Television networks are having a busy month trying to stamp out new TV-watching technology, including telling a court that skipping a commercial while watching a recorded show is illegal. Yesterday, Fox, NBC, and CBS all sued Dish Network over its digital video recorder with automatic commercial-skipping. The same networks, plus ABC, Univision, and PBS, are gearing up for a May 30 hearing in thei... (more)
The Department of Homeland Security has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.
The intriguing the list includes obvious choices such as 'attack', 'Al Qaeda', 'terrorism' and 'dirty bomb' alongside dozens of seemingly innocent words like 'pork', 'cloud', 'team' and 'Mexico'.
Released under a freedom of information request, the informatio... (more)
Nations that carry out cybercrimes and wreak online havoc pose the greatest threat to the future of the internet, the chairman of Google has warned.
In a speech delivered at London's Science Museum on Wednesday, Eric Schmidt said the internet would be vulnerable for at least 10 years, and that every node of the public web needed upgrading to protect against crime. Fixing the problem was a "huge task" as the internet was built "without criminals in mind" he said.
Ever wonder how many of your tax dollars are going to the federal government censoring music blogs based on no real evidence, but just the say so of the RIAA and MPAA? Well, in the newly proposed Homeland Security Appropriations Bill, just introduced in the Senate by Mary Landrieu, the federal government would like to se... (more)
Although reports today suggest that the TSA is looking to move away from physical pat downs, owing to public backlash, TSA head John Pistole admitted recently that screeners are being trained to pay specific attention to the crotches of travelers moving through airport security.
In comments to Bloomberg News columnist Jeffrey Goldberg... (more)
An audio recording of an exchange between a teacher and a student at North Rowan High School in North Carolina serves as a reminder that the school system is becoming a training ground for teaching kids to be subservient to the state while indoctrinating them into thinking that the First Amendment doesn’t exist.
Soon the file-sharing habits of millions of BitTorrent users in the United States will be monitored as part of an agreement between the MPAA, RIAA, and all the major ISPs. Those caught sharing copyright works will receive several warning messages and will be punished if they continue to infringe. However, it now appears that the much-discussed July start date will have to wait until later in the year as the parties involved may fail to meet the provisional deadline.
For many years I've been pointing out the basics of economics concerning concepts like "free" and the importance of marginal cost to pricing in an efficient market. After one such recent post, I got an angry email from a college professor who has worked in the entertainment industry for many years, telling me that clearly I had never taken an economics class. That, ... (more)
Talking surveillance cameras that bark orders at passers-by and can also record conversations are heading for U.S. streets, with manufacturer Illuminating Concepts announcing the progress of its ‘Intellistreets’ system.
As we first reported last year, high tech street lights with “homeland security applications” are now being ... (more)
Documents just released by US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) in response to one of EFF's Freedom of Information Act requests show that DHS is considering collecting DNA from kids ages 14 and up--and is exploring expanding its regulations to allow collection from kids younger than that.
The proposal appears to be working its way through DHS in the wake of regulatio... (more)
Sheriff’s deputies secretly attached a GPS tracker to the truck of a vocal local government critic who they feared was planning to kidnap her son — and then tried and failed to retrieve it for four months.
Stacy Lynne found the device on her SUV earlier this month after growing suspicious that deputies were following her. Lynne has repeatedly... (more)
Fox News host Geraldo Rivera revealed today how he was “manually raped” by a TSA worker while traveling to Afghanistan, explaining how he had been persecuted by the federal agency for falsely appearing on the infamous ‘no fly list’.
Rivera appeared on Fox and Friends to discuss yesterday’s story about an eighteen-month-old child appearing on the TSA’s no fly list. The parents of the toddler said that after they were "humiliated, embarrassed... (more)
We've been warning for a while about the TPP negotiations, and how the big interests who pushed SOPA were making a concerted effort to use the (very questionable and extremely secretive) nature of international trade negotiations to sneak through many of the things they wanted in SOPA, without any scrutiny. Make no mistake: while the public has no access to, or information about, what the federal government is negotiating, the big special interests are well informed. As pressure has been mount... (more)
This man should be taking The Pirate Bay public like Facebook, instead he's going to be in a government cage because he came up with an innovative business model which the government arbitrarily proclaimed illegal. - Chris
We've all seen the crazy high claims by the legacy entertainment industry about the "costs" of infringement. Most of these reports have absolutely no basis in reality and have been widely debunked -- even by the US government itself. But, even if we grant that there are some "costs" to infringement, why is it that we rarely -- if ever -- hear about the costs of enforcement? Julian Sanchez has a great post riffing off of the news that Hulu is thinking of requiring proof of pay TV su... (more)
