On International Women’s Day, it’s somewhat depressing to have to report that Virginia’s governor signed a pre-abortion ultrasound law into effect yesterday. While some may argue that the bill is not as bad as it would have been without massive public protest, it is still a significant blow to the autonomy and equality of women…
Category: Laws
Opinion of the European Data Protection Supervisor on the data protection reform package
From the Executive Summary: The main weakness of the package as a whole is that it does not remedy the lack of comprehensiveness of the EU data protection rules. It leaves many EU data protection instruments unaffected such as the data protection rules for the EU institutions and bodies, but also all specific instruments adopted…
Seventh Circuit Strikes VPPA Claim for Retention Damages
Josephine Liu writes: The Seventh Circuit held yesterday, in a decision written by Judge Posner, that damages are not available under the Video Privacy Protection Act (“VPPA”) for violations of the statute’s data deletion requirement, only for unlawful disclosures of video-viewing information. Subsection (b) of the VPPA prohibits knowing disclosure of personally identifiable information that identifies a…
Civil libertarians slam McCain cybersecurity bill
Joseph Menn of Reuters reports: A cybersecurity bill introduced by Republican Senator John McCain could dramatically expand the domestic reach of United States intelligence agencies and potentially give them massive troves of emails, civil liberties advocates said. “This is a privacy nightmare that will eventually result in the military substantially monitoring the domestic, civilian Internet,”…