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What do your cell phone and the current trial of twenty-six Americans, many of them CIA agents, in an Italian court for the 2003 kidnapping of Muslim cleric Abu Omar have to do with each other?Both your phone and the phones of undercover CIA agents act as silent trackers, constantly transmitting physical location. In an Italian court room last week, one of the lead investigators described how poli... Read More

We have written numerous posts discussing how companies want to know who you are, what you do, and where you go online because this information can translate into big advertising revenue. Your photos may be the new frontier.Gmail, the popular email service, already "reads" your email to display relevant sponsored links. Why not your pictures? New technology can analyze photos at an amazing level o... Read More

Charter Communications, one of the nation's largest cable Internet providers, plans to begin monitoring the online activities of its high- speed Internet customers and then sell the data for targeted advertising.The announcement is already drawing criticism from activists, academics, and bipartisan members of Congressdue to privacy concerns.Charter is in the position to observe and analyze nearly ... Read More

A coalition of privacy and consumer organizations from California to Washington, D.C. have sent a letter today urging Google to post a prominent link on its homepage to its privacy policy in accordance with the California Online Privacy Protection Act (OPPA) and the widespread practice of commercial web sites.The organizations include EPIC, the California-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the Wo... Read More

The blogosphere has been bubbling over the past few weeks over the subject of laptop searches and seizures at international borders. The source of the buzz? A couple of recent court cases. Read More

A federal grand jury on Thursday issued an indictment against a Missouri woman accused of creating a fake MySpace page to bully a 13-year old girl who later committed suicide. The high profile, and emotionally charged case, has drawn media attention from around the world.Unfortunately, the prosecutors have relied on a novel and troubling interpretation of the law in order to go after the MySpace b... Read More

The FBI has withdrawn an unconstitutional national security letter issued to the Internet Archive after a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As the result of a settlement agreement, the FBI withdrew the NSL and agreed to the unsealing of the case, finally allowing the Archive's founder to speak out for the first time about his battle aga... Read More

The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation can today reveal their participation in a long fight with the FBI over free speech and government-imposed secrecy.In November 2007, the FBI delivered a National Security Letter to the Internet Archive, which ordered them to hand over detailed usage logs on several users.Both the ACLU and EFF fought the legal request, which we argued was unconstitutional.... Read More

The government uses National Security Letters (NSLs) to demand access to sensitive records in the custody of Internet service providers, financial institutions, credit reporting agencies, and many other kinds of organizations. In almost all cases, recipients of the NSLs are served with gag orders that prohibit them from disclosing that they have received the letters. The NSL statute v... Read More

The Internet Archive is a digital library, founded in 1996 with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Internet Archive's collections includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages. To fulfill its mission, the Archive works with national libraries, muse... Read More

In response to a letter from the ACLU of Northern California, the Linden Unified School District will not read private text messages stored on students' cell phones unless there is good reason to believe that the search will show that a law or school rule was violated. The District's new policy also limits the scope of the search to the alleged infraction leading to the seizure of a cell phone. Read More

The Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference is on May 20-23, 2008 at the Omni Hotel in New Haven, Connecticut. Early Bird Registration is open until this Friday, May 2.This year, the 18th annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference is focusing on those issues at the forefront of technology policy this election year. In the areas of privacy, intellectual property, cybersecurity, telecommun... Read More