Babak Siavoshy writes: As the Washington Post reports, one of the legal obstacles the ACLU may face in its lawsuit challenging NSA surveillance of telephony metadata is the state secrets privilege. In recent years, the government has used the state secrets privilege with increasing frequency to block lawsuits and prevent discovery on national security grounds. According to Professor Donohue, between 2001…
Category: Govt
Facebook Releases Data, Including All National Security Requests
Ted Ullyot, Facebook General Counsel, writes: … Since this story was first reported, we’ve been in discussions with U.S. national security authorities urging them to allow more transparency and flexibility around national security-related orders we are required to comply with. We’re pleased that as a result of our discussions, we can now include in a…
Dark clouds loom over Google in the EU as Swedish data regulator kills a Google Apps deal
Robin Wauters writes: In what seems to have garnered precious little attention, Sweden’s data protection agency earlier this week ruled to (again) disallow an agreement between a tiny municipality and Google for the use of cloud services, such as Google Apps, within the public body. The Swedish data regulator had requested changes in the agreement between Google and the…
EPIC Calls on FCC to Investigate Unlawful Disclosure of Consumer Phone Records
From EPIC.org: In a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn, EPIC urged the FCC to determine whether Verizon violated the Communications Act when it released consumer call detail information to the National Security Agency. In response to an unprecedented Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order which focused on solely domestic communications, Verizon released telephone customer information to the…