The American Civil Liberties Union is backing former Intel employee Kourosh Hamidi who was ordered to stop criticising Intel in internal emails.

In a case of email as free speech, the ACLU has filed an Amici Curiae (Friend of the Court) brief in an appeal pending in the lawsuit brought against by Intel. Over a two-year period, Hamidi is reported to have sent six emails to other Intel employees criticising the company's employment policy and the hiring of staff from outside the US. Intel asked Hamidi to desist, but he refused. Now no longer with the chip behemoth, Hamidi runs the FaceIntel website with the aim of highlighting what he considers to be inappropriate corporate behaviour. The ACLU says that Intel's subsequent legal actions were a heavy-handed attempt to silence a critic, not an effort to prevent overload to its email system. The California Court of Appeal is not expected to make a decision on the case until the end of the year.