Lenz then teamed with online free-speech advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation to get a judge to declare that her video was a "fair use" of the song. She then sought damages against Universal, the world's biggest record company, for sending a meritless takedown request.

"This isn't about who won the Olympic gold yesterday; this is for sharing what happened to me as well," said Michael Barclay, a California patent attorney and a fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"That is pretty broad. I would not be surprised if someone had been doing just what is in this patent before 2006."

The National Coalition Against Censorship and the Electronic Frontier Foundation both chimed in this week in support of Greenfield.

"If a user community video is flagged as inappropriate, YouTube should at least have an appeals process to allow an artist to explain the artistic merit," EFF attorney Kurt Opsahl wrote on the organization's blog. "While we understand YouTube's desire to keep pornography off its servers, it must also understand that not all nude art is pornographic."

"It absolutely is a threat," said Danny O'Brien, international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation of San Francisco.

"If intermediaries like Google or the person who hosts your Web site can be thrown in jail in any country for the acts of other people and suddenly have a legal obligation to prescreen everything anyone says on their Web site before putting it online, the tools for free speech that everyone uses on the Net would grind to a halt."

Regardless, Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who focuses on privacy, said the message of Please Rob Me is still important.

"There is clearly a privacy issue here _ one they are trying to shed light on," he said.

"There are physical and economic safety risks when you're publicizing to the world where you are," says Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It's obviously a treasure trove of information for criminals. PleaseRobMe is a good demonstration of how easy it is."

This and other intelligence-activity disclosures appear in heavily redacted documents that were released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They came in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act project the organization is conducting to obtain oversight information from intelligence agencies.

EFF received more than 800 pages from intelligence oversight reports created by the Defense Department inspector general that examine actions, conducted by various branches of the department, that are believed to be illegal.

Attorney Lee Tien of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation shares Harris’ concern for online rights.

“The threat to internet free speech from nations around the world that don’t have the same laws and attitudes about free speech is absolutely a constant problem and is getting worse,” Tien said.

Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a call today, "We find it troubling that copyright law is being invoked here. Microsoft doesn't sell this manual. There's no market for this work. It's not a copyright issue. John's copying of it is fair use. We don't do this anywhere else in speech law."

For example, in cases involving libel or trade secrets, said Cohn, "You go to court, you make a case and you get an injunction. You don't just file a form. DMCA makes censorship easy."

Eddan Katz, international affairs director of San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, argued that the incident itself might have gone unreported if not for the video. That supposition was supported by a statement made to authorities by the autistic teen's father, who expressed anguish at seeing on the video how his son had suffered but hadn't had the courage to tell his family.

Thanks to the footage and Google's co-operation, the four bullies were identified and sentenced by a juvenile court to community service.

Exposing wrongdoing and abuse, Katz said, is a strong argument against placing limits on the Web.

"The implication would be that those videos exposing wrongdoing on the part of government, corruption, or organized crime would not be aired. How do we differentiate between the positive exposure of that kind of information, and the negative?"

Matt Zimmerman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says the U.S. shields Internet speech from government interference. In Europe -- not so much.

MATT ZIMMERMAN: The First Amendment provides much greater protection for free expression than do comparable laws in Europe.

"It's unfortunate that the bill does not seem to recognize that identity management systems can in themselves be a threat to privacy and anonymity," Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told TechNewsWorld. "Given our constitutional commitment to civil liberties like freedom of speech, of religion, of the press, of association, and of course the right to privacy, there are obvious limits to how far identity management should and can lawfully go."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which supports and defends freedom in the digital world, has listed 7 “corporations of interest” who are violating this call by selling surveillance technology to the Chinese government, Katz said. These corporations include: Cisco, Nortel, Oracle, Motorola, EMC, Sybase and L-1 Identity Solutions. It has also launched a “Surveillance Self-Defense” project detailing what kinds of surveillance are currently legal in the United States and providing practical data for protecting private information.

"I've always felt that one of the missed parts of this story is Google's early emphasis on the fact that human rights activists had been targeted" in the attacks, Danny O'Brien, international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the E-Commerce Times.

Not only was that fact emphasized as justification for the "very radical steps" Google took upon discovering the attacks, O'Brien said, but "it was also a major clue that this was an attack by a major state actor -- or someone who believed they could sell the information to a state actor."

A lot and little has transpired following the Electronic Frontier Foundation asking the U.S. Copyright Office for an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for authorization to jailbreak an iPhone or any “wireless telephone handsets"...

