The Intimate Privacy Protection Act, introduced by Rep. Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, would make it illegal to distribute a private, visual depiction of a persons intimate parts or of a person engaging in sexually explicit conduct, without that persons consent.
Nicknamed the Gawker Bill, it would also provide criminal consequences for third parties who sought to profit from such material, Thiel wrote. Except its not really nicknamed the Gawker Bill, according to Speiers office.
That is 100 percent not a thing, her chief of staff, Josh Connolly, told me. And its really self-serving, I think, on his part, to try to conflate our bill with their very specific case that has all sorts of loaded issues associated with it.
The bills intent was to provide a level of protection for individualswith non-famous, non-wealthy people in mind, he told me. A typical example might be a woman whose ex-boyfriend uploads to the Internet nude photos of her, without her consent. This [legislation] was in no way crafted in response to, or to address the Gawker case, Connolly said.
Speier said in a statment provided by her office that the bill is meant to address a range of privacy violations that have had devastating impacts on the lives and livelihoods of countless victims, from residents in assisted living centers to patients seeking confidential medical care to individuals involved in bitter breakups.
It is not the Gawker bill, she added.
In an age where anyone can be a publisher, government regulation of what might be deemed news is thorny, and yet, Speier specifically intended to grant the press an exemption. The law would not apply to cases in which disclosing such imagery is in the bona fide public interest, according to the language of the bill. Our congressional intent is that it really should carve out [an exception] for any sort of legitimate conduct by the press, Connolly said.
Legitimacy, of course, is a standard that is sometimes decided by the courts. Thats what happened to Gawker, and the outcome of that case may be the start of what Lemann calls a protracted war against journalists at a time when the press is far more vulnerable, economically and culturally, than it used to be.
Thiel, apparently without irony, claims that he wages this battle for the good of the press. (His tactics, a former lawyer for The Wall Street Journal wrote in June, in fact resemble nothing so much as the legal maneuvers white racists used to threaten the Northern press with ruin if it continued to cover the violent official response to efforts to desegregate the South in the 1950s and 60s.)
The press is too important to let its role be undermined by those who would search for clicks at the cost of the professions reputation, Thiel wrote for the Times this week. What he seems not to understand is that freedom of the press means that editorial decisions are made in newsrooms, not by venture capitalists or presidential candidates hellbent on revenge. Thiel could have fought speech with speech, instead of with $10 million, Marcus Wohlsen wrote for Wired in June. In seeking to destroy Gawker, Thiel showed that what matters to him isnt freedom but the raw exercise of power.
And in writing for the Times this week, Thiel showed that hes not as concerned with protecting privacy as he is with serving up a narrative that he believes justifies his actions.
