constitutional rights
U.S. Govt: Megaupload Users Should Sue Megaupload
torrentfreak.com
Nearly half a year has passed since Megaupload’s servers were raided by the U.S. Government, and still there is no agreement on how former users can retrieve their files. This prompted Megaupload user Kyle Goodwin, a sports reporter who used Megaupload to store work-related files, to take action. Helped by...
DC police chief announces shockingly reasonable cell camera policy
arstechnica.com
DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier We've written a number of stories about police officers interfering with citizens who are trying to record the actions of police in public places. In some cases, cops have arrested citizens for making recordings in public. In others, they've seized cell phones and deleted...
ACLU: Judge's Decision on Protest Tweets Is Troubling
www.readwriteweb.com
Data stored on Twitter's servers became fair game for eager prosecutors on July 2, when a New York City criminal court judge once again upheld the District Attorney's subpoena for more than a hundred days' worth of tweets and user information tied to a Brooklyn man arrested during the Occupy...
Hold cops personally liable for camera arrests? Connecticut bill says yes
arstechnica.com
The Connecticut state Senate passed legislation last week that would hold police officers in the state personally liable for violating a citizen's First Amendment right to videotape their actions. The bill is sponsored by Sen. Eric Coleman (D-Bloomfield). According to The Day, a Connecticut newspaper, Coleman cited the 1991...
Record Labels Threaten the Open Internet, isoHunt Tells Court
torrentfreak.com
In 2010 a conglomerate of record labels – including the ‘Big Four’ of Sony, EMI, Warner and Universal – went after BitTorrent site isoHunt. The site and its owner are accused of facilitating copyright infringement on a massive scale. Through the lawsuit the labels hope to shut down the isoHunt...
DC Police Chief Lays Down New Cell/Camera Policy: 'Don't Seize. Don't Delete. Don't Interfere.'
www.techdirt.com
There's a long history of police officers abusing their power to prevent documentation of their actions via cellphones and cameras. For the most part, this has been the norm, rather than being relegated to outlying, "rogue" police departments. Some attempts at "controlling" this interaction have been blatant: illegal seizures of...
Look, This Is What It Comes Down To
uncrunched.com
The old press is still having the same conversation about the new press: objectivity! Here’s the latest by the L.A. Times, titled Are Silicon Valley tech bloggers truly objective? This can (and has) gone on and on and on. I argue that there’s no such thing as objectivity, and that...
Judge Quickly (But Temporarily) Blocks New CA Law That Takes Away Anonymous Speech Rights
www.techdirt.com
So, we had just written about the unfortunate (if expected) news that voters in California had overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure which (among other things) would take away anonymous speech rights from anyone on the state's sex offender list (which could include things like people arrested for urinating in public,...
Court makes spying on Americans legal with new warrantless wiretap ruling
www.bgr.com
A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled in favor of President George W. Bush’s controversial Terrorist Surveillance Program, which allows the government to spy on Americans without a warrant. The court reversed an earlier decision in which two American attorneys were awarded more than $20,000 in damages and their...
Can We Kill The Myth That The Constitution Guarantees Copyrights And Patents?
www.techdirt.com
We've seen it all too frequently: copyright and patent system supporters insisting that these forms of government-granted monopoly privileges are guaranteed by the Constitution, due to Article I, Section 8, Clause 8. People like to claim that, for example, the First Amendment can't conflict with copyright law since "both are...
There Are Many Reasons Not To Give The NSA The Power To Spy On Your Info
www.techdirt.com
We were just noting that the Senate is undergoing a fight concerning whether or not the Cybersecurity Act is going to go anywhere, with much of the fight being a tug of war over your privacy. Senators Franken, Paul and Schumer are supporting an amendment to add in more privacy...
Twitter Continues Uphill Trudge in Freedom-of-Tweets Legal Battle
allthingsd.com
Twitter filed a motion to appeal a federal judge’s decision in ongoing litigation between the state of New York and Malcolm Harris, a Twitter user involved in last year’s Occupy Wall Street protests. The original decision passed down by Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. — which Twitter is fighting —...
Court Suggests Politically Motivated Border Searches May Be Unconstitutional
www.techdirt.com
The federal government has long held that you have no Constitutional rights at the border, and that they can search your laptop at the border without following the 4th Amendment. Unfortunately, courts have agreed with this position across the board. However, some situations can get a little trickier. What about...
Porn kingpins sue Verizon for not coughing up personal info on alleged pirates
bgr.com
There’s just no satisfying some pornographic film companies. TorrentFreak reports that three porn producers are suing Verizon (VZ) for allegedly coddling alleged porn pirates by refusing to disclose identifying information on some of its customers. In refusing to hand over such information, Verizon is defying court-ordered subpoenas granted to the copyright holders,...
Constitutional Law Professor: Search Results Protected by the First Amendment
www.theatlantic.com
In a Google-funded report on the constitutional rights of an Internet search, UCLA law professor -- and blogger -- Eugene Volokh makes a lofty claim about the legal rights of any given Google search: The weight, placement, and even omission of search results deserve the same free speech protection as...
Paul Ceglia's At It Again, Claiming His Constitutional Rights Are Being Violated
betabeat.com
Mr. Ceglia. (facebook.com) You’ve got to hand it to Paul Ceglia, the man who would own Facebook. Most people, when charged with criminal fraud by the U.S. government, would abandon the civil lawsuit that got them into trouble in the first place. Not Mr. Ceglia. This onetime wood-pellet salesman is...
