The first panel opened with a discussion of the little-known topic of Flash cookies, a type of software deposited on computers to gather information. It runs through Adobe's Flash multimedia player and isn't deleted when a user clears the standard cookies through their Internet browser.

The technology "clearly circumvents the intentions" of users, said Peter Eckersley, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created an on-line tool that details the wealth of information a Web browser reveals, which can pose privacy concerns when used to profile users.

The EFF's Panopticlick tool takes just a few seconds to pluck out information that a Web browser divulges when visiting a Web site, such as a user's operating system, version numbers for plug-ins, system fonts and even screen size, color and depth.

And many — including the former AT&T technician who produced the documents in the case and the EFF — believe the alleged dragnet surveillance program continues unabated today.

“Nothing has stopped the dragnet,” said Cindy Cohn, the EFF’s legal director, whose case had grown to include all of the nation’s leading internet service providers.

"This goes to show that there's a problem with due process in these kinds of situations," said Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for Internet users and technology companies. "If you're going to kick somebody off the Internet, there's a lot of procedures that need to be put in place to protect the innocent. It doesn't look like those were in place here."

Those with no technical knowledge generally believe that they are anonymous when simply browsing the Web. Those who know more might recognize that IP addresses can be used to do some rough targeting, while browser cookies can be used to track someone across sessions and across IP addresses. But what if your browser itself—even with cookies off and IP addresses out of the picture—was leaving a digital fingerprint at every site you visit?

That possibility lies behind a new experiment from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, something called "Panopticlick."

Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says on privacy: "There are dozens of companies that are making a garage living or maybe more. The problem is if you choose to do business with one of those companies, there's so little to guarantee you're actually getting real privacy." Online privacy is really hard to achieve, he says, and a programming error you don't know about could expose your personal data to the world.

And in fact it turns out that the privacy-protecting technologies that have prospered are noncommercial. There's Adblock Plus, for which the source code is available at no cost. The Tor network, which offers reasonably strong anonymity, is free software using a network run by volunteers.

"If you want privacy from a piece of software, you want to be able to see inside it and see how it works," Eckersley says. "You have that level of assurance with open source that you don't have with a Windows executable." He thinks that a for-profit privacy business could sell a service retroactively: "If there's a way you could fix privacy problems afterwards, there may be a very good business model."

When it comes to Obama transparency, Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy attorney Kurt Opsahl points out that the chief executive told the American public one thing Wednesday night and a federal appeals court another just a few weeks ago...

“What they want to hide will not give some advantage to our adversaries,” Opsahl said in a telephone interview. “They want to protect the telecoms and themselves from the embarrassment to be involved in lobbying to deny millions of Americans their day in court.”

Now, he'll be volunteering at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, traveling with his wife and studying guitar, which he took up after his son died. Barclay will also spend more time reading his favorite humor and law blogs -- and maybe even start his own.

Electronic Frontier Foundation legal director Cindy Cohn hopes "to see the president commit that he meant it when he said it's time to return to the rule of law in this country."

From warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens to detention, treatment and extraordinary rendition of terrorism suspects, Cohn said, Obama's Justice Department has "enthusiastically embraced and extended most of the broad claims of executive power, which, when the Bush administration made them, he and most of the people now in his administration were up in arms against."

8. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

...If you are a technology user of almost any type then the EFF has got your back, and thankfully it's very good at what it does.

Indeed, "it's not an unexpected move from China," agreed Danny O'Brien, international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

On China's charges that the United States maintains a double standard, "it has to be admitted that they're right," O'Brien told TechNewsWorld. "The U.S. does not currently have the world's best track record for that kind of surveillance."

That said, "I don't think if a country goes past what is legal or legitimate under its own laws and the laws of international standards of human rights, they can expect a company to go along with them," O'Brien asserted.

Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation that brought one of the cases, said the decision means “when you’re trying to stop the government from doing something illegal, and if the government does it to enough people, the courts can’t fix it.”

Taking counter measures against such cyber attacks is problematic. Microsoft issued an emergency patch for its Internet Explorer browser this week that it said addressed a vulnerability exploited in the Google hack. The previous week, Google beefed up its own Gmail security by automatically encrypting its e-mail sessions. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said the move was a "significant step to safeguard user's privacy and security."

Bankson vowed on Friday that the EFF will ask the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn Walker's decision in the two class-action suits.

"The alarming upshot of the court's decision is that so long as the government spies on all Americans, the courts have no power to review or halt such mass surveillance even when it is flatly illegal and unconstitutional," said Bankston.

"It's important that these companies speak for themselves in these kinds of issues," said Danny O'Brien, international outreach co-ordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group defending users rights in the digital world.

