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David Crary AP October 6, 2014, 11:01 am

For gay men in the dozens of countries that criminalise their sex lives, social networking can be a blessing or a curse.

High-tech dating apps and social media have enabled countless men to expand their circles of friends and lovers in settings that are hostile to any overt trace of homosexuality. Yet the same technology that they gratefully embrace can expose them to the risk of blackmail, arrest and violence.

In one chilling case earlier in 2014 in Pakistan, police arrested a paramedic on suspicion of killing three men he had met via the gay social network Manjam, which is based in London but has many users in Asia and the Middle East. The suspect told police he considered homosexuality to be evil.

More recently, bloggers and activists raised concerns about how the popular dating app Grindr could be used to pinpoint a user's exact location - even a user living where gay sex is outlawed. After complaints mounted, Grindr in September announced steps to reduce the risks for users in countries with a record of anti-gay violence - including Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Liberia, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

And during the past couple of weeks, Grindr has posted a warning to its users in Egypt that police - as part of an ongoing crackdown on gays - "may be posing as LGBT to entrap you". The warning urged users to be careful when arranging meetings with strangers.

Grindr's chief executive, Joel Simkhai, says his Los Angeles-based company strives to maximise security and privacy for all its users, yet he cautions that governments hostile to gays can muster powerful surveillance resources.

"They have a lot of control and smarts on their side," he said. "We try to use the latest technologies on our end, but so do they, so this tension will continue.

"If your security is a big issue for you," he added, "a location-based service might not be the best option".

The potential perils of social networking have attracted the attention of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, a New York-based watchdog group.

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Social networking poses risk for O/S gays

Oliver Smith Oct 5 2014 at 11:51 PM

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A new travel website is promising guests discounts on hotel rooms depending on how large their social media following is.

Visitors to the website Hotelied are invited to provide it with access to up to five of their social networking accounts Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin and Instagram.

They can then search for hotel rooms in five destinations (New York, Los Angles, Miami, Portland and Tel Aviv) and are presented with a variety of options, with discounts that supposedly correspond with their social media clout.

The idea is that those with a large number of friends and followers "tastemakers" is how Hotelied describes them are more likely to provide free publicity for the hotels and encourage others to stay.

The website explains: "Based on its specific business needs, a hotel may be targeting small groups, guests who work in specific industries such as fashion, entertainment, business, or education, frequent travellers, loyal travellers, and more. In addition, a hotel may want to increase their social media interaction with guests, thus searching for guests with high social influence and a strong digital following."

I searched for a hotel room in New York for a two-night stay from November 21, and with a reasonable number of Twitter followers (1,800 or so), I was offered a discount of 20 per cent at the Dream Downtown hotel ($US276 ($AU318) a night, instead of $345 ($AU397)). The discount would seem to be valid when I approached the hotel directly, the cheapest available rate for the same period was indeed $US345 a night.

My social media following earned me discounts of up to 40 per cent on other hotels, such as the Metropolitan by COMO in Miami. The maximum discount available to all users is 50 per cent.

Members of six hotel loyalty programmes (Accor, Hyatt, Hilton, IHG, Marriott and Starwood) and four airline reward schemes (BA, TrueBlue, Lufthansa and Virgin) are also invited to link those accounts to Hotelied, to further boost their profile.

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Want a cheaper holiday? Expand your social media circle

I attended the oral argument this morning in the Supreme Courts first case of the new Term, Heien v. North Carolina. I had a long preview of Heien here. He are some impressions of the argument.

On the whole, I thought the argument was puzzling. A large chunk of the argument time was spent on Justice Scalias insistence that the Court could not render a decision on the rights question alone without also ruling on whether the exclusionary rule was available. I found this odd for two reasons. First, the state had never argued the exclusionary rule. The states Brief in Opposition had argued that it would be better to review a different case in which the exclusionary rule issue was also part of the case, a position the Justices presumably weighed before granting cert on just the rights question.

Second, the logic of Davis v. United States is that the Court is free to rule on substantive Fourth Amendment issues even when there is no remedy. Its fine to consider rights when there are no remedies, Davis concluded, because the two are conceptually distinct questions. More broadly, the Court often rules on one issue and remands for other issues that need to be resolved before we know which side will win. Given that, it was puzzling that so much argument time was spent in Heien considering whether they could decide the rights issue without also deciding the remedy in the same case.

Perhaps the Court will dismiss Heien as improvidently granted and later take a different case in which the exclusionary rule issue is presented? Its a possibility. But that path would seem pretty puzzling in light of cases like Davis.

In the time not spent considering whether the Court could decide the case, there was a lot of discussion of how a reasonable mistake of law standard would be different from the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule or qualified immunity. Is the proposed standard any different, and if so, how? Both the state and the U.S. suggested that the reasonable mistake of law standard is similar to qualified immunity but doesnt go as far. The state suggested that there could be a difference if a prosecutor tells the agent that the search is legal, presumably when the prosecutor is relatively straightforwardly wrong. There would be no reasonable mistake of law, as the prosecutor was clearly wrong, but prosecutorial approval could trigger qualified immunity. The U.S. suggested that the reasonable mistake of law standard should be for close calls, unlike qualified immunity that applies unless the error was clear.

How might the Court rule? Im not at all sure. Justice Kennedy suggested that he would say that the good faith exception applies to the facts of Heien, and that he wanted to reach that issue. Justice Kagan seemed sympathetic to the defenses argument on the rights issue. Justice Breyer seemed open to allowing a reasonable mistake of law claim if it could be narrow. And a lot of Justices didnt give any sign one way or the other, perhaps in part there was so much focus on the remedies issue. Given the close connection between rights and remedies in the case, it may not matter which side in Heien wins on the only briefed issue, that of rights. The rights issue isnt really where the action is, and its hard to predict if that means the Justices will give the rights issue to the defense and wait for another case on the exclusionary rule, or, alternatively, import exclusionary rule concepts into the rights issue to resolve the ultimate disposition of such cases now even though the remedies issue isnt before them.

Orin Kerr is the Fred C. Stevenson Research Professor at The George Washington University Law School, where he has taught since 2001. He teaches and writes in the area of criminal procedure and computer crime law.

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Volokh Conspiracy: Oral argument in Heien v. North Carolina

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