Two Battles Won: PATRIOT Reform AND State Secrets Reform Bills Pass House Committee

Deeplink by Kevin Bankston

After a long two days of legislative battle, the House Judiciary Committee just finished its second day of debate on Chairman Conyers' PATRIOT reform bill, HR 3845 (see our wrap-up of the first day). Thanks in no small part to those of you who used our action alert, the Committee rejected almost all amendments that would have weakened the bill's reforms and voted to recommend the bill to the House floor by a vote of 16 to 10.

Even better, the Committee kept going after it was finished with PATRIOT to consider Representative Nadler's State Secret Protection Act (HR 984), which would reform the state secrets privilege that the government has repeatedly used to try and throw EFF's warrantless wiretapping cases out of court. After an impassioned defense by Mr. Nadler, who described how the government has used the privilege like a "magic incantation" to cover-up wrongdoing and warned that state secrecy "is the greatest threat to liberty at present," the bill passed with even better numbers than the PATRIOT bill, 18 to 12!

It was, to say the least, a busy couple of days in the House Judiciary Committee. If you want the entire blow-by-blow of both day's meetings, check out our Twitter stream at @EFF.

Admittedly, the PATRIOT bill isn't all we had hoped for — as we described yesterday, it's been weakened in a number of ways due to quiet pressure from the Obama Administration — but it passed through the Committee with most of its major reforms intact, and it is a substantial improvement over the PATRIOT bill approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee last month. Meanwhile, the state secrets reform bill made it through the committee without being watered down at all, with only a few technical changes. Thanks and congratulations to the representatives and activists that worked so hard to make that happen.

Eyes now turn to the Senate, where the Senate Judiciary Committee's PATRIOT Bill (S. 1692) will soon land on the floor, and to the House Intelligence Committee, which will soon be marking-up its own competing PATRIOT bill with much fewer reforms (HR 3969). So, the war is far from over. But two important battles were won today.

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House Committee Heads into Second Day of PATRIOT Reform Battle

Legislative Analysis by Kevin Bankston

After an eventful day yesterday, the first day of the House Judiciary Committee's "mark-up" of Chairman Conyers' PATRIOT reform bill (HR 3845), the Committee is starting its second day of PATRIOT debate at 11 AM EST this morning. State secrets reform is also still on the Committee's schedule, so it's looking to be a big day.

You can watch the sparks fly via the Committee's live webcast, and @EFF will be live-tweeting important developments as they happen. You might also want to check out @ACLU, @normative and @emptywheel, who did a great job live-tweeting yesterday's Committee meeting. Stay tuned to Deeplinks for a full update when the mark-up is over, and if your Representative is on the Committee, please visit EFF's action center to push for strong PATRIOT and state secrecy reforms.

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House Committee Considers PATRIOT Reform (UPDATED)

Deeplink by Kevin Bankston

The House Judiciary Committee has recessed its meeting to "mark-up" Chairman Conyers' PATRIOT renewal and reform bill, the USA Patriot Amendments Act of 2009 (HR 3845), so that the committee members can attend a vote on the House floor. We don't know when they'll be back — we'll try to tweet via @EFF if and when they do return — but in the meantime, here are the major developments that you missed if you weren't watching the live webcast. Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute also has a great blow-by-blow with characteristic snark via @Normative.

The mark-up got off to a somewhat worrisome start when Chairman Conyers introduced a "manager's amendment" making numerous changes to the bill to address concerns raised by the Obama Administration about some of the bill's reforms. We have a copy of the amendment and a description of the changes it makes to the bill. Based on a very quick review, most of the changes seem relatively minor, but they are definitely not an improvement from a civil liberties perspective. So, once again, the Obama Administration is quietly working to stop reforms to the PATRIOT Act even though Senator Obama was one of the PATRIOT Act's staunchest critics.

On a brighter note, the first and only vote of the morning went very well. That vote was on an amendment offered by Representative Gallegly (R-CA) to eliminate the bill's special protections for library and bookseller records. The original Conyers bill would have flatly prohibited the government from using PATRIOT Section 215 orders to obtain library and bookseller records. Unfortunately, at the behest of the Administration, Conyers' manager's amendment weakened that provision to allow Section 215 orders for such records, but only where the government can show specific and articulable facts linking the records suspected terrorists or spies. Gallegly's amendment would have removed even that protection, allowing the government to use PATRIOT Section 215 to obtain the library and book records of Americans without any link to terrorism or foreign intelligence. After spirited debate, the amendment from Gallegly failed on what appeared to be a party line vote, with 21 committee members voting "no" and 13 voting "yes."

