radio (NPR), PBS, and local public stations. In May, NPR and local public radio organizations filed a lawsuit in federal court over President Trump’s executive order that aims to end federal funding for NPR and PBS, sa...| Knight First Amendment Institute
We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity. 1. Nick Bostrom. 2012. The superint...| Knight First Amendment Institute