In washington, d. C. My name is tranfive, caters senior digital outreach manager and you at cato digital and ongoing series on the intersection of tech, social media and the ideas of liberty. Tonight we will be talking about ongoing attacks on freedom of speech and freedom of press and what we can do to combat those attacks. Our hashtag tonight is cato digital, and in the spirit of Free Exchange and freedom of expression, i encourage you all to use it liberally on twitter and insta graham to show your thoughts, reflections, favorite quotes from the panel tonight. Those of you who are watching on cspan or one of our online channels can also use it to tweet in questions which i will be looking for on my phone throughout the panel. The freedom of speech and freedom of press are at the core of a free society. Unfortunately we are increasingly discovering that far too many people might say they support them but when in actuality they dont support the policy that safeguard any of the above. On the campaign trail we saw both from Hillary Clinton and donald trump calls to close sections over the internet in order to combat isys, and support for bans on flag burning, a constitutionally protected right. Last week even donald trump double down on his dislike of flag burners with an incendiary tweet hauling for all americans would burn the flag to lose their citizenship. Hes also called tougher libel laws that will crack down on Media Companies that publish embarrassing or unflattering information about individuals, and has said that the freedom of press gets in the way of the war on terror. Meanwhile, on the campaign trail we saw students calling the police to report hate speech because of seeing trump 2016 written in chalk on their campuses. We saw employees a facebook petitioning mark zetterberg to band donald trump and all of his posts from the platform the Trump Campaign alleged that twitter has lost much of its advertising platform because of ideological reasons. Post 2016 election, pendants on both the left and the right blame social media for the increasing polarization of the voting public and both google and facebook have announced initiative to crack down on despite controversy over what that fake news actually is. Our guests tonight are two stalwarts in the fight for free speech and the freedom of press and we are lucky to have them here tonight. Flemming rose is the 2016 winner of the Milton Friedman award for advancing liberty, also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and he is the author of the tierney of silence, the first of his three books that is now out in paperback. Those of you who are here in the audience who get an opportunity to get a copy site after the presentation. Most of you probably know nick gillespie, editorinchief of reason. Com and reason tv. You can find in online on twitter here. About 330 a. M. If if youre looking for something to do. The best time. I want to get those trump tweets out there, we tweet immediately. Flemming, your life changed on september 19, 2005. Can you tell us why . September 19, 2005, was a day the socalled cartoons of the prophet mohammed were published by the newspaper i worked at back then. Nothing happened right away but that is a publication i just received one phone call from a newspaper when, within at the mosque and complained and said he would not sell the newspaper anymore. But as a newspaper you get those calls every now and then. It took a while until i understood that this may change my life. Right. And why did you publish those cartoons . The cartoons didnt come out as blue. There published as part of a debate about citizenship and violence regarding islam and bin laden in europe. There were several cases pointing to the issue of citizens censorship and intimidation. There were other cases, so there was this debate, is are still censorship or not . If there is selfcensorship is a based in actual fact or just in the imagination of those who sense of themselves. To find out we invited, i invited the cartoonists to troll the profit as they seem. From 25 active members of the association of the danish some of those people did express they would want to publish anonymously or yes. One of the reasons why we published was that it was always part of the Childrens Book about the life of the prophet mohammed. The instore the illustrator insisted on anonymity. You do not want to appear under your own name out of fear for the consequences. Its the case mohammed, a a dominant train of thought in islam is that you should not figure the profit in sunni islam but i did know that at the time. But, in fact, if you ask, there is a very famous american scholar of islamic art who unfortunately passed away a few days ago and he said afterwards that there is no basis in the text for the, the text of finding banning images of the prophet. Within she islam you have images of the prophet. But recently thats true, its been banned. But you have throughout islamic history you see in copenhagen where you have, in fact, the 13th century image of the prophet. So its not true that, you know, its an eternal taboo within islam. But it is true the depictions is not quite common. If you go into a mosque compared to the church you will see no images in a mosque. A good reason to avoid both, right . Keep your weekends free. That was a violent reaction after these cartoons came out. Multiple embassies around the world were set on fire. I think over 139 people were killed in protests. Probably more. Right, yes. Do you regret publishing the cartoons . No, i dont regret publishing these cartoons. They were in line with my fundamental approach to journalism, and its, you know, if you hear about a story, if you hear about an issue you want to find out if its true or not, right . Thats what you do as a journalist. We just chose an untraditional way. Instead of just asking people, we invited people working with images as their medium to show in practice how they view this issue. But, of course, i dont believe that a cartoon is worth a single human life. The challenge for any editor and journalist is what do you do when there are people out there who believe