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In a victory for civil liberties and responsible government spending, the Budget Committee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted Thursday to cut $300,000 from its invasive, intrusive, and ineffective video surveillance camera program.The Budget Committee's decision is an important first step, but will not be finalized until the full Board approves the budget next month. Please contact yo... Read More

In a recent victory for employee privacy and free speech, the Ninth Circuit told employers to stop snooping on email and text messages.The case:Quon v. Arch WirelessThe facts:The City of Ontario Police Department gave two-way pagers to its employees. Officer Quon, a Department employee, used his pager to send personal messages. Quon exceeded his messaging limit and the Department decided to audit ... Read More

The memory of another monumental day in court, 60 years earlier, hung over the March 4 hearings on marriage equality, and not just because the famous Perez v. Sharp decision was invoked repeatedly by lawyers.Stuart Gaffney, half of one of the couples who sued for the right to marry, said on the day of the hearing that he wouldn't have been there were it not for the 1948 California Supreme Court's ... Read More

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) set off a minor firestorm in the blogosphere over its new ID policy, which went into effect this past Saturday. At least one passenger has reported that he was asked which political party he is registered to vote for, as part of TSA's new authentication process.TSA's new rules relate to passengers who attempt to fly without ID — itself a relatively ... Read More

Apart from the ceremonial naming of post offices, it has become an increasingly rare thing in Washington for Republicans and Democrats to band together on an issue. However, the effort by telecom lobbyists to steamroll retroactive immunity for AT&T, Verizon and Comcast is being met with stiff resistance by a broad coalition of activist groups.The "compromise" legislation, which has been widely... Read More

The ACLU of Northern California has written extensively about the privacy and free speech implications of video surveillance.A video surveillance firm is now trying to make its technology a bit more privacy friendly by developing technology to blur most people's faces.With the rapid expansion of governmental video surveillance, the introduction of photographic services like Google Street View, and... Read More

SB 31 overwhelmingly passed the California Assembly Judiciary Committee on June 10 by a vote of 10-0.To read the bill language of SB 31, visit here.SB 31 makes it illegal for a person to intentionally read or attempt to read an RFID tag in an individual's identification document without their knowledge and prior consent.Right now, private information on California drivers' licenses is stored on a ... Read More

Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has been thrust into the media spotlight after his own private collection of photographs and videos was accidentally made available on the Internet.Kozinski told a reporter from the LA Times that he thought the material on his Web site, which included photographs and videos of a sexual nature, couldn't be seen by the public.While the story ... Read More

What do your cell phone and the current trial of twenty-six Americans, many of them CIA agents, in an Italian court for the 2003 kidnapping of Muslim cleric Abu Omar have to do with each other?Both your phone and the phones of undercover CIA agents act as silent trackers, constantly transmitting physical location. In an Italian court room last week, one of the lead investigators described how poli... Read More

We have written numerous posts discussing how companies want to know who you are, what you do, and where you go online because this information can translate into big advertising revenue. Your photos may be the new frontier.Gmail, the popular email service, already "reads" your email to display relevant sponsored links. Why not your pictures? New technology can analyze photos at an amazing level o... Read More

Charter Communications, one of the nation's largest cable Internet providers, plans to begin monitoring the online activities of its high- speed Internet customers and then sell the data for targeted advertising.The announcement is already drawing criticism from activists, academics, and bipartisan members of Congressdue to privacy concerns.Charter is in the position to observe and analyze nearly ... Read More

A coalition of privacy and consumer organizations from California to Washington, D.C. have sent a letter today urging Google to post a prominent link on its homepage to its privacy policy in accordance with the California Online Privacy Protection Act (OPPA) and the widespread practice of commercial web sites.The organizations include EPIC, the California-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the Wo... Read More