This week, comments from Democratic Senators, a panel of witnessses, and the director of the National Security Agency (NSA) called on the Senate to enact cybersecurity legislation. But a new poll shows that Americans don't want to sacrifice civil liberties by allowing unfettered data exchanges between corporations and the...

As a headline from Reporters Without Borders stated today, the number of citizen journalists killed or arrested in Syria rises daily. While some, such as Razan Ghazzawi—who won Frontline Defenders' award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk—have received ample international attention for their plight, many others have gone...

The people spoke, and politicians finally listened. Last week, the European Parliament rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in a rare sweeping majority vote. After years of secretive negotiations over this international agreement that would crudely protect intellectual property at the expense of Internet freedom, it has been...

Law Enforcement Demands User Cell Phone Data 1.3 Million Times
Yesterday, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) revealed that federal, state and local law enforcement agencies demanded user cell phone data 1.3 million times last year. The demands sought “text messages, caller locations, and other information.” The New York Times...

Copyright trolls lost one of their knobby clubs this week. Judge Lewis Kaplan of the U.S. district court in Manhattan ruled that the owner of an Internet connection cannot be found liable for "negligence" simply because another person uses his wifi connection to commit copyright infringement -- even if he...

When Customer Service Gets Creepy
With commercial use of biometrics and online tracking on the rise, emerging customer service products threaten to sacrifice consumer privacy for the sake of convenience and security.
Take, for example, the mobile “solution” a home-delivery services company called Blackbay dreamed up to solve...