Craig Timberg reports: Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it’s forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, is the latest…
Category: U.S.
Feds Must Produce NSA Dragnet Records for Criminal Defense
In the wake of revelations about NSA amassing phone records, a sharp defense lawyer filed a motion to compel the government to turn over his client’s records that might exonerate him. Julia Filip reports: Citing the NSA telephone dragnet, a federal judge ordered the United States government to deliver telephone records demanded by a man…
Senate committee passes ECPA bill to increase email privacy, full floor vote next
Carl Franzen reports: A bipartisan Senate committee just voted unanimously to advance a privacy reform bill that would tighten the restrictions on how the government and law enforcement can access user email and other electronic messages in investigations. Called the ECPA Amendments Act, the bill would modify the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to require government and…
Yahoo discloses user data requests from US law enforcement agencies
John Ribeiro reports: Yahoo has received between 12,000 to 13,000 requests for user data from law enforcement agencies in the U.S. between Dec. 1 and May 31 this year, the company said Monday. The most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and General Counsel Ron…