After privacy complaints, Google Inc. is beginning to automatically blur faces of people captured in the street photos taken for its Internet map program. Rolling it out will take several months, however.

Although Google's Street View service was not the first to augment online maps with photos, the detail and breadth of images on the site surprised and unsettled many users when it launched last year.

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Some privacy advocates, including the influential Electronic Frontier Foundation, suggested that Google blur the images of people. That move, the critics pointed out, would not inhibit Street View's goal of helping people become familiar with the look and feel of a location before they travel there.

The Internet Archive, a project to create a digital library of the web for posterity, successfully fought a secret government Patriot Act order for records about one of its patrons and won the right to make the order public, civil liberties groups announced Wednesday morning.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive's lawyers, fought the NSL, challenging its constitutionality in a December 14 complaint to a federal court in San Francisco. The FBI agreed on April 21 to withdraw the letter and unseal the court case, making some of the documents available to the public.

The call came in to police just after midnight April 16.

Hours before, a distraught young man had phoned his mother, hinting he wanted to kill himself. When he didn't meet her as planned, she telephoned Seattle police and reported her son missing.

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"What you'd want is those rules to be in place, and, as far as we know, they are not," said Rebecca Jechke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Pennsylvania's chief liquor regulator says a plan to offer wine in up to 100 free-standing kiosks in grocery stores is part of the state's ongoing attempt to modernize the way it sells alcohol.

But public health advocates said Tuesday they're concerned about whether the state would be able to keep the wine out of the hands of underage drinkers.

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"One of the things to keep in mind: Do you really want to hand over more information to the government? And who else would be able to have access to it? How will they secure it?" asked Rebecca Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group in San Francisco.

"Would you really want a record of how often you buy alcohol?" she asked.

Biological weapons delivered by cyborg insects. It sounds like a nightmare scenario straight out of the wilder realms of science fiction, but it could be a reality if a current Pentagon project comes to fruition.

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Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights and civil liberties group, sees that same future in a different light. Cyborg insects, he says, are an order of magnitude away from today's more standard surveillance technologies like closed circuit television.

"CCTV is mostly deployed in public and in privately owned public spaces. An insect could easily fly into your garden or sit outside your bedroom window," he explained. "To make matters worse, you'd have no idea these devices were there. A CCTV camera is usually an easily recognizable device. Robotic surveillance insects might be harder to spot. And having to spot them wouldn't necessarily be good for our mental health."

Maybe it was just an act of "imprudent curiosity" by low-level employees, as State Department spokesman Sean McCormack dubbed it on Friday.

But others saw something more sinister in the breach of privacy that allowed at least four State Department workers to rifle the electronic passport files of all three leading presidential candidates.

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David Sobel, senior counsel for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted that the State Department's software would probably never catch an employee who simply wanted to glance at the private files of his neighbor.

"They have put in place a mechanism for the flagging of access involving prominent people," Sobel said. "But what about everyone else?"

Big Brother may be tracking you.

Most people don't realize it, but driving around with your cell phone on leaves a precise electronic trail of where you've been and when you've been there stored in your phone company's data banks.

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No one knows exactly how many times the Justice Department has received phone tracking records without a warrant, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group that fights these dangerous government fishing trips.

In the wake of the suicide of 13-year-old MySpace member Megan Meier, officials are stepping up efforts to crack down on online bullying.

In the latest example, Kentucky state legislator Tim Couch has proposed a bill that would ban anonymous comments on boards or message boards. Among other provisions, the act, introduced this month, would demand that operators of blogs or message boards require commenters to register their names, addresses and e-mail addresses.

But civil liberties advocates say that such legislation, no matter how well-intentioned, violates First Amendment rights to free speech. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that people have the right to speak anonymously, said Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. While that right isn't absolute--judges, for instance, can order the disclosure of users' identities when they've defamed someone--courts also have protected online commenters' anonymity in numerous cases.

"There's certainly an impulse, a desire on the part of various people across the spectrum to try to pierce the anonymity of online speakers," Zimmerman said. But, he added, courts turn down such requests unless there are solid legal grounds to order disclosure. "You have to demonstrate that there's a reason to do it other than wanting to know."

Gathered at the Legal Futures Conference at California's Stanford University over the weekend, online legal experts have again raised their concerns that the rise and rise of Web 2.0 has come at the expense of individual privacy.

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Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, acknowledged that she finds the location-based technology in her iPhone very convenient when she's trying to avoid traffic congestion but she doesn't want the government to be able to use that technology to track her down.

The fact that all sorts of data about each of us is being gathered and is archived, searchable, and can be compiled to create profiles about each of us is what makes digital privacy intrusions so much scarier than pre-Internet life, she said.

The social-networking startup Facebook said it didn't give the Moroccan government information to identify a user who was arrested for impersonating a Moroccan prince on the website.

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Facebook's policies regarding privacy are closely scrutinised by privacy advocates because its users often share detailed personal information on the site, such as their home address, phone number, employer and educational institutions they've attended. The site is "a honey pot of personal information," said Danny O'Brien, international outreach coordinator at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil-liberties group that had raised questions about the incident involving Mr Mourtada.