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President Donald Trump warned about the influence of violence in movies while discussing school safety and mass shootings, suggesting it could be a contributing factor to recent mass shootings.  "We have to look at the internet, because a lot of bad things are happening to young kids and young minds, and their minds are being formed, and we have to do something about maybe what they're seeing and how they're seeing it. And also video games," President Trump said. "I'm hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people's thoughts.

Could reporters really go to jail for publishing leaks? The answer is probably not. But we don’t really know with 100 percent certainty because the federal government has never tried to jail reporters under such circumstances before.

The wild card is a federal law called the Espionage Act of 1917. The federal law was created to prosecute spies, but it is so broadly worded that some fear it could be used against journalists. The law makes it a felony for an unauthorized person to receive or “communicate” “national defense” information to others with reason to believe that it could harm the United States or assist a foreign enemy. The punishment ranges from a $10,000 fine to imprisonment. The law has never been used against a journalist. Some legal experts argue that the law, if applied to journalists, is unconstitutional because it is vague, overbroad, and allows censorship of the press for lawfully obtained, critically important information. Already, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice is weighing filing Espionage Act charges laws against members of the WikiLeaks organization for its 2010 leak of diplomatic cables and military documents as well as the website’s disclosure of the CIA’s cyber-tools, the Post reported in April.

The press relies heavily on the landmark Pentagon Papers case from 1971 in which the Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot block publication of classified federal documents without concrete evidence of immediate, irreparable harm, akin to publishing the location of US troops during war. The court rejected the Nixon administration’s request to stop the New York Times and Washington Post from reporting about secret documents revealing that the government knew the Vietnam War was fruitless. But three justices suggested that the Nixon administration could prosecute the Times and the Post for violating the Espionage Act by publishing classified documents. The Nixon administration, however, did not try to prosecute the newspapers. The two men who leaked the Pentagon Papers — including military analyst Daniel Ellsberg — were charged with a felony under the Espionage Act, but the case was thrown out by a Los Angeles judge due to misconduct by the Nixon administration.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has a pretty savvy publicity team. The only problem? It isn’t exactly telling you the truth.

Net neutrality is an Obama-era policy designed to ensure that everyone has pretty much the same access to the internet — and that no company can pull strings to gain advantage over its competitors. The FCC points to public comments to suggest there is broad support for its plan to lift net neutrality restrictions — creating an unfettered free market in which providers could set whatever speeds they like — perhaps giving preferential treatment to companies that pay for it. But a closer look reveals the FCC’s plan is meeting stiff opposition by the same sectors cited by the FCC — the public and Silicon Valley.

Matthew Berry, chief of staff to Chairman Pai, recently sent out a series of tweets about broad support for Pai’s proposed “Restoring Internet Freedom” plan, which would dump net neutrality rules and allow ISPs like Comcast and AT&T to choke off traffic for some smaller websites in favor of large business partners. On May 11, Berry tweeted, “New @MorningConsult poll: 78% of Americans favor either light-touch Internet regulation or no regulation at all.” But Berry was a little selective in his choices about what elements of the poll to cite in his tweets. Though he didn’t say so, the poll also reveals that most of the people questioned lacked knowledge about “regulating internet access as a utility” – the legal underpinning of net neutrality. Sixty-four percent said they had knew “not much” or “nothing at all” about net neutrality. Once pollsters informed the voters that net neutrality “is a set of rules which say Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Comcast, Time Warner [now Spectrum], AT&T and Verizon cannot block, throttle, or prioritize certain content on the Internet,” nearly two thirds of the voters – 61 percent – said they “strongly support (24 percent) or “somewhat support” (37 percent) net neutrality.

Sen Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) took the floor of the Senate to call for a filibuster and voice concerns over how Judge Neil Gorsuch might handle First Amendment cases in light of President Trump’s calls to “open up” libel laws.

“Voting rights, workers’ rights, reproductive rights, even our First Amendment speech rights, which President Trump has threatened by saying he wants to ‘open up libel laws against the press’–if any of these cases make it to the Supreme Court, they will all be decided in part by the next Supreme Court justice,” Sen Gillibrand said. She added that the judge’s record “does not give me confidence that he will be a justice whose rulings would bolster those individual rights.”