We have that here (Netherlands). You are under no circumstances allowed to not hire someone because of past failures if the statue if limitation has expired or the sentence has been served. There might be restrictions on what you can do after you have served, but it is not up to the company to judge on this. This is one of the reasons the "right to be forgotten" exists.
You can however request a "VOG" (translation something like: "Confirmation of good behavior") in which a company (or volunteer organisation for instance) asks for very specific cases like "Allowed to work with children" or "Can have access to privileged data like personal data or medical". The request is handled by the government. You get a response like "No comment" if there is no problem or "Not granted" if you fail. This avoids the problem of having people judge your exact misdemeanors/behavior in the past and leaves it out of a private companies hands and allows the right to be forgotten to exist.
You can also request it and let the person reject the request on legal grounds, but this usually gets you into more problems than you would like.
There is one "but". For higher security clearances (like for working for the state department equivalent) they are allowed to look further back and are allowed to view data from further back and do proper background checks forcing specific issues to come to the light of day. But that check is way more complex than a simple "VOG".
Because frankly I wouldn't ever want to work with somebody who had raped a child.
But if somebody rapes a five year old I don't want to work with them, don't want to be near them, etc. There are crimes that are impossible to rehabilitate from.
I'm not saying you would fail to make the distinction. But many people do, and many essentially innocent people suffer, and IMHO society as a whole, suffer as a result.
Sure theres no argument with someone who aims at pre-pubescent children. But those laws have themselves been perverted so that even a single picture between 2 17 year olds is this horrible felony that ends up ruining 2 lives.
So yeah, its time to quit this Scarlet Letter for most "sex crimes" - cause its a gross miscalculation of justice and law.
1. How would someone else know that the person did X?
2. What if that crime had nothing had bearing on the position?
3. What about the concept of a sentence representing the 'complete payment to society'? Denying someone the ability to make a living turns a finite sentence into an indefinite sentence.
For me,
1. If someone was guilty of embezzlement, this would be relevant (positive or negative) if the position involving money handling (cashier, or accounting) - but not relevant if the position was social work.
2. If the person was guilty of stalking, a position that would allow access to customers' PII would be problematic.
But there can be no excuse to rape a five year old.
You ignored the part where I said that if a person has served their sentence, this represents the end of the social punishment. If you want to argue for a life long sentence than do so.
In order for someone to function, they need a job. A convicted and released child rapist needs to pay rent. How would you propose housing, clothing this person so they are not homeless in front of your office?
I think the issue of freedom of speech is much more nuanced than that.
For example, even in places with "absolute freedom of speech", which I suspect is what you're implying, there is defamation laws that forbids certain kind of speech. There is also laws around hate speech and so forth.
Not in the US (as far as I understand). See the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
> In June 2017, the Supreme Court affirmed in a unanimous decision on Matal v. Tam that the disparagement clause of the Lanham Act violates the First Amendment's free speech clause. The issue was about government prohibiting the registration of trademarks that are "racially disparaging". Justice Samuel Alito writes:
> “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express "the thought that we hate". United States v. Schwimmer, 279 U. S. 644, 655 (1929) (Holmes, J., dissenting).”
Absolute freedom of speech doesn’t really exist anywhere. The US is probably one of the most liberal countries on earth when it comes to policing it, but it’s not like anyone can say anything.
Since when? How would that even work? The president orders the NSA to generate a list of disagreeable film makers and journalists and passes it to the TSA and customs? Do you have any evidence for that claim at all?
> It wouldn’t be wise to talk about bombs near an airport, or tweet about killing the president when he’s visiting your city.
Those are not free speech issues. It is not illegal to talk about bombs at an airport or to threaten the president. Just because you shouldn't does mean you're not free - freedom from consequences isn't the same as freedom of action. Restricted speech is exceedingly rare and, to my knowledge, only applies to public safety (falsely yelling fire in a theatre) and inciting violence (rallying everyone to get weapons and go shoot cops)
How would that even work?
For example, imagine you're a Youtuber and you make a serious, fair film about the Israel-Palestine conflict. You successfully get access to senior people on both sides.
Except Hamas is a terrorist organisation, and to get that access you've visited online forums about the organisation, contacted people in the US associated with it, and flown to a terrorism hotspot to meet with terrorist leaders. That pattern is pretty similar to someone who had been radicalised and wanted to fight abroad!
So you're put on a terror watch list, and at the border you're subject to extra searches, with the random delays that entails.
"We’ve learned about this fishing expedition through documents we obtained in a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit filed on Poitras’s behalf to find out why she was constantly being stopped by federal agents during her travels. Border agents detained Poitras at airports over 50 times from 2006 to 2012. The detentions began after she directed and released documentary films about post-9/11 life in Iraq and Yemen that challenged the U.S. government’s narrative about the war on terror."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/11/government-documents-s...
