After several days of destructive riots throughout the UK, British Prime Minister David Cameron is practically tripping over himself in his eagerness to sacrifice liberty for security. In a speech before an emergency session of Parliament today, Cameron highlighted concern over rioters’ use of social media tools such as Facebook...

In June, we published an article highlighting the problems with uploading sensitive documents to two Wikileaks imitators, the Al-Jazeera Transparency Unit (AJTU) and the Wall Street Journal's Safehouse. Apart from the well-documented security problems of both sites, we noted that their terms of use (TOU) offered...

This week's news roundup takes us to Iran, where censorship is getting worse, Turkey, where it might be getting better, and Zimbabwe, where a blogger is under threat.
Iran sets out to build ‘national Internet’
Iran already ranks amongst the world’s worst when it comes to online...

by Oscar Montezuma Panez, Google Policy Fellow
We all know that HTML links are the heart of the World Wide Web. What many don’t appreciate is that legal liability for linking varies greatly across countries. Given the importance of linking to the World Wide Web, whether websites can be...

In a cursory opinion issued today that left us scratching our heads, a federal judge has ruled that the government does not have to return a domain name seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), because its seizure did not create a substantial hardship. Really?
Puerto 80 is...

Last month, we wrote about Cisco’s plans to help the Chinese government build a massive camera surveillance network in the city of Chongqing. This is the same company that sold equipment to China to build the Great Firewall, which prevents Chinese Internet users from accessing much of the Internet,...

In a major blow to one of the most pernicious copyright trolls now operating, the US Copyright Group (USCG), federal judge Robert Wilkins of the District of Columbia has effectively dismissed thousands of Doe defendants due to lack of jurisdiction.
The ruling, which partially echoes ...