Hopefully, the failure of the Gallegly amendment bodes well for the action we'll see when the Committee reconvenes after the current floor vote, and we can expect the bill to pass through the committee with its strongest reforms intact. But we're not out of the woods yet, so if your representative is on the House Judiciary Committee and you haven't yet voiced your support for PATRIOT reform, please visit EFF's action center now!

UPDATE: The Committee reconvened around 3:30 p.m. EST and got back down to work but didn't get to a final vote on the bill; the committee will reconvene tomorrow at 10 a.m. EST. In the meantime, here's what happened when the Committee came back from the House floor:

Representative Lungren (R-Ca) introduced the second amendment of the day to weaken the reforms in the PATRIOT bill — in particular, to eliminate the bill's requirement that the government "minimize" the data that it obtains using national security letters (NSLs) to better protect the privacy of U.S. persons without any link to foreign intelligence. Unfortunately, as with the previous issue raised by Representative Gallegly's amendment, Conyers' manager's amendment already watered down the minimization provision in the bill at the request of the Obama administration. The original version would have thankfully required that the government destroy records collected using NSLs when those records are about persons that are no longer of interest in an authorized investigation, and the new manager's amendment eliminated that important new reform. Thankfully, the bill's minimization provision wasn't further watered down by Representative Lungren — his amendment failed by a vote of 8 to 18.

Then, another Republican representative offered an amendment to weaken the bill's reforms to the NSL power. This time, it was Representative Chaffetz from Utah seeking to reduce the bill's strong standard for the issuance of NSLs. The bill would require the government to have a written statement of specific and articulable facts demonstrating that the records they seek with an NSL pertain to suspected spies or terrorists; Chaffetz wanted to weaken that standard by only requiring the government to have a statement of facts demonstrating that the records are relevant to a government investigation. That amendment failed like the ones before, on a voice vote.

The Committee then voted on Conyers' manager's amendment, which disappointingly weakens the original bill in a variety of ways (see, e.g., the weakening of NSL and Section 215 protections mentioned above). That amendment, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, passed by a vote of 19 to 11.

Finally, on another ominous note, one of the Democrats — Schiff of California — offered his own amendment to weaken the bill's reforms of PATRIOT Section 215. Like Chaffetz with NSLs, Schiff wanted to remove the requirement that the government support its application for a 215 order with "specific and articulable facts," and with the unfortunate support of Chairman Conyers, that amendment passed by a vote of 19 to 12. The only consolation is that it could have been worse — Representative Lungren had offered a "second-degree" amendment to the Schiff amendment to make it even worse, but that second-degree amendment failed 13 to 19.

So, it's a mixed bag so far as we head into our second day of the House Judiciary Committee's PATRIOT mark-up. The supporters of reform have done a good job of beating back bad amendments from the Republican camp, but we're also starting to see Chairman Conyers and other Democrats working to weaken their own bill in a number of ways at the request of the Administration. It looks like they could use some shoring up before tomorrow's meeting from folks like you who care about civil liberties and privacy. If you haven't already, please visit EFF's action center today!

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Leaked ACTA Internet Provisions: Three Strikes and a Global DMCA

Commentary by Gwen Hinze

Update: The leaked European Commission memo is now online.

Negotiations on the highly controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement start in a few hours in Seoul, South Korea. This week's closed negotiations will focus on "enforcement in the digital environment." Negotiators will be discussing the Internet provisions drafted by the US government. No text has been officially released but as Professor Michael Geist and IDG are reporting, leaks have surfaced. The leaks confirm everything that we feared about the secret ACTA negotiations. The Internet provisions have nothing to do with addressing counterfeit products, but are all about imposing a set of copyright industry demands on the global Internet, including obligations on ISPs to adopt Three Strikes Internet disconnection policies, and a global expansion of DMCA-style TPM laws.

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As Congress Considers State Secrets Reform, Obama Admin Tries to Shut Down Yet Another Warrantless Wiretapping Lawsuit

Deeplink by Kevin Bankston

In a Court filing late Friday night, the Obama Administration attempted to dress up in new clothes its embrace of one of the worst Bush Administration positions — that courts cannot be allowed to review the National Security Agency's massive, well-documented program of warrantless surveillance. In doing so it demonstrated that it will not willingly set limits on its own power and reinforced the need for Congress to step in and reform the so-called 'state secrets' privilege. The House Judiciary Committee will be taking the first step toward such reform when it begins to consider the State Secret Protection Act of 2009 (HR 984) this Wednesday, so please visit our action center now to voice your support!

