It’s been a rough few weeks for legal challenges to NSA surveillance. First, a federal district court in Maryland dismissed a lawsuit brought by the ACLU challenging the NSA’s Upstream surveillance of the Internet backbone. Then, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals refused to grant the ACLU a...

A day in the life of the surveillance state
Often, the discussion on government surveillance in the US is all about the NSA or the FBI. But the feds aren’t the only ones spying on you. Local law enforcement has been getting in on the action, and it’s not...

This week, the U.S. Department of State’s Defense Trade Advisory Group (DTAG) met to decide whether to classify “cyber products” as munitions, placing them in the same export control regime as hand grenades and fighter planes. Thankfully, common sense won out and the DTAG recommended that “cyber products” not be...

One of the biggest reasons the Eastern District of Texas hears so many patent cases (at last check, almost half of all cases filed this year were filed in the Eastern District) is because of a Federal Circuit case from 1990—VE Holding—that radically expanded the places patent owners...

On September 17, 2015, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved a $33 million settlement between Comcast, CPUC staff, and the California Attorney General’s office (along with public interest groups TURN and the Greenlining Institute), related to a Comcast data breach that resulted in the personal information (name, address and...