Privacy Inc.

The Obama administration has drafted new proposals to curb Internet piracy and other forms of intellectual property infringement that it says it will send to the U.S. Congress "in the very near future."

It's also applauding a controversial copyright treaty known as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, saying it will "aid right-holders and the U.S. government to combat infringement" once it enters into effect.

Those disclosures came from a report released today by Victoria Espinel, whom President Obama selected as the first intellectual property enforcement coordinator and was confirmed by the Senate in December 2009. There's no detail about what the proposed law would include, except that it will be based on a white paper of "legislative proposals to improve intellectual property enforcement," and it's expected to encompass online piracy.

The 92-page report (PDF) reads a lot like a report that could have been ... Read full post & comments

A California attorney representing a juror required to divulge the contents of his Facebook account says he will file an appeal of the court order tomorrow.

Ken Rosenfeld, a Sacramento criminal defense attorney, told CNET that forcing jurors to turn over private correspondence in the form of Facebook posts "would be catastrophic in terms of free speech, justice, and the jury system itself."

The dispute arose in the trial of alleged members of the so-called Killa Mobb gang, who were convicted of performing a vicious beating in 2008. Soon after the verdicts, one juror alleged misconduct by another juror, Arturo Ramirez, who had mentioned the case on Facebook.

Ramirez' comments appear to have been innocuous, wondering during the prosecutors' case "can it get any more BORING" than perusing cell phone records.

But they were enough for defense attorneys to send a subpoena to Facebook asking for the full records of ... Read full post & comments

The Obama administration is quietly seeking the power for it and other governments to veto future top-level domain names, a move that raises questions about free expression, national sovereignty, and the role of states in shaping the future of the Internet.

At stake is who will have authority over the next wave of suffixes to supplement the venerable .com, .org, and .net. At least 115 proposals are expected this year, including .car, .health, .nyc, .movie, and .web, and the application process could be finalized at a meeting in San Francisco next month.

Some are likely to prove contentious among more conservative nations. Two different groups--the dotGAY Initiative and the .GAY Alliance--already have announced they will apply for the right to operate the .gay domain; additional controversial proposals may surface in the next few months. And nobody has forgotten the furor over .xxx, which has been in limbo for seven ... Read full post & comments

U.S. State Department officials successfully pressured Google to restore a YouTube video showing torture and murder by Egypt's state police, a WikiLeaks cable reveals.

The Cairo embassy and the State Department's bureau of democracy, human rights, and labor "worked to convince Google to restore" a prominent blogger's account that was suspended in late 2007, the recently released cable says.

Nearly a year later, the same blogger contacted the State Department to report that "YouTube removed from his website two videos exposing police abuses," including a woman being tortured at a police station and Sinai Bedouin allegedly shot by police and thrown in a garbage dump.

The cable doesn't reveal the blogger's name, but it appears to be Wael Abbas, who disclosed at the time that his YouTube channel was suspended due to complaints and the videos he uploaded replaced with this message: "This video ... Read full post & comments

Following widespread street protests demanding an end to autocratic rule by President Hosni Mubarak, a country of more than 80 million people found itself almost entirely disconnected from the rest of the world. Here's how the story has unfolded:

Vodafone: We were forced to send pro-Mubarak texts

Egyptian government of President Hosni Mubarak forced carrier to send prescripted, propagandistic text messages during recent unrest, Vodafone says.
(Posted in Politics and Law by Lance Whitney)
February 3, 2011 11:43 AM PST

U.S. defended Egyptian activist's YouTube videos

WikiLeaks cable shows U.S. State Department talked Google into restoring YouTube video showing torture and murder by Egypt's state police.
(Posted in Privacy Inc. by Declan McCullagh)

... Read full post & comments

Three U.S. senators who want to give the president emergency powers over the Internet are protesting comparisons with the "kill switch" highlighted by Egypt's Net disconnection.

In a statement yesterday, the politicians said their intent was to allow the president "to protect the U.S. from external cyber attacks," not to shut down the Internet, and announced that they would revise their legislation to explicitly prohibit that from happening.

"Some have suggested that our legislation would empower the president to deny U.S. citizens access to the Internet," said the statement from Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Senator Tom Carper, (D-Del.). "Nothing could be further from the truth." Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, is chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

They said, however, that they'll make sure their forthcoming legislation "contains explicit language prohibiting the president from doing what President [... Read full post & comments

It may come as a surprise to know that police generally need a warrant to search your house, but not to track your whereabouts through your cell phone.

This is what Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has become the Senate's leading champion of electronic privacy, wants to change. Wyden recently spoke with CNET in an interview transcribed below about his forthcoming legislation.

It's hardly Wyden's first foray into technology. In 2006, he introduced a pro-Net neutrality bill, opposed a renewal of the Patriot Act, and proposed restrictions on the Bush administration's controversial Total Information Awareness program. He championed limits on what Internet access taxes state and local governments could collect and co-authored a CNET op-ed article in 2003 about curbing e-mail spam.

This time, Wyden is looking not just at cell phones, but also ... Read full post & comments

Pubs and clubs in Australia are signing up in droves to national and state biometrics databases that capture patron fingerprints, photos, and scanned driver licenses in efforts to curb violence.

The databases of captured patron information mean that individuals banned at one location could be refused entry across a string of venues. Particularly violent individuals could be banned for years.

The databases are virtually free from government regulation as biometrics are not covered by privacy laws, meaning that the handling of details are left to the discretion of technology vendors.

"You don't get on the [ban] list because you didn't want to go home," said Peter Perrett, chief executive of database company ID-Tect. "You get on there because you are a safety risk."

Read more of "National biometric pub list use 'explodes'" at ZDNet Australia.

There's nothing like a whole-country Internet disconnect to focus attention on how a so-called "kill switch" would work.

While proposals to give President Obama emergency authority to disconnect privately owned computers from the Internet have circulating on Capitol Hill for a few years, last week's news about Egypt pulling the plug on its Net-connection focused new attention on the topic. (On January 24, CNET was the first to report that the legislation will return this year.)

Legendary technology columnist John C. Dvorak warned that such a proposal "gives the president the power to literally kill the Internet." Investor's Business Daily noted the emergency procedures would be overseen by the Department of Homeland Security, "the same people who think enhanced pat-downs and groping our junk are necessary evils." Canada's National Post concluded, with mild understatement, the timing was "awkward."

Make that "awful." Less than 24 hours after ... Read full post & comments