Hugh D’Andrade of EFF points us to an opinion piece their legal director, Cindy Cohen, posted it to the blog of the American Constitution Society. The piece points out that the Obama Administration has embraced two of the most radical positions taken by the Bush Administration — that the Executive Branch need not follow the…
Category: U.S.
When is “outing” bloggers actionable?
Lawsuits involving anonymous bloggers and attempts to out them were prominent in the news last week. How do the courts handle attempts to unmask bloggers and how can bloggers fight back if they have been outed? Last week, model Liskula Cohen succeeded in getting a New York court to order Google to reveal the name…
Do DNA ‘prints’ invade privacy?
Being fingerprinted upon arrest is so commonplace, few people think twice about it. But what if the arresting agency wanted to take DNA? And run it against an index of unsolved crimes? And then store it in a database for eternity? Over the past several years, DNA collection has become more common, and it’s regularly…
Feds invoke national secrets in wiretap case
The Obama administration, trying to derail a lawsuit over former President George W. Bush’s authority to wiretap Americans without court permission, has refused to take a position on the program’s legality and says a federal judge can’t decide that question because the crucial facts are national secrets. A ruling on whether Bush exceeded his constitutional…