“We limited it to phones. This was the only category of devices where this was a problem in 2008,” said Fred von Lohmann, the EFF attorney who wrote the DMCA phone exemption...

“It’s a very glacial process when compared to the pace of technology,” von Lohmann said. “Since it happens every three years, you’re always behind the technology curve.”

"They are built into the cars," said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights advocacy group. "So the general idea is how much surveillance should you be subjected to? Depending on how they're configured, what you end up with is the possibility of the boxes recording the entire travel history of your car and therefore of you."

Who controls the internet? Well, at the moment a trade agreement known as ACTA is being negotiated by the U.S., Japan, the European Union, Canada and more than a dozen other countries, and, if ratified, would significantly regulate what you can and can’t do online. ACTA’s rules will supersede each country’s local laws. Oh, and the whole affair is secret. Danny O'Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains the possible impact on net users worldwide.

The lawsuit speaks for itself, said Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "This is utterly shocking, and a blatant violation of [the students'] constitutional rights," Bankston said Thursday, citing the Fourth Amendment after reviewing the Robbins' complaint. "The school district would have no more right to [use the laptop's webcam] than to install secret listening devices in the textbooks that they issued students."

In the meantime, EFF and Public Knowledge have teamed up to ask the USTR to change the process and, at the very least, stop taking the word of industry lobbyists as if it were gospel. They also suggested that the USTR be more flexible in allowing countries to set their own IP policy -- noting, amusingly, that the US itself famously didn't implement its "international obligations" in the Berne Treaty for decades, because the country felt differently about certain aspects of copyright law.

Attorneys for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the San Francisco civil liberties group that's representing Taylor, have asked the court to suppress any evidence obtained from the search of his iPhone. They say the search was "unconstitutional" because it was done without a warrant--and they say it also may have violated a 1986 federal law designed to protect the privacy of e-mail messages.

"I've never heard of anything this egregious," said Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney at the San Francisco-based group. "Nobody would have imagined that schools would peer into students' private homes and even bedrooms without any kind of justification."

"These problems arose because Google attempted to overcome its market disadvantage in competing with Twitter and Facebook by making a secondary use of your information," wrote Kurt Opsahl of the EFF in a statement. "Next week Google will face a federal judge and ask for approval of the Google Books settlement. EFF has raised privacy concerns, including the possibility that Google might make secondary uses of the Books information. Buzz's disastrous product launch highlights the danger posed by this possibility, and showcases the need for firm enforceable commitments to protecting user privacy."

"The underlying issue is that your email and chat contacts are not necessarily people you want to advertise as friends via a public social network," wrote Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on Friday.

Information stored on cell phones may not be protected under privacy rights, but the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco is hoping to protect information stored on the portable devices.

Kevin Bankston, an attorney for Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, cautioned the appeals panel about the effect of its ruling on future cases.

“I’m concerned the government would obtain information that people would expect should have a reasonable amount of privacy,” Bankston said.

But Kevin Bankston, an EFF attorney, called on Philadelphia's 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the 2008 ruling.

"If the courts do side with the government, that means that everywhere we go, in the real world and online, will be an open book to the government unprotected by the Fourth Amendment," he warned in an interview with CNET.com.

The appeal heard Friday stems from a Pittsburgh drug-trafficking case, in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sought the data as an investigative tool because the suspects frequently changed vehicles and residences.

Magistrate Lisa Pupo Lenihan denied the 2008 request, calling the information "extraordinarily personal and potentially sensitive."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union asked that Lenihan's ruling stand.

If you own a cell phone, you should care about the outcome of a case scheduled to be argued in federal appeals court in Philadelphia tomorrow. It could well decide whether the government can use your cell phone to track you - even if it hasn't shown probable cause to believe it will turn up evidence of a crime.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology will ask the court to require that the government at least show probable cause before it can track your whereabouts.

"This is a critical question for privacy in the 21st century," says Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who will be arguing on Friday. "If the courts do side with the government, that means that everywhere we go, in the real world and online, will be an open book to the government unprotected by the Fourth Amendment."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with several other groups including the American Library Association, urged an appeals court to uphold a ruling in a long-running suit related to secondhand software sales.

Many people have no idea how much data their cellphones collect about them. Phones, for example, report back to the carriers on where the users are at any given time — in some cases even when the phone is not in use. When you carry a cellphone, you are “essentially carrying a tracking device,” says Jennifer Granick, the civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Danny O'Brien, an international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that after Google said its popular Web email service had been attacked by Chinese hackers, the company began encrypting, or protecting, all of its email messages and chats. This makes monitoring more difficult.