"I think too strong a position by the State Department makes US companies look like an extension of US foreign policy and that can put them in a very awkward position," said Mr O'Brien.

The Elecronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), whose lawyers brought the case in 2008, expressed deep disappointment.

"This ruling robs innocent telecom customers of their privacy rights without due process of law. Setting limits on Executive power is one of the most important elements of America's system of government, and judicial oversight is a critical part of that," said EFF legal director Cindy Cohn.

But Danny O'Brien, a digital civil liberties activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that Microsoft might actually gain users by taking a more liberal approach and offering more information than Baidu. "At this point, it behooves Bing to become the least censored search engine in China," he says. "Maybe it's time it used its lack of obedience to what the Chinese authorities want as a selling point. Perhaps free speech is part of the brand of American companies abroad."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized how long the illegal phone-record requests were allowed to continue and how much prodding it took for the FBI to change its policies. The EFF has filed a lawsuit against the government and said that the violations revealed in the DOJ document have not been disclosed by the FBI during the course of the ongoing lawsuit.

Nevertheless, there are a couple of things that trouble me about what Verizon is doing. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't believe it's true that broadband account holders are "legally responsible for all activity" on their lines. And neither does Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who's active on copyright issues.

"What they might mean to say is we, Verizon, are going to hold you responsible," von Lohmann said. But the courts have stopped well short of that, von Lohmann said. For example, he noted cases where judges have refused to hold account holders liable for infringements done by their children. In fact, in at least one case a judge ordered the RIAA to pay the attorney fees for a parent it tried to hold indirectly liable for an offspring's file-sharing.

Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said looking for clues in the judge's background or actions thus far in the case is probably fruitless. Cohn remembers how Walker surprised the San Francisco civil liberties group by ruling several times in recent years against the Republican administration and lawyers from his old blue chip law firm in cases arising from the warrantless wiretapping program.

"If you are going to try to make assumptions based on how he's ruled in the past or the firm that he came from, you will be wrong," Cohn said. "He is his own guy."

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission should avoid adopting strict net neutrality rules that would limit broadband providers' flexibly to "address" illegal online file sharing, the Recording Industry Association of America said in comments filed with the FCC on Thursday.

Internet service providers should have authority to block subscribers from sharing music and other files without permission of the copyright owner, the RIAA said. "ISPs are in a unique position to limit online theft," the RIAA said in its comments. "They control the facilities over which infringement takes place and are singularly positioned to address it at the source. Without ISP participation, it is extremely difficult to develop an effective prevention approach."

...

Other groups called on the FCC to stay out of the copyright enforcement business. If ISPs are required to check for copyright infringement, they could interfere with legal online activities, said six digital rights and business groups, including Public Knowledge, the Consumer Electronics Association and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

ISPs are "poorly placed to determine whether or not transfers of content are infringing or otherwise unlawful, a task generally reserved to attorneys, courts, and law enforcement," the groups said in a filing with the FCC. "In short, the issue raised by broadening the 'reasonable network management' exception to include copyright enforcement and the blocking of unlawful content is not whether ISPs may undertake these efforts, but rather whether they may inflict collateral damage on lawful traffic when they do so."

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) is urging individuals to join its petition to convince the FCC to remove language from the proposed net neutrality guidelines which provide a legal loophole for the entertainment industry to "hijack the Internet."

In its comments filed with the FCC, the EFF states "EFF is also concerned that content-based discrimination may be looming on the horizon. The entertainment industry, for example, has been pressing ISPs to implement network-based measures to address the problem of online copyright infringement.7 Experience suggests that these technologies are likely to be overbroad, ineffective, expensive, and impede innovation."

A good example is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed its comments today in opposition to the proposed rules. The EFF is a strong proponent of online freedom -- that's practically the group's raison d'être. It was a vocal critic of Comcast when it surreptitiously interfered with BitTorrent traffic in 2007, and has offered Internet users a tool to help them detect similar violations of Net neutrality by their ISPs. Nevertheless, the group doesn't believe the FCC has as much authority to regulate as the commission asserts.

The digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation helped expose one of the biggest net neutrality violations to date -- Comcast's deliberate throttling of peer-to-peer traffic.
But that doesn't mean the EFF supports the Federal Communications Commission's efforts to craft neutrality rules. In comments filed today, the civil rights organization says the FCC lacks authority to issue neutrality regulations that would ban ISPs from discriminating against content.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group and frequent critic of Google, commended the company in a blog post titled “Uncensoring China — Bravo Google.” Human Rights Watch said that Google’s response to the attacks “sets a great example.” On Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats alike hailed Google’s move.

