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John Morris
General Counsel and Director of CDT's Internet Standards, Technology and Policy Project
Free Expression

John B. Morris, Jr. is CDT's General Counsel, and the Director of its "Internet Standards, Technology and Policy Project." Prior to joining CDT in 2001, Mr. Morris was a partner in the law firm of Jenner & Block, where he litigated groundbreaking cases in Internet and First Amendment law. He was a lead counsel in the ACLU v. Reno/American Library Association v. U.S. Dep't of Justice case, in which the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and extended to speech on the Internet the highest level of constitutional protection. In that case, Mr. Morris was responsible for the development of the factual presentation concerning how the Internet works, a presentation that served as the foundation for the Supreme Court's landmark decision.

From May 1999 through April 2000, Mr. Morris served as director of CDT's Broadband Access Project (while on leave from his firm). The ... More »

John B. Morris, Jr. is CDT's General Counsel, and the Director of its "Internet Standards, Technology and Policy Project." Prior to joining CDT in 2001, Mr. Morris was a partner in the law firm of Jenner & Block, where he litigated groundbreaking cases in Internet and First Amendment law. He was a lead counsel in the ACLU v. Reno/American Library Association v. U.S. Dep't of Justice case, in which the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and extended to speech on the Internet the highest level of constitutional protection. In that case, Mr. Morris was responsible for the development of the factual presentation concerning how the Internet works, a presentation that served as the foundation for the Supreme Court's landmark decision.

From May 1999 through April 2000, Mr. Morris served as director of CDT's Broadband Access Project (while on leave from his firm). The Project undertook a comprehensive assessment of the legal, policy, and factual issues surrounding the emergence of broadband Internet access technologies.

Prior to becoming a lawyer, Mr. Morris had extensive experience with computers and politics. In the mid-1970's, as a staff member on Capitol Hill, he helped to promote the use of computer software to manage and improve constituent communications. In 1981, Mr. Morris joined a D.C.-area computer company, where he was one of the lead system designers of a constituent management software system for Members of Congress. In 1985, he co-founded Intelligent Solutions, Inc., which developed the leading constituent services product used on Capitol Hill today.

Mr. Morris received his B.A. magna cum laude with distinction from Yale University and his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was the Managing Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Thomas A. Clark of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, worked for three years as a staff attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia, and then joined Jenner & Block in Washington in 1990.

In addition to his work with CDT, Mr. Morris is an Adjunct Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School in New York City.

In 2008, Mr. Morris served as a member of the Harvard-run Internet Safety Technical Task Force, which studied online safety in social networking and other environments. The Task Force released its Final Report in January, 2008. In 2009, Mr. Morris was appointed to the Online Safety and Technology Working Group of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce. OSTWG was established by Congress to study online child safety issues.

Also in 2009, Mr. Morris was appointed to the Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council of the Federal Communication Commission, where he will work to ensure that civil liberties values are considered in developing new emergency and law enforcement communications technologies.

Publications and Testimony

2009

2008

2007

  • RFC 4745, "Common Policy: A Document Format for Expressing Privacy Preferences" (with H. Schulzrinne, H. Tschofenig, J. Cuellar, J. Polk, J. Rosenberg) (Internet Engineering Task Force 2007)
  • John Morris and Jon Peterson, Who's Watching You Now?, IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine, Vol. 5, Issue 1 (January/February 2007)

2006

2005

2004

  • John Morris, Look at the Bare Naked Facts [pdf] Legal Times March 2004
  • RFC 3694, "Threat Analysis of the Geopriv Protocol" (with M. Danley, D. Mulligan, J. Peterson) (Internet Engineering Task Force 2004)
  • RFC 3693, "Geopriv Requirements" (with J. Cuellar, D. Mulligan, J. Peterson, J. Polk) (Internet Engineering Task Force 2004)
  • "Internet Technical Standards Setting Bodies: The Public Policy Venues of the Twenty-First Century," in The Standards Edge: Dynamic Tension, S. Bolin, editor (2004)

2003

2002

2000

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Testimony - Statement of John Morris before the Joint Committee on Business, Research, and Economic Development Maine State Legislature
3/4/2010 Free Expression

Chairman Schneider, Chairman Smith, and Members of the Joint Committee:

On behalf of the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), I thank you for the opportunity to testify today. Although we appreciate the concerns that have motivated the legislature to consider this issue, and recognize the efforts by Senator Schneider and others to narrow the focus of the bill before the Committee today, we continue to have concerns about the constitutional implications of restricting minorsʼ online access to health-related information.

