News & Commentary

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 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 about its desired merger.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 neutrality.

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.