Jury says journalist arrested while videotaping police is not guilty
arstechnica.com
Police Major Nancy Perez, moments before she arrested Miller on January 31, 2012. Image courtesy of Carlos Miller A jury acquitted a Florida photojournalist who was arrested on January 31 while documenting the eviction of Occupy Miami protesters. The police accused Carlos Miller, author of a popular blog about...
Telecoms firm hails 'significant victory' as judge orders halt to FBI's data demands
www.guardian.co.uk
Credo speaks for first time after judge orders US government to stop issuing 'national security letters' to access citizens' dataThe Californian telecoms company behind a stunning legal victory that has blown a hole in the FBI's highly secretive system for collecting US citizens' private data has come out of the...
Supreme Court kills activists' challenge to FISA spying law
arstechnica.com
flickr / flowercat In 2008, Congress passed the "FISA Amendments Act," or FAA. This expanded the government's ability to use electronic surveillance on people located abroad—and, apparently, any Americans they're speaking to. A lawsuit was quickly filed by an array of civil rights groups, labor unions, and media organizations,...
Verizon: net neutrality violates our free speech rights
arstechnica.com
"Can you hear me now?" Aurich Lawson Verizon pressed its argument against the Federal Communications Commission's new network neutrality rules on Monday; filing a legal brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. The company argued the FCC's rules not only exceeded the agency's regulatory...
Twitter turns over OWS tweets after threat from judge
gigaom.com
Faced with a harsh contempt of court threat, Twitter today surrendered the tweets of an Occupy Wall Street protestor to a Manhattan judge. The tweets belong to Malcolm Harris who was among hundreds arrested last year during a protest that spilled onto the Brooklyn Bridge. The case became a media...
San Diego Cop Thinks You Might Have Turned Your Cell Phone Into A Gun And That 'Officer Safety' Trumps Constitutional Rights
www.techdirt.com
We've seen several times before the reticence (a fancy $20 word for "antipathy") many law enforcement officers have towards being recorded while on the job. They don't seem to mind cameras they control (even though those too have proven problematic -- but fixable), but if the average citizen starts...
San Diego Cop Thinks You Might Have Turned Your Cell Phone Into A Gun And That 'Officer Safety' Trumps Constitutional Rights
Photography Advocate/Journalist Acquitted After Arrest Over Filming Police; Intends To Sue Back
www.techdirt.com
We've linked to the blog, PhotographyIsNotACrime.com (PINAC), a few times in the past (it recently moved locations). Its author, Carlos Miller, not only covered a number of cases involving photographers being arrested or harassed for photographing buildings, police or something else, but was a defendant in just such a case...
California proposition to monitor sex offenders online gets put on ice
arstechnica.com
A California proposition that passed overwhelmingly in the fall would have forced registered sex offenders to hand over a huge amount of information about their online lives. Now, that proposition has been put on hold because of a preliminary injunction [PDF] from a San Francisco federal judge, who says...
Is the FBI breaching the Constitution in the name of national security?
www.theverge.com
A report in Wired has exposed the shady way in which the FBI is using National Security Letters (NSL) and 2001's Patriot Act to spy on American citizens, potentially breaching their constitutional rights to privacy in the process. An unnamed communications provider is currently fighting an NSL demanding information...
Megaupload User Asks Court To Order Return Of His Data
torrentfreak.com
In the wake of the January shutdown of Megaupload, many of the site’s legitimate users complained that their personal files had been lost. Behind the scenes Megaupload negotiated with the Department of Justice and other parties to allow these users to temporarily access their files. When these negotiations failed last...
Week in tech: Raspberry Pi, undead Facebook photos, and Flash-free Chrome
arstechnica.com
Over 3 years later, "deleted" Facebook photos are still online: Photos that you think you're deleting from Facebook are still remaining on their servers years later. Ars has been following this story for nearly three years now; Facebook says it's still working on fixing the problem, but that a...
"Viral nature of the Internet" means only family can release autopsy photos
arstechnica.com
In 1983, two-year-old Phillip Buell died of head injuries, which his mother's boyfriend at the time, Kenneth Marsh, testified came from the boy falling off the couch and hitting the fireplace hearth. Kenneth was convicted of second-degree murder and later acquitted, but the story still captured the public interest, especially...
Music Company Asks For Permission To Pursue Its Delayed Civil Suit Against Megaupload; States Extradition 'May Never Occur'
www.techdirt.com
It's not just Kim Dotcom that's tiring of the endless procedural delays in the US's prosecution of him and his service. Other plaintiffs who are looking to legally pursue Dotcom for infringement are getting fed up with the length of the process, which still has no end in sight. Microhits,...
Music Company Asks For Permission To Pursue Its Delayed Civil Suit Against Megaupload; States Extradition 'May Never Occur'
Google's ECPA report reveals the extent of the FBI's warrantless email snooping | Dominic Rushe
www.guardian.co.uk
Guess who's reading your email? Thanks to a legal loophole that nixes your constitutional rights, the Feds can help themselvesRight now, as you read this, the US government may be snooping through your emails, looking at your photos, poring over your online life. Maybe, one day, there'll be a knock...
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