Whatever your opinion of the government abusing surveillance power, Poitras wasn't detained because the government didn't like what she was saying, she was detained because the government suspected that she had foreknowledge of an attack that took place in Iraq where a U.S. soldier was killed and kept silent about the attack so that she could film it.
Now that belief was unjustified, ended up being wrong and in my opinion an absolute abuse of power by the government, but it is not a matter related to freedom of speech or censorship.
You are taking that situation and exploiting it to push an unrelated narrative, and I think that's disingenuous.
It's generally illegal to threaten anyone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault#United_States
That exactly defines why you are not free to do it. - let's reword that sentence and test again -
"Just because you shouldn't murder someone doesnt mean you are not free, freedom from consequences isn't the same as freedom of action."
Just once you're flagged and are inside The Machine you get detained upon entry whilst they confiscate your devices, try to see where you've been etc. Lookup the wikipedia page of Laura Poitras who for years lived in Berlin due to USA government surveillance. And this started way before her involvement with Snowden as a filmmaker.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jul/14/citizenfour-dir...
"Citizenfour director Laura Poitras sues US over 'Kafkaesque harassment'
Film-maker whose documentary about Edward Snowden won an Oscar says she has been held for hours at a time by airport officials, told she was on a no-fly list and threatened with handcuffs for taking notes"
Actually yes. Just look at the McCarthy era witch hunts against 'communists' in Hollywood. The FBI and CIA were involved in drawing up the watch lists.
That may not be entirely true [1], although the same video makes the point that US courts have apparently ruled you _can_ incite another to harm them.
This is true, but your examples are pretty bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
As usual, it depends on how you measure
It’s a hodge podge in the US
This all says nothing about the tacit control given to corps to control the work we undertake, thus controlling conversations we are allowed 40+ hours of week (the bulk of our waking life).
Or how Citizens United is enabling purchasing and pushing speech of a certain kind which we can see modifies people.
“Who controls the past controls the future.”
“The best books tell you what you know already.”
“War is peace.”
American is living those quotes and has been for decades.
"The Australian Constitution does not explicitly protect freedom of expression. However, the High Court has held that an implied freedom of political communication exists as an indispensible part of the system of representative and responsible government created by the Constitution. It operates as a freedom from government restraint, rather than a right conferred directly on individuals." - https://www.humanrights.gov.au/freedom-information-opinion-a...
You can't be criminally prosecuted for hate speech (unless the prosecutor stretches other laws to cover your "hate speech") or most instances of defamation (except in certain cases on a state by state basis[1]). You can be sued but that's a civil matter.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation#Criminal_defamation...
Yes, these laws exist in many places in the US often under the name "ban the box"
Here in DC, it is illegal for me to obtain an applicant's criminal record until after I've made an offer and I cannot withdraw an offer simply because the applicant has a record.
I think SF and NYC have some version of this as well.
how is this proven? If you fired an employee after a "while", may be siting business reasons, how does the employee prove that you checked the criminal record, and then that information is what led to the termination?
The first is the most important in the US for free-speech issues. For instance, "it's true" is considered an absolute defense in cases of slander/libel, no matter how mean spirited or damaging.
Yelling “fire” in a theater is not illegal. It was asserted to be the kind of thing the government might permissible prohibit in dicta (which are not themselves authoritative) illustrating the decision rule, without any citation to supporting precedent, in a later-overturned case in which the court allowed what is now recognized as an imperssible restriction on core political speech.
E.g. in the UK, to even be able to do a check to see if someone is barred from certain types of work, you are required to abide by a long list of terms which goes much further than merely not republishing the data. To request a less comprehensive check requires you to have a compelling need (a specific set of roles). The basic checks can only requested by the person they're about.
Violating the terms comes at the risk of no longer being able to do records check (among other consequences), which may force you to close down your business in the worst case.
Nothing prevents you from making a truthful record of history if you have the data, but lots of things act to prevent most attempts to publish them.
Now, publishing expunged records in the US is morally dubious. I don't know the case law in this area, though, so I don't know where it stands on legal grounds.
In the US, there are fewer people who expunge criminal records because there are companies that will produced expunged records in background checks so long as they were public at any time. Banning this gets into 1st amendment grounds.
And that's the flip side: labeling theory. In places like Australia, certain crimes do get removed from your record so long as you've stayed out of the system for five years. Even their sex offender registry has limited use (certain jobs, housing restrictions etc.); it's not public like ours. Then again, they don't have freedom of speech (except in Victoria; sorta).
Could we have laws that restrict companies from considering criminal records past x number of years in the US? I'm not sure if that'd be possible in our currently legal system.
In America, you can't really restrict information, once it's published, except in certain limited cases (like when a case involves a minor).