The U.S. Supreme Court announced Wednesday that it will continue streaming live audio of its oral arguments at least through December of this year. The justices will also resume holding arguments in person, though the Court building will remain closed to the public. The Court's announcement came the same day that EPIC and a coalition of over 75 civil society, transparency, media, and disability rights organizations wrote to the Court urging it to make live audio access to oral arguments permanent. The letter emphasized that "[f]air and equal justice can't be delivered without accountability and transparency. Ensuring that live audio of oral arguments remains accessible to the public . . . would promote transparency and increase public confidence in the nation's highest court." At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Court began streaming live audio feed oral arguments for the first time in its history. More than 130,000 people streamed arguments live during the Court's May 2020 sitting, and oral arguments since the beginning of the pandemic have been streamed nearly three million times. During its last term, the Court held oral arguments by teleconference in four cases in which EPIC filed an amicus brief, including U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service v. Sierra Club, Van Buren v. United States, Facebook v. Duguid, and TransUnion v. Ramirez.
The Sixth Circuit has rejected a robocall defendant's bid to use the Supreme Court's decision last year in Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants to create immunity for illegal robocalls made between 2015 and 2020. In Barr, the Supreme Court found that an exception added in 2015 to the decades-old robocall restriction was unconstitutional and must be severed from the law. The defendant in the case before the Sixth Circuit, Lindenbaum v. Realgy, LLC, argued that the decision in Barr made the broad robocall ban unenforceable for the period between the unconstitutional exception's enactment and the Supreme Court's decision to sever, from 2015-2020. The district court agreed and threw the lawsuit out. The Sixth Circuit's decision reverses the district court and allows the robocall suit to continue. EPIC and the National Consumer Law Center filed an amicus brief in the case arguing that granting robocallers immunity “would reward those who made tens of billions of unwanted robocalls and deprive consumers of any remedy for the incessant invasion of their privacy.” EPIC regularly files amicus briefs supporting consumers in illegal robocall cases.
EPIC has submitted comments to the Biometrics and Surveillance Commissioner of the United Kingdom on proposed updates to the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice. The currents updates proposed focus on aligning the Code with developments in surveillance law and recent court decisions. EPIC's comment contains several recommends to more directly address surveillance risks to privacy and international human rights, including banning facial recognition technology, emotion recognition, and biometric categorization systems, setting clear assessment and consultation requirements criteria for databases used for matching technology and consultations, and strengthening protections against improper use of facial and biometric recognition systems. EPIC contributes substantially to ongoing efforts in protections against surveillance, including a campaign to ban facial recognition technology and filing suit against agencies misusing surveillance technology, as in a recent suit against the Postal Service .
