Expressing sympathy for her plight, a federal judge nevertheless turned down a request by the National Rifle Association to keep the identity of a 19-year-old Alachua County woman secret in a challenge to a state law that raised from 18 to 21 the minimum age to purchase rifles and other long guns. Lawyers for the NRA late last month asked U.S. District Judge Mark Walker to keep the identity of “Jane Doe” secret, based in large part on a declaration filed by the gun-rights group’s Florida lobbyist Marion Hammer, who detailed threatening emails she had received featuring derogatory words for parts of the female anatomy. “If it were entirely up to this court, this court would not hesitate to grant the NRA’s motion. One need only look to the harassment suffered by some of the Parkland shooting survivors to appreciate the vitriol that has infected public discourse about the Second Amendment. And this court has no doubt that the harassment goes both ways; Ms. Hammer’s affidavit proves just that,” wrote Walker. But based on precedent, “this court finds that mere evidence of threats and harassment made online is insufficient to outweigh the customary and constitutionally-embedded presumption of openness in judicial proceedings,” Walker wrote. “This is especially true where the targets of such threats and harassment are not minors and where the subject at issue does not involve matters of utmost intimacy.”
Tampa Bay Times
The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point was among the victims of a computer hacker who was arrested in California on Thursday. According to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Billy Ribeiro Anderson 41, of Torrance, Cal., used special computer skills and knowledge to hack important U.S. military and government Web sites and more than 11,000 other Web sites around the world. The New York City Comptroller’s Office also was among the victims.
Governing
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“Mere evidence of threats and harassment made online is insufficient to outweigh the customary and constitutionally-embedded presumption of openness in judicial proceedings.”
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