Today, Yahoo upped the ante when it comes to protecting search engine users' privacy, announcing a new data retention policy providing for anonymization of search queries — as well as page views, page clicks, ad views and ad clicks — after 90 days. This announcement comes on the heels...

Today, the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals gave another setback to the Bush Administration's claims for sweeping new Executive powers. The court found the National Security Letter (NSL) statute's gag provision unconstitutional in Doe v. Mukasey. The NSL law allows the government to seek your electronic communications...

Obama May Keep CIA ChiefMichael Hayden, a major player in the Bush administration' wiretapping program, may stay on as head of the CIA under Obama.
Panel to Call for Review of Wiretapping ScholarThe House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel plans to ask the NSA to open a formal...

Finally. The major record labels are coming around to voluntary collective licensing, as we've been urging (and predicting) since 2003. Last week, TechDirt posted a set of leaked slides suggesting that Warner Music Group has opened a discussion with several major U.S. universities about creating a collective licensing...

The Obama-Biden Transition Project took a major step to increase transparency Friday, announcing that most policy documents from meetings with outside groups will be posted on the Web site Change.gov for review and comment.
The new policy also invites the public to submit their own ideas...

Yesterday, EFF filed petitions (1, 2) with the Copyright Office seeking DMCA exemptions for three categories of activities that do not violate copyright laws, but that are still jeopardized by the DMCA's ban on bypassing technical protection measures used to control access to copyrighted works (i.e, DRM)....

In the last few days, President-elect Obama's transition team took a significant stride towards a more open government by licensing the content of Change.gov under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Using that license essentially means that the transition team is allowing others to freely share and remix what's posted...