News & Commentary

Would you allow a stranger to sift through your purse or wallet and take your driver's license? Would you want your children or grandchildren to tell passers-by on the street what school they attend or their student ID numbers?

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.

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.

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.

According to Google, the "time was right" for the company to post a link to a privacy policy on its homepage.

Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the Northern District of California issued a ruling blasting key arguments made by supporters of telecom immunity last week.