According to third-year Washington University law student Sophie Alcorn, the government has infringed upon citizens’ constitutional rights in the war on terrorism.
Alcorn co-authored an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) document, published last month, entitled “Reclaiming our Rights: Declaration of First Amendment Rights and Grievances.”
The paper was a part of a larger symposium entitled “Left Out in the Cold: The Chilling of Speech, Association, and the Press in Post-9/11 American.”
“It was shocking to write about because I was constantly surprised by how many things had come up in the past couple years,” said Alcorn, a 2005 Stanford graduate. “I had no idea that so many specific instances of individuals being silenced had happened.”
ACLU policy documents are scholarly reports written by staff members that explain the current state of a particular issue that the ACLU is working on. Alcorn and her boss, Jim Tucker of the ACLU, published this report in conjunction with the symposium.
Alcorn’s report begins with a list of grievances and continues with an analysis of each point.
“We wanted to use this as a model to proclaim all the ways in which the government is usurping and overriding the rights afforded to us by the First Amendment,” said Alcorn. “I researched all the supporting information for each of these assertions and their sub-points. There’s a lot of documentation.”
Alcorn said the theory behind the report is that free political speech granted by the First Amendment is vital since it allows for self-governance.
“At the point where the government prevents the public from getting adequate information, people no longer have control over the government,” she said.
Alcorn cited wire-tapping, opening mail and gathering phone records from private companies as examples of the government’s invasion of privacy and violating the right to free speech.
“The more we violate our own principles, the more we legitimize the actions and beliefs of terrorist groups,” she said. “The more we step away from those principles, the more we become the thing that others think we are. We reinforce their animosity toward us.”
Alcorn started at Stanford right after the 9/11 attacks and felt that the attacks framed her life through college.
She became interested in national human rights and then grew more into civil rights and liberties while working toward her degree in international relations.
She interned with the ACLU in Missouri where she fought the “local battles”-religious issues, abortion, protests and similar cases. That inspired her to work at the ACLU last summer in Washington, D.C. on the national level.
At Washington University before starting the report, Alcorn took a class with First Amendment professor Neil Richards, whom she said guided her research. Richards even wrote a blog article about it.
“I’m proud to be able to note that one of my First Amendment students, Wash. U. [law student] Sophie Alcorn, was one of the two principal authors of the report,” wrote Richards in the blog. “These are serious and wide-ranging allegations, and I have not studied all of them in detail.This is a very important document that is worth reading even if one disagrees with its allegations or conclusions.”
In addition to working on the First Amendment report, Alcorn also focused on reporters’ shield legislation.
“It would create a stature that would protect reporters from having to reveal names of confidential sources with exceptions for national security,” she said. “Right now there’s no protection for reporters. The legislation on the table would at least give a minimal amount. Many states do have these laws but they are undermined at the federal level.”
A version of the Free Flow of Information Act of 2007 did recently pass, but not with all the protections that the ACLU would have liked.
To view the full policy document, visit http://www.aclu.org/symposium/reclaiming_our_rights.pdf.
To see Richards’ blog, visit http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2007/09/the_aclus_decla.html.