As a note of introduction, I am an attorney and serve as General Counsel for CDT, which is one of the leading civil liberties organizations in the United States focused on the application of the First Amendment to speech on the Internet. In 1996, CDT led one of the consolidated legal challenges to the federal Communications Decency Act that resulted in the 1997 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that speech on the Internet warrants the highest level of First Amendment protection. Since then, CDT has brought and litigated constitutional challenges to a number of state laws that sought to regulate or restrict speech over the Internet.

Last fall, CDT was actively preparing to pursue a constitutional challenge against PL 2009 Chapter 230. Once a separate legal challenge was filed, we put our planned lawsuit on hold. We applaud the Legislature’s decision to revisit that law, and to avoid further litigation we urge this Committee to act to repeal the prior statute.

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Testimony - The Privacy Implications of Commercial Location-Based Services
2/24/2010 Consumer Privacy

The widespread consumer adoption of increasingly high-powered mobile devices has already spawned the Internet's next generation of location-based services and applications. As the accuracy of location data has improved and the expense of calculating and obtaining it has declined, location has become an increasingly common part of the online experience, and location-based services are an increasingly important market for U.S. companies.

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Paper - Revisiting User Control: the Emergence and Success of a First Amendment Theory for the Internet Age
2/18/2010 Free Expression

In 1995, when the popular, commercial Internet was just emerging, concerns about protecting children online were already on legislative agendas, and no one knew exactly what level of First Amendment protection courts would afford this new form of mass communication. That year, two public policy advocates, Jerry Berman and Daniel Weitzner, argued in the Yale Law Journal that the Internet’s technical characteristics, including abundance of capacity and a high level of individual user control, meant that online speech should receive the highest level of protection under the First Amendment—protection comparable to print. 

In the years since then, the concept of user control—or “user empowerment”—has been central to numerous decisions protecting speech in the online environment, from the United States Supreme Court on down. Under this theory, if technology can provide users (and parents) with the ability to control what they (and their children) access online, government regulation of content would be unconstitutional.  Arguments against and criticisms of this constitutional theory have been advanced, but the idea that users and parents—and not the government—should control what children access online remains the dominant rationale for courts to protect speech online. This essay looks at the origins and application of the “user control” theory in the online context and how the theory has fared the test of time. We conclude that “user control” on the Internet is as vital and important today as it was when Berman and Weitzner first advanced the theory fifteen years ago.

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Blog Post - Google DNS Service Warrants a Watchful Yawn
12/7/2009 Free Expression

There has been a kerfuffle in the tech policy world in the past few days about Google's new DNS service offering.  The Domain Name System is the lookup directory system that seamlessly converts human-readable Internet addresses (like "www.cdt.org") into the actual numeric "Internet Protocol" addresses that are used to reach the computers designated by particular domain names (72.32.6.120 in the case of www.cdt.org).  Most people never think about the Domain Name System or what DNS server they are using – they simply point their computers to the DNS servers provided by their broadband ISP. 

But there has never been a requirement that Internet users must use the DNS server of their ISP, and public DNS servers have been around for years.  OpenDNS and Level 3 provide the most prominent U.S.-based public DNS servers.  Until Google decided to play in the DNS pond.  Google announced last week that it was rolling out a network of public DNS servers that anyone could use for free.  Google argues (correctly) that the DNS system can introduce sluggishness in the online experience, and Google asserts that its new system will be significantly faster than the DNS system offered by many ISPs.  Google claims that it just wants to help speed up Internet communications for all (and Google says that is has some clever techniques to speed up the DND process).

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