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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

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

Claiming “state secrets” are at stake, the U.S. government today requested the dismissal of a federal lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against Boeing Company subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. for its participation in the CIA’s unlawful “extraordinary rendition” program. The ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of five rendition victims who were kidnapped by the CIA and secretly tra... 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

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

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

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

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

The ranking members of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, Democrat Herb Kohl from Wisconsin and Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, have just sent a joint letter urging the FTC to thoroughly explore Google's planned $3.1 billion purchase of online marketing company, DoubleClick. Google has been taking substantial hits in the press for the last few months abo... Read More

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security Privacy Office has announced a public workshop, CCTV: Developing Privacy Best Practices, December 17-18, 2007, at the Hilton Arlington Hotel (Ballston Metro Stop) in Arlington Virginia.The workshop will provide a forum to discuss the impact on privacy and civil liberties of CCTV and begin to inform the development of best practices for the use of CCTV by go... Read More