We Hate to Say We Told You So

EFF was skeptical when the Obama Administration announced in September its new policy on when the Executive Branch would assert the state secrets privilege in litigation. We argued that the Administration's promise of self-restraint was no replacement for Congressional reform of the oft-abused privilege, considering how the new administration had already embraced the Bush Administration's position on warrantless wiretapping and secrecy by invoking the state secrets privilege in an attempt to have EFF's case against the government, Jewel v. NSA, tossed out of court. Based on that experience, we feared that the purported change in policy would result in no change at all when it came to lawsuits over the NSA spying program.

The Shubert Filing: New State Secrets Policy Results in No Change

Our fears proved to be well-founded on last Friday night, when the government moved to dismiss yet another warrantless wiretapping lawsuit based on state secrecy. That lawsuit, Shubert v. Obama, was originally filed back in 2006 as Shubert v. Bush and had been on hold while courts grappled with the state secrets issue in other warrantless wiretapping cases such as EFF's Hepting v. AT&T. The case was recently put on track by the federal district court that is handling all of the wiretapping lawsuits, thus sparking the government's motion to dismiss.

That motion included the first assertion of the state secrets privilege under the Administration's "new" state secrets policy (motion is here, with attached exhibits here, here and here). Sadly, the motion amounted to a rehashing of the exact same state secrecy arguments originated by the Bush Administration and pressed by the Obama Administration in Jewel: that any attempt to have the courts rule on the legality of the NSA program would harm national security and that the courts should be blocked from considering whether the surveillance is legal or constitutional.

What a Difference a Year Makes for Obama and Holder

The government's position is in stark contrast to candidate Obama's criticism of Bush-era abuse of the state secrets privilege. For example, in June, 2008, now Attorney General Holder said in a speech that:

"Steps taken in the aftermath of 9/11 were both excessive and unlawful. Our government . . . approved secret electronic surveillance of American citizens . . . These steps were wrong when they were initiated and they are wrong today."

Similarly, the Obama-Biden campaign website includes state secrets as part of "The Problem" that President Obama would address, complaining that the Bush Administration "invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of court."

Attorney General Eric Holder took the rare step of putting out a press release to defend the Friday filing, which was immediately picked up by the press. Luckily, we were standing by to express our disappointment and inject a dose of reality into the Justice Department's spin (see our quotes in stories by the Associated Press, Bloomberg, CNN, and ABC). As one EFF representative explained to AP, "The Obama administration has essentially adopted the position of the Bush administration in these cases, even though candidate Obama was incredibly critical of both the warrantless wiretapping program and the Bush administration's abuse of the state secrets privilege." EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn similarly pointed out the Obama Administration's hypocrisy in Bloomberg's coverage: considering that Obama "campaigned for a return to the rule of law," "it's disappointing...to have them turn around and say that courts can't even look at these cases."

Congressional Reform of State Secrets Privilege is Needed

Holder's defensiveness probably stemmed from the fact that this very week, on Wednesday, the influential House Judiciary Committee will be considering long-delayed legislation to rein in the state secrets privilege. That bill, the State Secret Protection Act (HR 984), was introduced by Representative Nadler, the chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties who invited EFF to provide testimony in favor of state secrets reform last year, and is co-sponsored by twenty-three other Representatives.

Representative Nadler's bill aims to prevent the government from doing exactly what the Obama Administration is now trying to do in the Shubert case: force the dismissal of lawsuits at the outset based on blanket claims of state secrecy. The bill would, instead, provide clear and sensible procedures for courts to securely review evidence that the government claims is secret, and prevent cases from being dismissed based on state secrecy until plaintiffs have had an opportunity to discover all non-privileged evidence. In other words, the bill would do what the Executive Branch has been unwilling to do on its own, regardless of its new state secrets policy: fairly balance national security concerns with the right of plaintiffs to have their day in court.

