The U.S. Trade Rep announced last week that it will create a new “Public Interest Trade Advisory Committee,” in an attempt to allow public interest groups to provide more input into U.S. proposals in trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). That aim is important, and...

FBI agents arrested a Mexican tycoon named Jose Susumo Azano Matsura at his Coronado, Calif. home on Wednesday as part of a political bribery investigation based on captured emails, seized banking records, and covertly recorded conversations.
The unfolding scandal is soaked in irony: Azano is a surveillance evangelist whose...

Congress is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a "phone freedom" bill that is supposed to help solve the cell phone unlocking problem. We're all for phone freedom and we wish we could support the bill. Unfortunately, however, the costs for users outweigh the benefits.
For more than...

The NSA appears to have been involved in the surveillance of privileged attorney-client communications, and the legal community is not happy about it. The New York Times reports that communications between an American law firm and its foreign client may have been among the information one of the NSA’s...

The White House updated the nation on its commitment to curtail the patent troll problem and tie up some egregious loose ends in our patent system, announcing progress made on all fronts—as well as three new executive actions. While the Innovation Act (and other patent bills) is...

For the last month, Venezuela has been caught up in widespread protests against its government. The Maduro administration has responded by cracking down on what it claims as being foreign interference online. As that social unrest has escalated, the state's censorship has widened: from the removal of television stations from...

The net neutrality fight is moving in new directions, and quickly. Today FCC Chair Tom Wheeler announced that the FCC would press forward with new “Open Internet” rules, undeterred by last month’s court decision striking down most of the old ones. Last week, Comcast and Time Warner Cable...

The Intercept recently published an article and supporting documents indicating that the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ surveilled and even sought to have other countries prosecute the investigative journalism website WikiLeaks. GCHQ also surveilled the millions of people who merely read the WikiLeaks website. The article clarifies the...

UPDATE—February 19, 2014:
According to the Washington Post, just days after the story broke, DHS shelved its plans to create or tap into a national database of license plate recognition data. According to an Immigration & Customs Enforcement spokeswoman, the solicitation "was posted without the awareness of...

The Australian government may soon introduce major copyright reforms, including the possibility of adding a fair use doctrine similar to that of the United States. Fair use was central among the 30 recommendations to come out of a nearly two-year study by the Australian Law Reform Commission published...