Taylor Swift likely faces a significant number of stalkers with various ill intents. Some have previously been arrested. This is lamentable. The full force of the law should obviously be brought against anyone who breaks the law in related activities.
Still, the effective resourcing of personal security arrangements and liaison with law enforcement is the way to address these concerns. Swift’s new action to intimidate law-abiding citizens from engaging in free speech is misguided.
This point bears noting because Swift has retained attorneys in an effort to intimidate Jack Sweeney, a college student who uses publicly available aircraft tracking software/information, into ending his monitoring of her flights. Sweeney lists the estimated carbon emissions produced by each flight. As with Elon Musk’s threatened lawsuit against Sweeney, Swift’s lawsuit is rightly hopeless in legal terms. It would not pass muster in its challenge to free speech, and its success would be contrary to the public interest. Flight tracking software is used not simply to follow celebrities but also by journalists, activists, and other analysts to monitor the location and activity of organized criminals and hostile state actors.
Swift’s lawyers show the weakness of their case in two regards.
First, by their sidestepping of the reality that flight tracking information/software is legally and publicly available. Second, by publicizing the contents of their letter to the media. In so doing, the lawyers show their actual intent is to pressure social media companies such as Instagram and Meta to suspend Sweeney’s accounts and thus, they hope, greatly dilute the ease and scale of public attention he receives. Their threats to Sweeney personally are meaningless.
In a letter to Sweeney seen by the Washington Post, Swift’s Venable law firm attorney, Katie Wright Morrone, claims that Sweeney is “in violation of several state laws.” She adds that “while this may be a game to you, or an avenue that you hope will earn you wealth or fame, it is a life-or-death matter for our Client. There is no legitimate interest in or public need for this information, other than to stalk, harass, and exert dominion and control.”
Morrone needs a constitutional law class refresher. Whatever Swift or Morrone thinks, whatever you or I think, any judge will observe that Sweeney’s carbon emissions interest is, in and of itself, a legitimate public interest for his reporting. And that’s before we even consider Sweeney is publishing publicly available information! From a legal question standpoint, this isn’t even complicated.
Again, this is not to say that Swift’s stalker concerns are insignificant. Still, they can be mitigated.
Videos of Swift’s public appearances show that she retains a significant private and law enforcement security presence around her. These videos suggest her protective detail has an armed component and is well-trained and resourced, including the use of multiple vehicle convoys. The detail supervisors are likely to be former law enforcement officers/agents. It is likely that Swift also has local security employed at her places of residence, probably with some relationship to the local law enforcement agencies in each area. This maximizes Swift’s protective umbrella and her access to a timely law enforcement response where needed. While a stalker(s) could use Sweeney’s efforts/their own efforts to track Swift in real time, they would need significant resources, training, and operational security to evade detection and pose a threat. Of greater concern are those fixated people/stalkers who attend Swift’s public events and seek to take advantage of her close engagement with fans.
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In turn, although it is obviously an undesirable element of fame for Swift, Sweeney’s activities are part and parcel with being a public figure. Healthy democracies rest on the means of holding the powerful accountable to scrutiny. The corruption and scandal of the powerful are far more easily hidden from the public in the otherwise democratic nations of Europe than in the United States, for example. In the U.S., the law concerning speech on public figures yields far more to the public interest than to the private interest.
Swift has done well from the public interest. So, many of my friends would say, has the public done well from Swift. And the public interest must come first here.