Considering the Obama Administration's continuing insistence that the state secrets privilege amounts to an immunity for government law-breaking, this much-needed reform legislation is going to face an uphill battle when it comes before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. So, we need your help today: please visit our action center now to find out if your Representative is on the Committee and take action to let them know that you support the State Secret Protection Act. Because as the Obama Administration's filing in the Shubert case makes clear, no president — neither Bush, nor Obama, nor anyone who comes after — can be trusted to exercise self-restraint when it comes to state secrecy.

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New York Court Scores Over Oregon In Recent Email Privacy Opinions

Legal Analysis by Jennifer Granick

Last week, two new district court opinions took opposing views on the question of whether the Fourth Amendment protects stored email. One of the cases easily adopted the prevailing view that the Constitution protects electronic communications, while the other ignored existing U.S. Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit precedent to find consumers have no expectation of privacy in messages stored with third parties. EFF will be watching these developments closely as we continue to press for email privacy rights in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in U.S. v. Warshak and in other matters.

Email -- like letters, telephone calls or documents you keep in a rented locker -- should be fully protected by the Fourth Amendment. As with letters, calls or rented property, your expectation of privacy against the government does not weaken simply because you entrust the document to a third party for delivery or storage. Law enforcement needs a warrant to intercept your phone calls, even though they travel over wires owned by the phone company, or to search your storage locker or hotel room, even though the property owner has the right to enter in some circumstances. The same protections should and must apply to email. It matters not that a third party transports the messages (mail), that they are capable of interception (phone calls), or that they are kept on a third-party server (rented storage).

The government conceded Fourth Amendment protection in one of last week’s opinions and successfully fought against it in the other. In the New York case, United States v. Cioffi, the government wanted to search the defendant’s personal email account for messages showing that he and a confederate knew that they were misleading customers in a financial fraud scheme. The affidavit in support of the warrant asked for copies of messages related to the fraud offense but the warrant itself [more broadly]purported to give the agents permission to obtain all email
through a certain date. The government conceded that the e-mails were Fourth Amendment protected. The disputed issue was whether the warrant satisfied the constitutional requirement that it describe with particularity the place to be searched and the things to be seized. The court held that the warrant was overbroad because it authorized officers to obtain emails other than those for which there was probable cause, and therefore suppressed even the fraud-related messages that were discovered. This New York district court was right. The contents of electronic communications are protected by the Fourth Amendment, and that protection means law enforcement needs a valid warrant, not an obviously overbroad one, to search or seize the messages.

In contrast, the government in the Oregon case, In re: United States, successfully argued that you have no protectable Fourth Amendment rights in your email, at least in part because it is stored with third parties. Agents had applied for a warrant for email under the Stored Communications Act ("SCA"), but did not want to serve post-seizure notice of the return of the warrant on the account holders. After concluding that the SCA only required notice to the ISP, the court then asked whether the Fourth Amendment required notice on the account holder, or whether notice on the ISP was constitutionally adequate. While giving lip service to the idea that email is protected by the Fourth Amendment, the court nevertheless stated that a user has no protected expectation of privacy when she stores her messages with a third party. The court also pointed to email service privacy policies to assert that users are, or should be, aware that their personal information and the contents of their online communications are accessible to the ISP and its employees and thus can be shared with the government "in appropriate circumstances".

In re: United States is wrongly decided. While supposedly starting from the (correct) assumption that the Fourth Amendment protects email, the court then concludes that one has no expectation of privacy in materials stored with a third party. Email uses a store-and-forward transmission protocol; the messages are always transmitted through third parties. Moreover, almost all consumer email is stored at some point with a third party, whether as long term backup or incident to transmission. Thus, the presumption the court says it adopts is essentially meaningless; only those few corporations and individuals that host their own email would be arguably entitled to any constitutional protection the Oregon court says it assumes applies.

The opinion is also contrary to binding Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit precedent. In the 1967 cases of Berger and Katz, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment strongly protects telephone calls even though they travel over wires owned by the telephone company, or can be intercepted with a listening device on the outside of a telephone booth. The Court confirmed protection for the contents of communications in Smith v. Maryland, when it distinguished Katz from its holding allowing warrantless collection of dialed telephone numbers from the phone company, since the contents of communications were still protected. The Ninth Circuit, in which the Oregon court resides, has further confirmed that the Fourth Amendment protects electronic communications as well as phone calls in Quon v. Arch Wireless. In that case, the Department of Justice argued exactly what it argued in In re United States -- that because email and text messages are stored by third parties with the practical ability to read them, senders and recipients have no expectation of privacy in those messages. The appellate court rejected that view, holding that text messages, and presumably emails, are like letters or packages, and are protected even though the shipper could open them.

