Norman Oder updates us on the arguments at the Google Books settlement hearing. I found the several following points made by speakers at the hearing particulary interesting.
There are currently no firm standards on the kinds of Fourth Amendment protections that should apply to cell phone tracking data. This is becoming an issue as GPS and other tracking technologies have been added to cell phone to satisfy E911 requirements, and as police agencies have discovered the potential benefits of mobile-phone location data.
Feb 062010
The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years.
A federal trial court in Oregon ruled that a suspect’s rights were not violated when police — tipped by a neighbor — accessed his unprotected WiFi network and saw child pornography shared via his iTunes library.
In a Note called Defogging the Cloud: Applying Fourth Amendment Principles to Evolving Privacy Expectations in Cloud Computing, David A. Couillard explores the potential applicability of the Fourth Amendment to data stored in offsite servers: spreadsheets in Google Docs, accounting data hosted on FreshBooks, and pretty much everything synced through DropBox, just to name three example services.
FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni said in an interview Monday that the FBI technically violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act when agents invoked nonexistent emergencies to collect records.
The Supreme Court has accepted a new case on to its docket concerning the constitutionality of a Washington State law being used as the basis to publish the names of signers of a petition to restrict gay rights.
The TSA issued a directive aimed at instituting new security measures. After two bloggers published it, the TSA issued subpoenas that sought to compel them to reveal their sources. Why did the TSA think they could do this, and did they have the power to enforce their request?
Should accessing content via the Google Books service provide the same protections as one would receive when relying on a bookstore? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU say, “Yes.”
President Barack Obama confirmed Friday that the White House will be creating a new office to be led by a cybersecurity czar. The office will be in charge of coordinating efforts to secure government networks and U.S. critical infrastructures.
May 212009
Image via Wikipedia
Should so-called “shield laws,” intended to provide protection for journalists from being forced to reveal their confidential sources, apply to bloggers? The current answer seems to be “no,” although the question must be asked on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis.
In the United States, there is no federal shield law, for journalists or bloggers. There are, [...]
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