On Tuesday, January 29, at 9:30 a.m, members of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee will hold a public hearing on reform of the state secrets privilege, which the Executive Branch has often used in recent years to hinder judicial inquiry into controversial anti-terrorism policies such as the CIA's rendition program and the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program.

Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will appear at Tuesday's hearing to explain how the Administration has abused the privilege by seeking dismissal of all lawsuits concerning the NSA program -- including EFF's lawsuit against AT&T for assisting with the NSA -- based on blanket assertions of secrecy. Bankston will urge the committee to pass legislation to reform the privilege and clear the way for such lawsuits to proceed in court fairly and securely. Such reform is the most appropriate response to phone companies like AT&T that are lobbying Congress for retroactive amnesty, based on the claim that the government's assertion of the state secrets privilege prevents them from defending themselves.

Despite the ongoing controversy surrounding the Bush administration's claims that executive power alone allows it to engage in warrantless domestic surveillance that public officials and legal experts across the political spectrum have said violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the U.S. Constitution, only one question on the issue has been asked of any presidential candidate of either party during the numerous debates over the past year.

One of the issues surrounding the debate over Bush's warrantless surveillance concerns the telecommunication firms that assisted the NSA program. On May 11, 2006, USA Today reported that the NSA "has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth." Following additional reporting on the issue, several organizations filed lawsuits against the telecommunications companies alleging violations of the U.S. Constitution, FISA, and other state and federal laws. In a class-action lawsuit against AT&T, the Electronic Frontier Foundation alleged that the company is "collaborating with the NSA in a massive warrantless surveillance program that illegally tracks the domestic and foreign communications and communication records of millions of Americans."

James Cicconi, AT&T's senior vice president for external & legal affairs, set off a firestorm last week after The New York Times reported that he said his company was working with the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America to implement a digital-fingerprinting scheme and would detect and filter out copyrighted material from its network.

"Everyone who understands the technology agrees that most simple filtering efforts are doomed to fail, since all the file-sharing applications will simply encrypt the traffic, [thus] necessitating more complex deep-packet protocol analysis, at a minimum," says Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation "I'm told that 20% of Bit Torrent traffic is already encrypted."

A bid by the US government to force a child porn suspect to surrender his encryption password has sparked fierce debate about whether the move violates constitutional protections against self-incrimination.

On one side of the issue are civil libertarians from such groups as the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They argue the Fifth Amendment, which protects suspects from government demands to testify against themselves, extends to passwords because they're stored in a suspect's head.

"The last line of defense really is you holding your own password," Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the EFF, said.

Can the act of file sharing take place "passively," without the users' direct involvement; and if so, can they no longer be held liable for copyright infringement? That's the question a US district court is preparing to consider.

Next week, an Arizona district court will hear arguments in the ongoing case of the Howell family of Scottsdale, who last August was found to be illegally distributing 2,329 MP3s in violation of copyright. At that time, the judge in the case ruled that the fact that those MP3s appeared in Mr. Howell's shared music folder for his Kazaa program was proof enough that he had intention to share them, and that no evidence needed to be uncovered of actual subsequent file transfers.

The music labels' case against Jeffrey and Pamela Howell has taken on mythic dimensions over the last few weeks after the Washington Post went a little nuts and implied that the labels were suing the couple for making personal rips of their CDs (it later corrected the story). The truth is that Howells are being sued for having those rips in a shared KaZaA folder. But lost in the controversy over the RIAA's refusal to say that personal CD ripping is legal is the fact that the Howells aren't being sued for swapping songs with thousands of people around the world; instead, they are charged with making songs "available" for download. In a new amicus brief (PDF), the EFF argues that there's no such thing as "attempted copyright infringement." Yet.

Because the law specifically gives copyright owners the ability to control copies distributed "to the public," the music labels need to show that such distribution took place. The EFF points out that the copyright holder itself can hardly be considered "the public," and goes on to claim that "an authorized agent acting on behalf of the copyright owner also cannot infringe any rights held by that owner." Their conclusion is therefore that "where the only evidence of infringing distribution consists of distributions to authorized agents of the copyright owner, that evidence cannot, by itself, establish that other, unauthorized distributions have taken place."

With all of the Big Four record labels now jettisoning digital rights management, music fans have every reason to rejoice. But consumer advocates are singing a note of caution, as the music industry experiments with digital-watermarking technology as a DRM substitute.

Watermarking offers copyright protection by letting a company track music that finds its way to illegal peer-to-peer networks. At its most precise, a watermark could encode a unique serial number that a music company could match to the original purchaser. So far, though, labels say they won't do that: Warner and EMI have not embraced watermarking at all, while Sony's and Universal's DRM-free lineups contain "anonymous" watermarks that won't trace to an individual.

Still, privacy advocates were quick to point out that the watermarking is likely to produce fresh, empirical data that copyright material is ping-ponging across peer-to-peer sites -- data the industry would use in its ongoing bid to tighten copyright controls, and to browbeat internet service providers to implement large-scale copyright-filtering operations.

"It gives them the ability to put pressure on policy makers and ISPs to do filtering," said Fred Von Lohmann, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney.

The woman linked to the suicide of a 13-year-old girl who was tormented through MySpace could be charged with fraud after the case sparked worldwide outrage.

A federal grand jury in Los Angeles has subpoenaed the MySpace records of Lori Drew, the Missouri woman who created a false account on the social networking website to communicate with her daughter's friend, sources told The Los Angeles Times.

f Ms Drew is charged with defrauding MySpace by creating a fake profile, the case could have serious implications for internet privacy.

"The right to speak freely online is hugely important. Whistle-blowers create pseudonyms," an attorney for legal advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation told the Times.

The controversy surrounding a fake MySpace account that allegedly drove 13-year-old Megan Meier to commit suicide in October 2006 is raising new questions about the use of pseudonyms and false identities on social networking sites.

Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney for the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), said that there is a long history of anonymous speech in the United States, stretching all the way back to the Federalist Papers in 1787. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym "Publius" to advocate ratification of the United States Constitution, which was in danger of being rejected by New York state.

"If a prosecutor can maintain a case against a citizen who is merely using a pseudonym online, without more, it can have a chilling effect on free speech," Opsahl argued. "People can and should be responsible for their online actions, but one should address the actions, not the pseudonym."

Apple, Inc. settled a lawsuit out of court on Dec. 20 against Nicholas M. Ciarelli ’08 over leaks about its product plans on Ciarelli’s Web site, “Think Secret.”

The lawsuit ended a drawn-out effort by Apple to better control its product launches by targeting sites that published product information prior to official releases, as Think Secret has done on numerous occasions.

“[Although] the court never ruled on that motion, I think that if the case had gone to court, Think Secret would have won,” said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.