According to evidence presented in court, actress Amber Heard lied within the first moment she stepped onto the witness stand last week, saying: “I am here because my ex-husband is suing me for an op-ed I wrote.”
The Washington Post op-ed at the heart of the defamation lawsuit from actor Johnny Depp carried the byline, “By Amber Heard,” and Heard should be held responsible for putting her name on its contents, but the op-ed was anything but written by Heard.
In fact, in a disturbing breach of journalistic and nonprofit ethics, testimony in the tragic trial of Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard reveals Depp should put two other defendants on trial: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Washington Post. The two organizations raise millions of dollars on brand reputations that hinge on values of transparency, honesty, and ethics that they violated in writing and publishing the allegedly defamatory op-ed.
In a carefully orchestrated operation, extensive documentation of which I’ve detailed on Substack, we now know from testimony and email evidence that the communications, “development,” “artist engagement,” and legal teams of the ACLU crafted, wrote, lawyered, and placed the salacious 765-word Washington Post “op-ed” that implied Depp was a wife-beater with a 26-word assertion: “two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out.”
“The ACLU was a co-conspirator with Ms. Heard,” Depp’s attorney, Ben Chew, said during his arguments on Tuesday. “Of course, Mr. Depp chose not to sue them,” responded Heard’s lawyer, Benjamin Rottenborn. Heard’s and Depp’s PR firms didn’t comment further. The ACLU and Washington Post didn’t return several requests for comment. (Read more from “How the Washington Post and ACLU Helped Amber Heard Attack Johnny Depp” HERE)
Delete Facebook, Delete Twitter, Follow Restoring Liberty and Joe Miller at gab HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/2018-10-22T170053Z_2_LYNXNPEE9L1H1_RTROPTP_4_PEOPLE-AMBERHEARD-1024x683-1.jpeg6831024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2022-05-10 21:07:422022-05-10 14:10:35How The Washington Post And ACLU Helped Amber Heard Attack Johnny Depp
. . .In a 31-page filing submitted Tuesday with the United States Supreme Court, attorneys for the ACLU continue their advocacy on behalf of Donald Zarda, a man who claims that he was fired by Altitude Express, Inc. because of his attraction to other men and for failing to conform to the “straight male macho stereotype.”
Ray Maynard, the owner of Altitude, and the Trump Administration’s attorneys arguing on Maynard’s behalf don’t dispute Zarda’s claim. Rather, they both claim it’s well within Maynard’s rights under federal law to discriminate against sexual orientation in the workplace. . .
In a recent filing, the Trump Administration acknowledged that an employer who “fires a man for being attracted to men and [who] would not fire other employees for their sexual orientation violates Title VII.” The solution here? Discriminate against lesbians, too. . .
Such a staffing decision, the Trump Administration argues, would be allowable because said policy would discriminate against men and women equally. This doubly discriminatory policy would also be legally sound because, they claim, the real discrimination present in such a policy is actually sourced from sexual orientation discrimination–and is not pure or genuine sex discrimination.
“Altitude and the Government argue that when an employer engages in wholesale ‘sexual-orientation discrimination,’ the ‘[u]nfavorable treatment of a gay or lesbian employee’ is ‘not the consequence of that individual’s sex, but instead of an employer’s policy concerning a different trait—sexual orientation—that Title VII does not protect,’” the ACLU filing notes. (Read more from “Trump Admin: Businesses Can Fire Men for Being Gay If They Fire Women for Being Lesbian, Too. ACLU: No.” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/gay-love-with-heart-1.jpg553615Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2019-09-11 21:52:182019-09-11 21:49:32Trump Admin: Businesses Can Fire Men for Being Gay If They Fire Women for Being Lesbian, Too. ACLU: No.
The Supreme Court announced their decision Thursday on whether to hear an appeal to a ban on public prayer before official meetings in the county of Rowan in North Carolina.
In one of the last decisions by the court before it adjourned for the summer, they refused to hear an appeal to a lower court ruling upholding the ban on prayer before meetings of the Rowan Country Board of Commissioners.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) celebrated the decision from their social media account as a victory against what they considered an unconstitutional establishment of religion.
“The Supreme Court denied a request to hear Lund v. Rowan County, our challenge to a troubling government prayer practice that pressured the public to join in prayers that overwhelmingly advanced beliefs specific to one faith,” they tweeted. . .
BREAKING: The Supreme Court denied a request to hear Lund v. Rowan County, our challenge to a troubling government prayer practice that pressured the public to join in prayers that overwhelmingly advanced beliefs specific to one faith. Our victory in the lower court stands! pic.twitter.com/26cMV368lu
The ACLU represented three Rowan County residents and filed the suit against the county over the public prayer. The county superintendents would pray on a rotating basis, or observe a moment of silence, but the ACLU argued that this was unconstitutional because the prayers overwhelmingly represented the Christian faith. (Read more from “ACLU Gets Prayer Banned From a County’s Meetings – Here’s What the Supreme Court Just Said” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/bible-998150_960_720-2-1.jpg720960Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2018-06-28 19:39:212018-06-28 19:39:21ACLU Gets Prayer Banned From a County’s Meetings – Here’s What the Supreme Court Just Said
A battle will soon be held in Oklahoma over a statue of Satan that a group wants to erect near the monument of the Ten Commandments on the Statehouse lawn in Oklahoma City. A group called the Satanic Temple, backed by the ACLU, is insisting that its nearly-completed statue should stand near the monument, while a spokesman for the governor bluntly said that setting up the Satanic statue on the grounds will never happen.
