Blog

What happens when you mix political speech, clips of "The Daily Show" and self-styled YouTube video blogs? Last spring Allen Asch found out first hand when Viacom sent him takedown notices for copyright infringement.After several letters from the ACLU of Northern California and other fair use advocates, Asch's videos are back up and running. Asch's experience highlights the current tension between... Read More

Yahoo! executives faced harsh criticism this week from the House Foreign Affairs Committee for the company's role in the Chinese government's arrest of journalist and democracy advocate Shi Tao.After Shi Tao posted warnings to journalists about possible social unrest leading up to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, Yahoo supplied the government with the information needed to identify and a... Read More

The California Research Bureau (CRB), the non-partisan government agency responsible for researching topics for the Governor and the State Legislature, has begun to tackle the thorny issue of RFID.Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are tiny computer chips that can be encoded with any type of information. These chips are embedded within documents or objects to be used for monitoring or trac... Read More

Last week, the ACLU of Northern California, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and several other public interest groups released a set of fair use guidelines for user-generated content (UGC).With the rise of YouTube and other video-sharing sites, the phenomenon of UGC has exploded, and with it, ambiguity over what constitutes fair use has also grown.The fair use doctrine provides that individuals... Read More

Today's news story that Comcast is blocking customer use of peer-to-peer program, BitTorrent, provides yet another glimpse into a future without net neutrality. According to several sources, Comcast disrupts communications between users of the peer to peer file sharing protocol. Comcast's block can be analogized to dropping a telephone call between two people and has been called "the ... Read More

On September 27, we blogged about Verizon’s attempt to discriminate based on content when it announced that it would block the text messages of NARAL. After a firestorm of bad press, Verizon quickly retreated and said that it had all been a misreading of their policy. But, whether or not companies will be able to function as a bottleneck on protected speech is at the heart of the debate over net n... Read More

In late September, US District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the PATRIOT Act's changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. The sections of FISA struck down by Judge Aiken detail how and under what circumstances federal officials can get a warrant to wiretap. Prior to the passage of the... Read More

State Senator Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) announced today that Governor Schwarzenegger signed his Senate Bill 362, which would prohibit employers and others from forcing anyone to have a radio frequency identification (RFID) device implanted under their skin. The bill will go into effect on January 1, 2008.RFID "tags" are tiny chips with miniature antennae that can be embedded in almost anything. U... Read More

Over the last week, Americans in places as far as upstate New York and as nearby as downtown San Francisco have noticed ads on billboards and taxi cabs for Google's new service, Google 411. Google 411allows users to call a 1-800 number to get local business information for no fee. Users can also connect to the requested number without a charge and can have the phone number sent as a t... Read More

Last November we learned that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been secretly compiling data on millions of innocent Americans. According to the Washington Post, the DHS has been using its Automated Targeting System (ATS) originally developed for cargo security to generate "terrorist" risk ratings on American travelers. This past August the DHS proposed a rule that would continue the c... Read More

In case you missed it on our National ACLU blog, here is an entry written by the ACLU's Catherine Crump about the government's latest attempt to censor the Internet. As expected, the government is appealing the ACLU's March 2007 victory in the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) case. COPA is an Internet censorship law that makes it a crime to place content deemed "harmful to minors" o... Read More

In case you missed it on the National ACLU blog, check out this post by Michael German, Policy Counsel on national security, immigration and privacy. He explains how some of the Director of National Intelligence's public statements in support of warrantless wiretaps distort reality, the issues, and the law. There's been a lot of confusion of late about just how vital the Protect Ameri... Read More