that its okay to kill because of a cartoon . You yourself were put on alqaeda is hit list alongside salman rushdie, the now late editor of and your own newspaper, supporting you publicly, did give you a very restricted list of rules on how you are allowed to engage. Quite late in the game in 2011 after i published this book in denmark in 2010. It was in a situation of emergency, i would say. There were between five and 10 foiled attacks or plans to attack the newspaper. So it was a very unusual situation, and thats what i accepted this dictate in 2011. But a year later when i was told this will be an effective song as you are employed by this company i was not allowed to speak and write about religious issues. I was not allowed to speak and write about the cartoon crisis. I was not allowed to speak and write about the organization of islamic conference or islamic collaboration, international organization. I said i disagree strongly and i will take the consequences if im not able to live with this at some point. It was emblematic of the same showing a speech that it was a huge victory for the artists. Jihadists. I am not on speaking terms with colleagues and friends who i have known for 25 years. The top management at the newspaper, they tried to silence me and in the end i broke with them and i left the newspaper. We dont talk anymore. So i mean, friendships are ruined, fundamental journalistic principles were violated. And thats a huge victory for the jihadists, of the assassins veto. Nick, in 2015 he faced similar pressure to valley security over liberty. Tell us a little bit about that. Thank you for having me. Its a real honor and a privilege for me to be on the stage with somebody like flemming, and i hope you all appreciate both what he said when he said no cartoon is what the human life and somebody who reads editorial cartoons almost everyday almost every day and even publishes them on a weekly basis i agree with him completely. And also the principles for which he really made a bold statement, is really just fantastic and i would like to give them a round of applause for standing up for that. [applause] as kat was saying as a bedrock principle of a free society, of an open society, of a truly liberal society, free speech, Free Expression, i think, i think we assume as well, these are all intertwined at there at the core. I say that as a bit of a preface to say like i feel bad to be on the same stage as somebody who is like, well, i in the in the name of a foundational civilizational value, i published a bunch of cartoons and then in saying jihadists who pervert the very religion that purport to represent tried to kill me and kill hundreds of people around the globe and cause all kinds of mayhem, my contribution to free speech is much, much smaller. It may be more common for more of you but essentially last year if all of you know or have heard of the silk road website which was a dark web where people could buy and sell anything they wanted basically using that going. They were anonymous users. It was used to traffic in a lot of drugs. The person who was ultimately convicted founding and running the site, he went on a long trial. He essentially got a life sentence which he is appealing out from a judge in new york. With no chance of parole. That is right. Hes going to be locked up for the rest of his life, almost certainly. He is appealing it. But when the judge handed down her sentence, in the Southern District of the federal court of new york, she spent a long time haranguing him about his libertarian beliefs and who did he think he was the people should be able to come and freely trade whatever they wanted any consensual nature . What kind of bastard are you . Exaggerating a little bit. So i wrote up a post at reason. Com about the outcome of the colleges think was wrong, and also that the judge went off on a tangibly like she wasnt talking about the law. She was mad that this guy would have done this. And then in response to that a couple of her comments, we havent unmoderated section at commons, its increasingly rare to have comments on website but a couple of them made literally, six people make comments that were making fun of the judge. A couple made jokes that were threats based on fargo, the movie fargo. Theres a scene where a guy gets fed into a wood chipper. They made a couple of references of that. Like when the revolution comes and they round up the judges they should put them one behind another so you say bullets, rings like this. We got him a week or so after that we got a subpoena asking for all of the information that we had on our commenters, which is not all that much because we dont actually, we as people if they want to comment, i need to supply a valid email address and theres a variety of other information they may or may not give. Because the federal prosecutor was, had standing grand jury that was related to this trial and they said these were threats against the life of a federal judge, a very serious charge and wanted that, and we were faced with the question whether not we would go public with it subpoena or not. Do we tell the people or do we just comply with the subpoena . We ended up doing based on Legal Counsel will let the people who were the subject of the subpoena, the six commenters we got in touch with them and told them about it and we wanted to find out if theyre going to try to quash the subpoena subpoena,s ridiculous on its face. Then we got a gag order the day after because our lawyer said to the federal prosecutor who had gotten in touch with us, well, we told the people, you know, who were named in the subpoena about this and we are waiting to see if theyre going to quash it. They should you cant do that, you are under a gag order which means you cant even say to people if they ask you, are you under a gag order, you just got to be like, you know. You are not allowed to say anything. The federal prosecutor messed up. Then they issued a gag order ad then we were stuck. One of the commenters late the subpoena to ken white who is a criminal defense attorney in california, runs a great legal blog, and you wrote a story about this