According to Lucien Graves, spokesman for the Satanic Temple, the sculptor working in New York has not been identified, but has been commissioned by the Satanic Temple, which has raised more than $20,000 for the project. Greaves boasted, “We’re really coming along fast.”
The bronze statue will represent the Baphomet, or Sabbatic Goat, which has been commonly thought to represent Satan for hundreds of years. To make matters more disturbing, the statue has a smiling child on each knee.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on Monday, seeking to force the U.S. government to disclose details of its foreign electronic surveillance program and what protections it provides to Americans whose communications are swept up.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, came three days after the ACLU lost a bid to block a separate program that collects the phone calls of millions of Americans.
The latest lawsuit seeks information related to the use of Executive Order 12333, which was signed in 1981 and governs surveillance of foreign targets.
Under the order, the National Security Administration is collecting “vast quantities” of data globally under the order’s authority, “inevitably” including communications of U.S. citizens, the lawsuit said.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2014-01-01 03:13:562014-01-01 03:13:56ACLU Sues for Details of U.S. Surveillance Under Executive Order
The National Rifle Association joined the American Civil Liberties Union’s lawsuit on Wednesday to end the government’s massive phone record collection program.
In a brief filed in federal court, the NRA argues that the National Security Agency’s database of phone records amounts to a “national gun registry.”
“It would be absurd to think that the Congress would adopt and maintain a web of statutes intended to protect against the creation of a national gun registry, while simultaneously authorizing the FBI and the NSA to gather records that could effectively create just such a registry,” the group writes.
After leaks by Edward Snowden, the NSA acknowledged that it collects records on virtually all U.S. phone calls. The data include phone numbers, call times and call durations, but not the contents of the conversations. The NSA says it only “queries” the database a limited number of times for specific national security reasons.
The NSA argues that Congress authorized the phone data surveillance with Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows for the collection of business records “relevant” to terrorism.
Photo Credit: WNDThe ACLU has threatened to sue Kentucky’s 174 school districts if they refuse to ban the distribution of Gideon Bibles, but the warning lacks teeth, according to the Alliance Defending Freedom, which contends it is based on outdated law.
“Most of the decisions cited in the ACLU’s letter are no longer good law as they were issued before the Supreme Court decided Good News Club in 2001,” ADF told school officials in a letter sent to correct an ACLU missive.
ADF jumped into action when it became aware of the threat from the ACLU.
“Public schools should encourage, not shut down, the free exchange of ideas,” said ADF Litigation Staff Counsel Rory Gray. “That’s why the schools frequently allow a wide array of groups to distribute literature of various sorts to students. Singling out the Gideons while allowing other groups to distribute literature would be clearly unconstitutional.”
The issue arose when the ACLU dispatched a letter to every school superintendent in the state, threatening lawsuits if they would not submit to ACLU demands and ban distribution of Bibles by members of the Gideons organization.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00kathleenhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngkathleen2013-07-20 22:48:552016-04-11 11:18:47ACLU Relying on Bad Law to Try to Ban Gideon Bibles from Distribution
Photo Credit: CNNBy Michael Martinez. Police around the United States are recording the license plates of passing drivers and storing the information for years with little privacy protection, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday.
The information potentially allows authorities to track the movements of everyone who drives a car.
The ACLU documented the police surveillance after reviewing 26,000 pages of material gathered through public records requests to almost 600 local and state police departments in 38 states and the District of Columbia.
Police are gathering the vehicle information with surveillance technology called automatic license plate readers, and it’s being stored — sometimes indefinitely — with few or no privacy protections, the ACLU said.
“The documents paint a startling picture of a technology deployed with too few rules that is becoming a tool for mass routine location tracking and surveillance,” the ACLU said in a written statement.
Photo Credit: APHow the government is keeping track of EVERYWHERE you’re driving thanks to license plates and police scanners
By James Nye. Chances are, your local or state police departments have photographs of your car in their files, noting where you were driving on a particular day, even if you never did anything wrong.
Using automated scanners, law enforcement agencies across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movement of every vehicle with a license plate, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Affixed to police cars, bridges or buildings, the scanners capture images of passing or parked vehicles and note their location, uploading that information into police databases. Departments keep the records for weeks or years, sometimes indefinitely.
As the technology becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and federal grants focus on aiding local terrorist detection, even small police agencies are able to deploy more sophisticated surveillance systems.