The Oregon court also got the analysis of the effect of terms of service and acceptable use policies dead wrong. In Quon, the Ninth Circuit followed its prior ruling in United States v. Heckenkamp, which held that a student did not lose his reasonable expectation of privacy in information stored on his computer, despite a university policy that it could access his computer in limited circumstances while connected to the university’s network. Like hotel rooms or storage lockers, a limited right of access on the part of the facility owner does not defeat all expectation of privacy versus the government. Moreover, the Oregon court itself had to admit that users might expect government access – not in all circumstances, but only "in appropriate circumstances", a situation that users can reasonably expect would involve a warrant based on probable cause.

There is other foolishness in the Oregon opinion, including the hyper-technical assertion that when the government copies your email, they have not seized your data because you still have a copy, so the government collection does not “meaningfully interfere” with your "possessory interest".

What’s even more disturbing, the Ninth Circuit may not get an opportunity to correct the Oregon district court. Since In re United States involved an ex parte proceeding, as of yet there is no real party in interest to appeal the court clearly erroneous opinion. Only if someone gets charged with a crime, and if that defendant becomes aware that the evidence the government intends to use was obtained as a result of a seizure that did not comport with the Fourth Amendment, will there be an opportunity for the affected party to ask for appellate review. This is one reason why EFF’s practice serving as amicus to district courts considering the applicability of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Fourth Amendment to cell phone tracking, email seizures and other pre-indictment investigative techniques is so important – we may have only one chance to get it right before the government barges in without proper cause or authorization.

For other legal analysis of U.S. v. Cioffi and In re United States, please read Orin Kerr's post on The Volokh Conspiracy or Venkat Balasubramani's assessment on Eric Goldman's blog.

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DVR is TV's New BFF

Commentary by Tim Jones

Digital Video Recorders, once considered a mortal threat by the entertainment industry, have now become its new best friend. It's just the latest example of how the industry's constant warnings of the dangers of "piracy" frequently turn out to be baseless hysteria.

Remember 2001? Digital Video Recorders ("DVRs") like TiVo and ReplayTV were poised to win mainstream adoption, allowing consumers to fast-forward past advertisements more easily than before. In response, the entertainment industry behaved predictably — it freaked out and filed a bunch of lawsuits.

Industry analysts claimed that DVR "potentially threatens the very lifeblood of how television is funded and how it's used for marketing and advertising." A coalition of television studios including Viacom, Disney, and NBC filed suit against SonicBlue, makers of ReplayTV, arguing that skipping commercials "effectively circumvents the means of payment to copyright owners for the programming being viewed... (and) thus constitutes copyright infringement."

Fast-forward eight years, and these claims turn out to be — surprise! — wrong. This weekend, The New York Times announced that "DVR ratings now add significantly to live ratings and thus to ad revenue."

A mystified NBC President Of Research called the situation "completely counterintuitive." But the reason behind the revenue isn't counterintuitive at all — it's obvious: When consumers are granted the ability to watch television whenever and however they want, they watch more TV — not less. That's a simple result which could only be "counterintuitive" to an industry that all too frequently treats its own best customers like criminals.

It's a cycle that by now has become sadly familiar: When the industry meets a new technology, it panics and fights it tooth-and-nail. Eventually, the industry loses this fight, often squashing innovation or arbitrarily singling out a few citizens for punishment along the way. Finally, the same technology ends up benefiting the same short-sighted industry — but rather than learn their lesson, the same corporations are usually busy repeating the same cycle all over again with something else. It happened with the VCR, the audio cassette, and even the turntable.

With a track-record like this, it's mind-boggling that the entertainment industry's schemes to "fight piracy" retain any credibility whatsoever. Unfortunately, thanks in large part to the industry's deep coffers, many in government continue to take their claims seriously. As a result, the UK is close to implementing a "three-strikes" policy of disconnecting illegal file-sharers from the Internet — even as a new poll reveals that those same file-sharers are the industry's best customers. Here in the USA, Hollywood is once again lobbying the FCC to introduce "Selectable Output Control" — a scheme which would grant the industry veto-power over new technologies.

Until legislators learn to stop trusting the entertainment industry's faulty "intuition," laws will continue to hurt innovation, consumers, and — yup — even the very industry they've been designed to protect.

