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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 2009-2010, Mr. Morris served on 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 - Free Speech and Online Intermediaries in an Age of Terror Recruitment
5/26/2010 Free Expression

Terrorism is a defining threat in our society today, and the use of any medium of communications – including the Internet – to recruit foot soldiers for terror attacks on the United States is a serious concern. It is understandable and appropriate that this Subcommittee should consider possible governmental responses to this concern, and the legal and constitutional implications of such responses.

There are a number of possible governmental responses to online terror recruitment, including (among others) seeking to directly prohibit speakers from posting such content and seeking to require online service providers to prevent such speech from being posted in the first place, or otherwise holding service providers responsible for the speech. This testimony first looks at the First Amendment issues raised by any governmental attempt to restrict online speech. The testimony then focuses on one possible response – seeking to make online websites and services responsible for policing user content for online terror recruitment activities, or otherwise be held liable for such content.

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Blog Post - This Apple Falls Too Far From the Tree
4/28/2010 Free Expression

The police search of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s apartment for evidence surrounding his possession of a pre-release iPhone 4G rightly has the Apple-sphere all a-twitter.  Gizmodo purchased the phone for $5,000 after an Apple employee inadvertently left it in a bar on his birthday.  Chen’s source allegedly tried to inform Apple that he had the phone, but was dismissed by customer support staff who had no knowledge of the unreleased phone.   (Check out this story, you really can't make this stuff up!)

The investigation raises some tricky questions about the Fourth Amendment, stolen property, and reporter shield laws, all of which have been well-covered in other blogs. EFF’s Matt Zimmerman has a strong theory that the search was plainly illegal.  Orin Kerr, writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, generally thinks the search was legal but points out some ambiguities in the California shield law.  Ultimately these questions will turn on particular evidence and what motivated the search; we just don’t have all the facts yet, and so we cannot yet say for sure whether the search was “clearly illegal” or “just barely legal.”

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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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