Casting an action as "speech" doesn't give you a free pass; fraud is also speech, as is libel. The rights enumerated in the Constitution conflict with each other; they were self-evidently incoherent when they were ratified, and the expectation has always been that those conflicts would need to be adjudicated by the Judiciary.

What is true is that speech and expression must receive enormous deference, and what is also generally believed to be true is that the content and ideas animating speech can't be the basis for allowing or denying it.

Well, right, but this isn't fraud, or libel, or sedition, or (to my knowledge) child porn, or anything necessarily cast as an unprotected form of speech.

It could potentially be categorized as 'obscene', but that's true (or false) of a given image regardless of how it was obtained or how it's distributed. If porn sites are still legal in the state of California (they are, right?), then so should images on this site be. If they're being displayed unlawfully, on grounds that they were illegal obtained, or are being illegally distributed, then I don't understand why a successful prosecution couldn't be had on those grounds already.

The specific case we're talking about here is legally simple. The charge is extortion. In California, the elements of extortion are 0. the victim has property (here money), 1. (the 1C variant) the accused threatened to expose a secret connecting the victim with disgrace, a crime, or deformity, 2. the accused did so with the intent of coercing the victim, 3. the victim consented, and 4. the accused received property as a result.

Different states, different extortion statutes, but the California construction seems to be a common one.

The crime isn't "speech"; it's coercion.

Similar dumbasses who are more sly about extracting money from their sites might be undone by other simple legal issues, such as red-flag knowledge that the content they're hosting is stolen, or (as mentioned upthread) that the content itself is facially illegal, for instance because it depicts minors.

Criminalizing or otherwise prohibiting revenge porn sites on a conceptual level, rather than targeting the sites dumb enough to try to cash in, is a trickier issue that's currently being confronted by state legislatures; it wouldn't be shocking to see one of the resulting statutes eventually end up before SCOTUS, sad as that sounds.

I missed this issue when I read the article, and you are right that it makes this particular case more clear cut.

But I'm not seeing other issues you mention as being relevant, stolen material in particular. Weren't the pentagon papers, wikileaks and snowdens NSA files all stolen material?

Well, I get that it was extortion, and I completely agree that it's extortion... and that's exactly my complaint -- extortion has nothing to do with revenge porn.

From reading the Slate article, they mention the new "revenge porn law" specifically, and then list other charges. The contents of the site could have been anything -- credit card numbers, blackmail information, etc., etc., and the CA legislature would still have the exact same case that they have -- extortion.

I suppose I glommed onto your argument because I assumed (from your other post) that you'd been following it, but I think that the implications of a 'revenge porn' law didn't actually come into play here, which sort of makes whatever point I had -- that there's no purpose for it.

Whatever implications the first amendment has here, origination shouldn't play a part in it. If the images are obscene, that can be determined independently of how they were obtained or distributed. If they violate someone's personal copyright, that's an independent claim. If they violate local pornography statutes, that's again, a separate crime.

What it seems to me is that we've taken a number of things that were already illegal and drafted up a new set of feel-good measures that make them illegal under a different heading. Perhaps the net result is in sentencing, but that seems about as efficient to me as "hate" crime sentencing, where we'll end up with mandatory minimums and such.

Anyway, sorry for pestering, you just seemed to have more knowledge on the matter than the Slate article, and I thought you'd implied that there were free speech implications.