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Hey, Texas Instruments -- Stop Digging Holes

News Update by Jennifer Granick

Texas Instruments (TI) ultimately failed to stand behind their misguided claim that calculator hobbyists violated copyright law by having public, online discussions about techniques to get more functionality from TI calculators. Yet the company continues to dig itself into new holes by issuing more improper take-down letters.

Several weeks ago, TI sent a barrage of letters claiming that the calculator enthusiasts' discussions about the discovery of calculator operating system signing keys -- and the keys themselves -- violated the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). TI demanded that the posts be taken down. EFF sent a letter to TI on behalf of three such bloggers, explaining why the company's legal claim was wrong, and stated that the men would restore their posts absent legitimate objection from the company. TI ignored both the letter and the deadline, and so the posts are now back online. Mr. Smith's post is here, Mr. Wilson's here, and Mr. Cross's here. You can find EFF's letter to TI here.

While it's no surprise that TI gave up when it found itself in the legal wrong, it is scandalous that the company continues to send its improper demands to other bloggers and hosting companies. In fact, TI has sent an identical take-down demand to Mr. Smith's university complaining about the same OS keys having been posted on our client's student webpage, and demanding that the school take the materials down from that URL. Today, Mr. Smith filed a DMCA Section 512 counternotice to continue the fight. Hopefully other calculator hobbyists who have received TI's baseless demands will consider standing up against the erroneous claim that reverse-engineered OS signing keys are illegal numbers that can not be published, discussed or linked to.

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UK and Three Strikes: What Not to Do in an Election Year

Call To Action by Danny O'Brien

The arbitrary termination of Internet access for repeated accusations of copyright infringement -- "three strikes" -- is as profoundly unpopular in the UK as it is elsewhere. National experts have generally come out against the idea, from government civil servants who previously omitted it from a public consultation document as too drastic, to the counter-intelligence MI5 unit, who apparently fear it will encourage an encrypted and unpoliceable darknet, to many of the artists it is supposed to protect. Net users, of course, are aghast at such a disproportionate and ineffective scheme, and 70% of Britons came out against it in a recent poll.

Nonetheless, UK Business secretary Peter Mandelson today stated explicitly that he intends to include three strikes in the upcoming digital economy bill. In a subsequent press conference, a government spokesman emphasized that the arbitrariness of this Internet enforcement mechanism will be proportional only to how ineffective it is as a deterrent:

If it [illegal filesharing] is a massive problem we could turn on a fast, powerful response... If there is a little problem we can be more proportionate. How draconian we are will be a matter for the secretary of state to decide at the time."

Is the UK really set to join France in a legally mandated three strikes regime? Even with Britain's generally government-friendly lawmaking process, that seems up for question.

A UK general election is due to occur within the next few months (the exact date is up to current Prime Minister Gordon Brown, but he is required to name the date before June 2010). The Conservative chairman for the committee considering the proposed digital economy bill has already expressed scepticism that there is time in this parliament if such a "hot potato" as three strikes is included.

The more British voters write to their MPs to complain, the hotter that potato will get. Unpopular and arbitrary proposals as three strikes will not sit well with any politicians facing an election in their near future.

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minilinks for 2009-10-27

miniLinks by Hugh D'Andrade

• CIA Invests In Social Network Monitoring
  Watch what you tweet! Intelligence agencies are investing in new tech to monitor and archive public activity on blogs and social networks.
  
• NYT Op-Ed: A Win For Free Speech
  The Times Editorial Board on why the Craigslist win in federal court matters.
  
• UK's MI5 Opposes 3 Strikes
  British intelligence is against cutting off internet access for accused pirates -- because might encourage people to use crypto.
  
• Resisting Corporate Bullying On the Net
  EFF Fellow Cory Doctorow on how and why to stand up to bogus DMCA takedowns and other forms of censorship.
  
• The French Disconnection
  France's Conseil Constitutionnel has ruled Internet disconnection law is now legal.
  
• Fair Use: What It Means, Why It Matters
  In the wake of Shepard Fairey's admission of lying in his fair use case, Tim Wu explains why fair use is important.
  
• Study: Can't Stop Filesharing
  A new study finds that the millions spent by the RIAA and MPAA to stop BitTorrent pirats has had no noticeable effect.
  
• Canadian DMCA? That's Funny
  CBC's "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" has a funny sketch on proposed Canadian copyright law reform.
  

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