The Justice Department is poised this week to publicly defend a little-known law-enforcement practice that critics say may be the "sleeper" privacy issue of the 21st century: the collection of cell-phone "tracking" records that identify the physical locations where the phones have been.

It may come as a surprise to most of the owners of the country's 277 million cell phones, but their cell-phone company retains records of where their device has been at all times—either because the phones have tiny GPS devices embedded inside or because each phone call is routed through towers that can be used to pinpoint the phones' location to within areas as small as a few hundred feet.

...

"Most people don't understand they are carrying a tracking device in their pockets," says Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group that has been trying to monitor the Justice Department's practice.

Now, in an appeal of Lenihan's ruling, the 3rd Circuit will become the first federal appellate court to tackle the question as Justice Department lawyers square off against a coalition of privacy and civil liberties lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy & Technology and the American Civil Liberties Union...

Bankston, in a brief jointly filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU and the Center for Democracy & Technology, urges the 3rd Circuit to uphold Lenihan's ruling on the grounds that Congress intended to give judges the discretion to deny such requests and require prosecutors to meet the ordinary standard for a search warrant.

Cell phone users, Bankston argues, have an expectation of privacy in such data because they "simply do not voluntarily expose their location whenever they make calls and receive calls ... nor do they do so merely by turning on their cell phones."

“You’d think it was nuclear weapons kind of stuff, not intellectual property law,” said Eddan Katz, international affairs director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which campaigns against regulation of the Internet. “The fact that there are 30 or 50 people sitting around a table deciding the laws of the world’s nations, when there are major areas of disagreement, seems like a wholesale contravention of the democratic process.”

The memo was made public as part of a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was seeking reports from an intelligence oversight panel. After The New York Times reported on its contents in December, a lawyer representing anti-abortion activists who attended the rally asked Middleton police to release a copy of the assessment under Wisconsin's open records law.

"This was actually a complete surprise to me," said EFF staff technologist Seth Schoen.

Schoen said copiers represent a major privacy loophole.

"Potentially all of that information is available to anyone who by chance buys the machine or wants to go looking for it. So that sounds like a pretty large scale problem to me," he said.

With its Patent Busting Project, EFF is targeting patents that it claims are invalid and hurt ordinary people by threatening innovation. In this case, the patent affects a technology that has made voice calls more affordable and that depends partly on independent inventors for new advances, said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn.

"VoIP is one of these kinds of technologies that really frees people," Cohn said. EFF is worried that fear of lawsuits by C2 could inhibit developers from making new VoIP products available. Meanwhile, its patent is one that never should have been granted, Cohn said.

Hofmann is a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a public interest group focused on privacy issues. The Foundation sued the CIA, Justice and Defense Departments after reading reports that the CIA is monitoring social-media sites like Twitter. Hofmann says her group wants to find out if there are any rules in place. She says social networking is like a new frontier.

"Things have changed slightly — for the worse," said Rebecca Jeschke from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has listed seven Western companies responsible for selling censorship and surveillance technology to the Chinese.

The EFF compiled its "corporations of interest" list from published data on companies that have sold surveillance tools to the Chinese. In strongly worded language, the EFF's Danny O'Brien said the named companies are "fostering repression in China" because the Chinese use the technology for "rampant censorship, invasive data collection and intimidation."

"It sounds very dangerous," says Lee Tien, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, referring to the police-only Web interface. "Let's assume you set this sort of thing up. What does that mean in terms of what the law enforcement officer be able to do? Would they be able to fish through transactional information for anyone? I don't understand how you create a system like this without it."

Warning of an FCC power grab, the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation says the commission lacks authority to impose regulations.

At a meeting last week in Mozilla's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., a few dozen attendees including representatives from the Federal Trade Commission began to sketch out how a standard for privacy icons would work. "They were thinking that you might have several icons in the address bar for each site," said Seth Schoen, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Maybe they would be showing things that were good about that site's privacy practices, and maybe they would be showing things that were bad about that site's privacy practices."

"Of course, they would never charge a guy from Channel 4 news, but they arrested this guy," said Attorney Jennifer Granick, the Civil Liberties Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Certainly under federal law, you are allowed to make recordings of things that happen in public places. The intent of the [two-party] law is meant to protect private communication,but not to insulate public occurrences from being recorded. Can you imagine if a news reporter was not allowed to record a fire?"