Civil Liberties

A behind-the-scenes look inside the historic case to overturn California's ban on same-sex marriage. The high-profile trial first makes headlines with the unlikely pairing of Theodore Olson and David Boies, political foes who last faced off as opposing attorneys in Bush v. Gore. The film also follows the plaintiffs, two gay couples who find their families at the center of the same-sex marriage controversy. Five years in the making, this is the story of how they took the first federal marriage equality lawsuit to the US Supreme Court. Olson joins directors Ryan White and Ben Cotner for a post-screening discussion. Ben Cotner, Theodore B. Olson, Ryan White, Pete Dominick

In the age of big data, e-commerce, and status updates, consumers provide a near constant stream of personal information to the companies they interact with. Whether it’s a shopping cart on Amazon, a family photo on Facebook, or a browsing history at Google, the data we provide about ourselves is becoming its own form of currency. But what price do we pay for participating in this information economy, and how much do we understand about the privacy we forfeit just by doing business? FTC Commissioner Julie Brill and investigative journalist Julia Angwin explore the implications of data collection on our personal liberty and ask: What are the smartest policies for the road ahead? Julia Angwin, Julie Brill, Kevin Delaney

On the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, witness a conversation with longtime congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis about his latest journey using graphic novels to move young people to embrace nonviolence. In the late 1950s, his own mentors, Rev. Jim Lawson and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., used a remarkable comic book to teach young people the fundamental principles of nonviolent social resistance. Now, following in their footsteps, Congressman Lewis has embarked on a nationwide campaign to use his award-winning graphic memoir series March to inspire a new generation to take up the fight against injustice in America. John Lewis, Gwen Ifill

Americans have been writing laws to keep technology from eroding privacy for more than a century. Stewart Baker, former General Counsel of the NSA argues that most of them have turned out worse than useless. Privacy, he argues, is situational. Our sense of what is private adapts to the new technology, but not until we’ve gone through a moral panic — searching for scapegoats, from NSA to Google — and punishing them to stave off the future. But laws adopted in the grip of a moral panic rarely make sense when the fever passes. Like Prohibition or the panic over computer games, privacy panics leave us with laws that are widely ignored or selectively enforced to serve wealth and power. Stewart Baker

As the Supreme Court wraps its term, a team of legal experts debates the big decisions, partisanship on the Court, and how it all might shape the future. From affirmative action, to religious liberty, campaign contribution limits, and beyond, hear what the Roberts Court decided and why it matters to you. Jeffrey Rosen, Theodore B. Olson, Neal Katyal, Sherrilyn Ifill

A wide-ranging, one-on-one conversation with the ACLU’s Anthony Romero about the challenges he foresees for civil liberties in the next ten years. How will surveillance impact our lives over the next decade? Will LGBT people continue to see an expansion of their basic rights and liberties? Will reproductive freedoms promised by Roe v. Wade endure? Will access to the ballot box expand or shrink? Anthony D. Romero, Elliot Gerson

Emerging technologies for accessing and altering the brain impacts our freedom to understand, shape, and define ourselves. Voluntarily choosing to take a performance-enhancing drug is quite different from being forcibly administered it. Adding brain-training games to our daily routines differs from being bombarded by deceptive marketing practices. Voluntarily confessing criminal activity to the police dramatically differs from having brain-encoded memories surreptitiously lifted from the brain. These differences are crucial to how we define and ultimately defend cognitive liberty. Nita A. Farahany

A little more than a decade after the founding of the United States, things weren’t going incredibly smoothly. People like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton actually wanted to create a whole new government. In the summer of 1787, the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia, and by September, the Constitution had been born. Join National Constitution Center President Jeff Rosen and the Carlyle Group’s David Rubenstein for a conversation about why a constitutional convention was needed, how it worked, what the thorniest issues were, and how we got the Constitution and Bill of Rights we have today. Jeffrey Rosen, David M. Rubenstein

In this digital age, many of the most pressing questions about free speech arise in cyberspace. And increasingly, the answers to those speech questions are defined in board rooms, rather than court rooms. What comments on Facebook constitute hate speech? Which videos on YouTube are likely to incite violence? At the moment, many of the most important decisions about online content, access, and speech are concentrated in the hands of a few private actors. Will they have even more power in 2024? Jeffrey Rosen, Monika Bickert, Nicole Alston

The Internet’s Own Boy follows the story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. From Swartz's help in the development of the basic Internet protocol RSS to his co-founding of Reddit, his fingerprints are all over the Internet. But it was Swartz's groundbreaking work in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to information access that ensnared him in a two-year legal nightmare. It was a battle that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26. Swartz’s story touched a nerve with people far beyond the online communities in which he was a celebrity. This film is a personal story about what we lose when we are tone deaf about technology and its relationship to our civil liberties. Director Brian Knappenberger and Lawrence Lessig discuss the film after the screening. Lawrence Lessig, Stephen J. Adler, Brian Knappenberger