and then he called me up for a comet to ask whether or not we were, in fact, under a gag order. I was like i really have no comment which is effectively the same thing when you are under a gag order. So that was a Chilling Effect on our speech peer we ended up protesting. We spent thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in man hours dealing with this. In a way its interesting, you called it the assassins vito and it is certainly that. We had a Chilling Effect from the federal government essentially saying he have a right to free speech but we are going to make you kind of work for it and pay for it, and away plus the Chilling Effect on the commenters. The happy ending industry was because what ken white great coverage in this fantastic piece of article, look it up on the blog, we generated a huge amount of media sympathy from different groups. Because it turns out the federal government has tens of thousands of requests. There is no way of really kind of cataloging and calculating how many they ask for information from places like youtube, from places like facebook, twitter, you name it. Tens of thousands, of the press organizations for information on readers and commenters. Oftentimes with a gag order so nobody really knows how many times this is happening and how often. And you in a unique position. You were are the right of the original piece of the commenters had commented on budget also the editor in chief of a very ideological libertarian publication. Do you think that you could have expected another media source to respond in the same way . Yeah, its a good question. The way that most media sources, and this goes to its a more subtle erosion of the ideal of free speech and a Free Expression and open and unfettered exchange of ideas. What most sites have done or most publications, many publications have done, theres two responses generally. One is that they will use a service like discus which is a commenting plugin for a variety of website concept Management Systems so that the comments are actually technically published by wholly Different Organization that the site they are on. And it gives you a certain amount of distance from that. Or you just get rid of comments altogether which is more and more common where people just dont have comments section anymore. The internet and the world wide web, which i guess it just called the web now, excuse me for being old, but in the early 90s one of the utopian dreams, and its delivered on a lot of this, not completely was while back, we could have real conversations, that it wasnt just waiting a couple weeks for the new times to publish 100 word letter from somebody bitching and moaning about something but you could have realtime discussion and a flourishing of the speech, the Public Square could be everywhere and always and always have more room for comments to something where things have really become shut down in many significant ways. Nick, you defended essentially the freedom of speech of people were making Death Threats although theres a lot of questions over how serious those were. Lending, you received Death Threats for supporting freedom of speech. So what is the difference . Should the people making those Death Threats against freedom of speech as well . I think if you look at the american situation and the First Amendment, Death Threats in order to be illegal needs to be followed by more or less immediate action. In europe its a bit more complicated. In europe people may be convicted for a speech like this but i am more in favor of the american approach, that there needs to be a clear and present danger. Even though you may not think its funny for the judge. Someone making fargo jokes is different from someone who is just murdered someone for saying something. Of course. You referenced the murder of Theo Van Gogh in the streets of amsterdam. Of the great historic he had a note stabbed into his body saying i had written of this era for the movie that he had directed for which he was killed. Thats an wildly different situation than what reason says where theres a concept of true threat were easy to say you are blowing off steam and you are saying i could kill this person, or i want to kill this person. Thats not a true threat because there isnt any proximity. There isnt any real followthrough, et cetera. One of the things that was hilarious in the federal prosecutor subpoena, and again this was to a grand jury. So we had no way of stopping just because grand juries are given vast latitude to just get whatever information they want. There are very few limits on that, which itself is a problem but it is somewhat separate from this speech issue. They were saying these people are making credible threats, real threats, two threats against the federal judge and can you get back to us with income Something Like 72 hours or a week, with information about them. They were so terrified that these people, these commenters were going to come and kill a federal judge that they give us the week to comply to get the information. Much of which was available in like inner profiles. One o of the people had a google plus page listed as the contact. So the federal government was so upset by this, but they didnt know where to turn so they asked us to get information in a week. Its just ridiculous. Thats a real distinction. If its a clear and present danger, if its a call to immediate source action, its one thing but otherwise otherwie on, speech is speech. On that note to get the elephant out of the room, is flagburning freespeech . I think so. Unless a person is wearing it and then its an assault. Do you think i dont know if there are any trumps aborted out there. The really novel thing about the trump comments on that wasnt simply flagburning because Hillary Clinton is against flagburning. All of these idiots, a large majority of people in congress i think are against flagburning. He actually said that you should not only go to jail but you should be stripped of your citizenship, which is truly kind of stunning. That is a particularly interesting kind of mean or idea that goes to a lot of trump talk. Some people are citizen, some peo