While the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that a judge’s approval is needed to track a car with GPS, networks of plate scanners allow police effectively to track a driver’s location, sometimes several times every day, with few legal restrictions. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Robert Landau/CorbisAlarming number of databases across US are storing details of Americans’ locations – not just government agencies
By Ed Pilkington. Millions of Americans are having their movements tracked through automated scanning of their car license plates, with the records held often indefinitely in vast government and private databases.
A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union has found an alarming proliferation of databases across the US storing details of Americans’ locations. The technology is not confined to government agencies – private companies are also getting in on the act, with one firm National Vehicle Location Service holding more than 800m records of scanned license plates.
“License plate readers are the most pervasive method of location tracking that nobody has heard of,” said Catherine Crump, ACLU lawyer and lead author of the report. “They collect data on millions of Americans, the overwhelming number of whom are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.”
Crump said that the creeping growth of license plate scanners echoed the debate over the National Security Agency. “It raises the same question as the NSA controversy: do we want to live in a world where the government makes a record of everything we do – because that’s what’s being created by the growth of databases linked to license plate readers.”
ACLU based their research on the results of freedom of information requests to 300 police departments and other agencies nationwide that generated 26,000 pages of documents. The mountain of training materials, internal memos and policy statements retrieved by the group has opened a door on a previously little understood world. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Reuters ACLU: We’re Increasingly Living in a Dragnet Society
“There’s just a fundamental question of whether we’re going to live in a society where these dragnet surveillance systems become routine,” said Catherine Crump, a staff attorney with the ACLU, which wants police departments to immediately delete records of cars not linked to a crime…
The ACLU study, based on 26,000 pages of responses from 293 police departments and state agencies across the country, also found that license plate scanners produced a small fraction of “hits,” or alerts to police that a suspicious vehicle has been found.
In Maryland, for example, the state reported reading about 29 million plates between January and May of last year. Of that amount, about 60,000 — or roughly 1 in every 500 license plates — were suspicious. The No. 1 crime? A suspended or revoked registration, or a violation of the state’s emissions inspection program accounted for 97 percent of all alerts. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-18 03:05:242016-04-11 11:18:58Moving Closer to Police State: Agencies Tracking Innocent Drivers by License Plate Scanners Everywhere (+video)
Photo Credit: APThe battle over gay marriage forges on. Civil rights lawyers said they filed the first known legal challenge Tuesday on behalf of 23 men, women and children seeking to overturn a state law effectively banning same-sex marriage in Pennsylvania, the only northeastern state that doesn’t allow it or civil unions.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Harrisburg, also will ask a federal judge to prevent state officials from stopping gay couples from getting married. It names Gov. Tom Corbett, Attorney General Kathleen Kane and three other officials. The plaintiffs are one widow, 10 couples and one of the couples’ two teenage daughters, and they include four couples who were legally married in other states but whose marriages go unrecognized by the state of Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania would become the 14th state to legalize gay marriage if the lawsuit is successful. It also would force the state to recognize the legal marriages of all same-sex couples in other jurisdictions.
The plaintiffs, some of whom spoke during a news conference in the state Capitol after the lawsuit was filed, said their willingness to join was driven partly by a desire to have the same legal and financial protections afforded to opposite-sex couples, but mostly by the emotional satisfaction of seeking social justice.
“Everyone in our world recognizes us as a true family,” said Deb Whitewood, 45, who lives in the Pittsburgh suburb of Bridgeville with her partner of 22 years, Susan Whitewood, and their three children. “We feel that it’s time that the commonwealth of Pennsylvania did, too.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00kathleenhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngkathleen2013-07-10 01:07:492016-04-11 11:19:40The Next Gay Marriage Battle? ACLU Files First-Known Lawsuit Over State Bans on Same-Sex unions
Photo Credit: APWhile Attorney General Eric Holder is taking heat for his department’s seizure of reporter records, the U.S. attorney who is personally overseeing those investigations is himself starting to face complaints that he’s gone too far in pursuing leaks.
Ronald Machen Jr., the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, was nominated by President Obama in 2009 and now runs the biggest federal prosecutor office in the country. His hundreds of attorneys handle everything from gang violence to corruption.
But in recent years, leak investigations have become a hallmark of his portfolio. And his dogged pursuit of the squeaky wheels in government has led him into the tenuous — and some say unprecedented — territory of lumping in leakers with journalists.
“What’s astonishing here is that never before has the government argued that newsgathering — in this case, asking a source to provide sensitive information — is itself illegal,” Gabe Rottman, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, told FoxNews.com.
Machen was an early and frequent campaign donor to Obama during the 2008 election, giving close to the maximum amount allowed by law. He gave $2,300 in the general election and nearly as much during the primary.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-05-25 04:00:452016-04-11 11:20:26ACLU: ‘Never Before has the Government Argued that Newsgathering is Illegal’
A battle will soon be held in Oklahoma over a statue of Satan that a group wants to erect near the monument of the Ten Commandments on the Statehouse lawn in Oklahoma City. A group called the Satanic Temple, backed by the ACLU, is insisting that its nearly-completed statue should stand near the monument, while a spokesman for the governor bluntly said that setting up the Satanic statue on the grounds will never happen.
