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On Monday, the Senate is set to begin debating FISA legislation that will grant immunity to the phone companies for turning over millions of our private records to the National Security Agency.If you care about privacy rights and holding corporations accountable for lawbreaking, call the California Senators and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Monday morning.Tell the Senators to use their lead... Read More

According to recent reports, Google Inc., the wildly successful Internet company based here in Northern California, is planning to offer online data storage to its users. Though the exact details of the plan are not yet known, Google is expected to launch the service sometime next year.Google already offers its users some storage though its other products, including GMail, Google Docs, and its pho... Read More

In a letter addressed to the Board of Supervisors, the Public Defender’s Office, the ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights (LCCR) requested today that the City enact a policy to ensure that all persons named in San Francisco gang injunctions are given the opportunity to be removed from the injunctions when appropriate. Read More

Can't imagine the library keeping track of the books you browse in the stacks and using that information to put advertising flyers in the books you check-out or "personalize" library services to you?How about the library sharing your book browsing information with other organizations or handing it over to the government when asked?Well, that is exactly what happens when you use most of the major I... Read More

We've blogged about the shortcoming of some muni WiFi plans on several occasions. Many networks were built from the ground-up to invade consumer privacy and free speech for profit. Now several of these systems seem to have fallen flat.EarthLink, once the champion of muni WiFi and a willing partner for many cities across the country, announced in November that it was pulling out of many proposed sy... Read More

The Bay Area's transit systems are about to join other cities and get a single payment card. The TransLink card will let you pay for rides on BART, San Francisco Muni buses, and the Peninsula's Caltrain.The new cards may help you avoid fumbling for cash or sorting through multiple fare cards. But, unless you want to also pay for that trip with your privacy, you should buy the TransLink card with c... Read More

Congressional leaders from throughout the nation released statements expressing their dissatisfaction with the Real ID regulations released today by the Department of Homeland Security.Rep. Tom Allen (D-ME)"We need to repeal REAL ID and replace it with a system that will work and does not pass the cost along to taxpayers."Read statement here.Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester (Ds – MT)"Enough is Enou... Read More

The Department of Homeland Security today issued its final regulations for the implementation of the Real ID Act, the plan to create a national identity card system, which Congress passed in May 2005 with little debate as an attachment to the tsunami and Iraq War appropriations bill.In its new REAL ID regulations, DHS does not resolve any of the threats the law poses to California's privacy, freed... Read More

A recent blog post discussed privacy concerns with the new Bay Area TransLink transit card.

The Dutch RFID transit pass produced by TransLink was recently cracked and cloned.

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At the Consumer Electronics Show last week, top executives from media giants AT&T, NBC/Universal and Microsoft announced that ISPs may be ready to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.But, checking for copyright violations at the network level may end up meaning a lot more high-level snooping at many other types of content as well. To try to catch that potential copyrig... Read More