The United States is a nation of laws. The police arrest suspects they reasonably believe to have broken the law, not citizens who happen to disagree with the government’s politics. Cops don’t go after people pre-emptively because they might commit a crime someday. In America, people are considered innocent until they’re proven guilty in a court of law
The secretive federal court that approves spying on terror suspects in the United States has refused to give the Justice Department broad new powers, saying the government had misused the law and misled the court dozens of times, according to an extraordinary legal ruling
The Federal Government has released a report about its online content co-regulatory scheme. But some industry commentators, including the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, have asked whether it’s the Government’s place to control what we look at
In what may become a new legal front in its war against online copying, the Recording Industry Association of America has asked a federal court for help in tracing an alleged peer-to-peer pirate. And in recent weeks, scads of so-called spoof
files — repetitive loops or snippets filled with crackle and hiss — have been anonymously posted to the hugely popular sites where music fans illegally trade songs online, a tactic fully endorsed by the RIAA
Come out of the closet
about marijuana use was the theme of this year’s Seattle Hempfest, the fragrant annual waterfront event. And at least several of the tens of thousands of festival-goers did come out of the closet. And went into jail
Alcatel has prevailed in a suit against former employee Evan Brown, who claimed that he — rather than the company — owned rights to a software idea that he asserts had long existed in his head. Maybe they should team up with NASA, who have told Northwest Airlines security specialists that they are developing brain-monitoring devices in co-operation with an unnamed commercial firm
The world’s largest record companies have filed a lawsuit against major ISPs for not blocking access to Listen4Ever.com, music site located in China. The defendants in the suit include AT&T Broadband, Cable & Wireless USA, Sprint, Advanced Network Services and UUNET Technologies. The RIAA has since dropped the contentious lawsuit
Toho — current owner of all things Godzilla — has launched a cease and desist notice on Davezilla
Ever since their computerised ID system switched on a few days ago, Japanese citizens have dropped out in droves from what many resent as a big brother
monitoring of the people
Human Rights Watch have announced that Yahoo is complicit
in rights abuses by the Chinese government after agreeing to a Beijing-backed self-censorship pledge for web pages
On Wednesday, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will begin awarding contracts for the design and implementation of a Total Information Awareness (TIA) system. The TIA program, with its ability to provide persistent storage of everything from credit card, to employment, to medical, to ISP records, is a recipe for civil liberties disaster unless there are provisions for citizens to find out who is looking at their records and to see and correct those records
US lawmakers have asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to go after Internet users who download unauthorised songs and other copyrighted material, raising the possibility of jail time for digital-music fans
American movie, recording and software executives could be arrested if they travel to Australia, could be prohibited from entering Australia, or could be extradited to face criminal charges if Californian Democrat congressman Howard Berman’s copyright protection bill, which allows cracking of computers, passes into law
New York has abruptly yanked an official web site after discovering that personal data from nearly 2,000 online job applicants — including home addresses and Social Security numbers — could be viewed by anyone
Senator Mike DeWine is crusading to hand the FBI new powers to eavesdrop on immigrants and other non-citizens living in America
Striking back against a computer that is attacking you may be illegal under US law, but security researcher Timothy Mullen, chief information officer of AnchorIS Inc, says people should be allowed to neutralise one that is unwittingly spreading destructive Internet worms like Nimda
One of the great questions of contemporary American political economy is, who shall control the commons? The commons
refers to that vast range of resources that the American people collectively own, but which are rapidly being enclosed: privatised, traded in the market, and abused. The process of converting the American commons into market resources can accurately be described as enclosure because, like the movement to enclose common lands in eighteenth-century England, it involves the private appropriation of collectively owned resources
Civil liberties groups in the United States are celebrating a court ruling which orders the United States Justice Department release all the names of those it has detained since the 11 September attacks
In a misguided fit of patriotism mere weeks after the World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks, a corporate employee handed over the records — almost literally, the grocery lists — to federal investigators from three agencies that had never even requested them. In a flash, the most basic of exchanges became fodder for the Patriot Act
Campaign group StopEsso said this week it would move its French language web site to an American internet provider after a court in France ruled it could not continue using its logo on the site
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