"China may throw Google out, and it will undoubtedly block Google.cn," said Danny O'Brien, an international coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group.

The contracts typically limit patient comments for five years from the last doctor’s visit and they imply that breaking the terms could land the patients in court. Matthew Zimmerman, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which monitors digital rights, says it’s not likely lawsuits against patients or Web site providers would be successful.

“The doctor can’t legally go to the Web site and demand that the content come down,” said Zimmerman.

But civil liberties groups and technology companies have been cautious about that kind of legislation because it is considered to be "using companies as a wing of U.S. foreign relations policy," said Danny O'Brien, international outreach director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an interview. "But on the other hand, having the back-up and support for a strong human rights agenda from other executives makes companies more comfortable to do the right thing."

"The biggest focus on this from the Hill will surround cybersecurity," O'Brien said. "The real tipping point for Google was attacks on its infrastructure."

Apex denies any wrongdoing and sought to quiet the perception storm with legal action by claiming libel, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl said in the blog post.

"This order dangerously overreaches," Opsahl wrote. "By restricting access to entire Websites, it places a prior restraint on all of the speech on the Websites, even if that speech is unrelated to Apex or Mr. Dharayan. Imagine if a court could order Amazon.com or Yelp.com shut down because of a disparaging review of a single product ... The New Jersey court's overreaching order shutting down these Websites also is inconsistent with federal law to the extent that it holds service providers to account for user posts."

The groups have the support of Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has argued in court that laptop searches are invasive because devices like laptops contain personal data, which people should be able to keep private. EFF has also argued that some searches have been conducted without suspicion.

"This lawsuit will not seek monetary damages for individuals who have been searched; instead, it will focus exclusively on fixing the unconstitutional policy," wrote Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director and lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a blog entry on Wednesday.

It's "an incredibly significant move," said Danny O'Brien, international outreach co-ordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet rights group in San Francisco. "This changes the game because the question won't be 'How can we work in China?' but 'How can we create services that Chinese people can use, from outside of China?"'

Five customers of AT&T had tried to go to court and charge that the government's omnipresent spy, the NSA, had been given by AT&T private information from their phone bills and e-mails. In a first, the Obama administration countered—says Kevin Bankston of Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing these citizens stripped of their privacy—that "the U.S. can never be sued for spying that violated federal surveillance statutes, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or the Wiretap Act."

Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kurt Opsahl said it is one thing to order that allegedly defamatory materials be taken down but quite another to shut down the web sites entirely.

"Imagine if a court could order Amazon.com or Yelp.com shut down because of a disparaging review of a single product," Opsahl said in a critique.

Among the databases: financial records, credit card data, even Blockbuster accounts.

From a privacy standpoint, ''it's a lot and it's quite scary,'' says Lee Tien, an attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at EFF, a San Francisco-based organization that has litigated on issues of bloggers' rights, anonymity, and file sharing among others, believes the court order to shut down the Web sites is "deeply dangerous and wrong," in part, because it was aimed at the entire Web sites and not just the posts or comments in question.

Sports leagues are likely to become more prescriptive about what images can and cannot be used from its games, according to Cindy Cohn, the legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group focused on digital rights. To fans, that may take the form of more restrictions listed on the backs of their tickets. This is likely to lead to more tension between the league, its fans and the news media.

“There’s a fundamental disconnect between fans who consider teams part of their culture, history and town, and the owners of the teams that view them as their private property,” Cohn said. “One saving grace is that they do care about their image and they don’t want to look like jack-booted thugs. But free speech is important.”

He alleges that the bloggers defamed him by calling the NAPW a scam -- but doesn't provide the context surrounding those alleged statements. That alone is reason for the judge to reject his attempt to learn the bloggers' identities, says Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Matt Zimmerman. "You can't determine if statements are defamatory in isolation," he says.

And so, to rally the troops, Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, posted his famous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. He declared the "global social space we are building" to be "naturally independent of the tyrannies" governments seek to impose.

"The court should recognize the Chamber's lawsuit for what it is -- an attempt to use intellectual property and related law to punish a political parody that the Chamber found humorless, and which cast unwanted light on its controversial position on climate change," the Yes Men argue in a motion filed on their behalf by the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation.

That’s unacceptable, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Kevin Bankston, who says that’s not the Facebook people signed up for.

“Just because Facebook users want to share personal info with their friends does not mean they want to share it with any nefarious parties on the internet,” Bankston said, “but that is exactly what Facebook is forcing its users to do.”

The proposal, brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, would pave the way for third-party apps on the iPhone — hence turning the iPhone into a blank slate to run whatever its owner wishes.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good primer on what you should do if you're ever subpoenaed for information you don't want to hand over.