CyberLaw Blog

Archive for July 23rd, 2008

UK comms intercepts up by half - and it isn’t the council: “

Wristslap for town halls’ street watchers, however

The latest reports from government surveillance watchdogs reveals that interception of communications by UK officials surged by almost 50 per cent in 2007. British public bodies including police and intelligence agencies made 519,260 requests for information to telcos and ISPs during the year.…

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(Via The Register - Public Sector.)

Court Upholds Ruling on Internet Content Law: “A federal appeals court upheld a ruling that struck down as unconstitutional a 1998 law intended to protect children from sexual material and other objectionable content on the Internet. The decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, is the latest twist in a decade-long legal battle over the law, the Child Online Protection Act. The court ruled that the law, which has not taken effect, violated the First Amendment because filtering technologies and ot…”

(Via NYT > Freedom of Speech and Expression.)

Net Censorship Law Struck Down Again: “A federal appeals court struck down yet again a law that would have required websites to verify all visitors’ ages if any of its content wasn’t suitable for minors. Tuesday’s ruling from the 3rd U.S. Court of Appeals adds to a decade of losses for the government’s attempt to regulate speech on the internet.

(Via Wired News.)

‘Spying’ requests exceed 500,000: “More than 500,000 official ’spying’ requests for private communications data were made last year, a report says.”

(Via BBC News.)

Court Affirms Online Content Law Unconstitutional: “A federal appeals court agreed with a lower court ruling that struck down as unconstitutional a 1998 law intended to protect children from sexual material and other objectionable content on the Internet.”

(Via NYT > Freedom of Speech and Expression.)

Momentum building for U.S. privacy policy: “Privacy advocates say there’s momentum in the U.S. Congress for a broad new privacy law.

(Via Macworld.)

Once Again: Court Says That COPA Anti-Porn Law Is Unconstitutional: “After the Supreme Court rejected most of the Communications Decency Act as being unconstitutional, Congress tried again with the more friendly sounding Child Online Protection Act. It sounds nice. Who doesn’t want to ‘protect the children,’ right? But it was basically the same thing as the CDA, and court after court has struck it down as unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has already weighed in on some aspects of the law, kicking the case back down to the district level, where the judge noted the law was unconstitutional. The government appealed (of course), and subpoenaed data from just about everyone. You may recall the legal fuss over the government’s demand that pretty much every search engine hand over their logs? That was part of the case the government was trying to make — and about the best they could do was to prove that (gasp!) there’s some porn online.

Of course, since porn is legal, proving that there’s porn online is hardly a rationale for restricting free speech — which is what COPA would do. It would require sites to make sure that either no adult content showed up anywhere on their site, or verify the age of everyone who visited their site. That is quite an extreme limitation on free speech, which is exactly what court after court after court has said. And, now we can add to that the Appeals Court who has now struck down COPA yet again, pointing out that it’s a clear violation of the First Amendment and chilling to freedom of speech. It also noted that there’s simply no reason that parents can’t deal with themselves through the use of filters:

‘It is apparent that COPA, like the Communications Decency Act before it, ‘effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another,’… and thus is overbroad. For this reason, COPA violates the First Amendment. These burdens would chill protected speech.’

Interesting that this comes at the same time that Andrew Cuomo and NY State are bullying ISPs to effectively do what COPA would have demanded. Hopefully Comcast will send Andrew Cuomo a copy of the Appeals Court decision. In the meantime, the Justice Department is indicating that it will appeal to the Supreme Court — so this case is still not over.

(Via Techdirt.)