News & Commentary

In an important victory for privacy rights, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday reinstated a portion of California's landmark financial privacy law that allows consumers to prevent banks from sharing information with affiliated companies about a customer's savings account or buying habits.

On blogs, personal and political websites, and through user-generated content sites, ordinary citizens in extraordinary numbers are recreating a public sphere and reinvigorating the democratic debate at the core of our political system. 46% of Americans have already used the Internet in connection with the political campaign- more than during all of 2004. User-generated content is playing a particularly integral role, with 35% of Americans watching online videos and 10% using social networking sites to engage in political activity.

"We didn't do anything wrong," said Victor Lopez, one of the Latino students at Rodriquez High School (RHS) who in March 2007 were lined up in front of their peers, accused of being gang members, and photographed by Fairfield police. "I was just talking to my friends. The police shouldn't assume we're gang members just because we're Latino and wearing certain colors. Lots of kids were wearing the same thing we were on that day and nothing happened to them."

The Federal Communications Commission chastised Comcast for throttling peer-to-peer applications today, calling the practice unreasonable and ordering Comcast to change its network management policies.

Planning a vacation? Thinking about traveling outside the country?

In a clear victory for free speech, a federal court once again held that the ACLU is right and the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a law that would criminalize constitutionally protected speech on the Internet, is unconstitutional.

Dutch and British transit cards, California Senate ID cards, HID building access cards, some new generation credit cards, and now FasTrak.

Dutch Chipmaker NXP, formerly Philips Semiconductors, is taking Dutch Radboud University to court to try to prevent researchers from publishing their scientific paper showing how the RFID chips used in Dutch travel cards can be copied and cloned.

President Bush signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, at 1:15 p.m. this afternoon in the Rose Garden.