A county electoral board member in Prince William County, Virginia (25 miles south of D.C.) was concerned that allowing electronic signatures to be used in requesting absentee ballots could lead to fraud. To test that theory, the Post reports, the official, "recruited four friends — while the county’s registrar was away — to inspect 151 absentee […]
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In 2004, an ISP called Calyx Internet Access in New York received a National Security Letter (NSL), a broad government tool for demanding information without judicial approval. In addition to demanding information, the NSL imposed a broad and indefinite gag order on Calyx and its president, Nick Merrill. They remained "John Doe" litigants through years of […]
Courthouse News reports: After passing some of the strictest legislation in the nation regulating soda and other sugary drinks, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously voted to repeal a ban on soft drink ads on city property. Days after the board passed the trio of laws in June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck […]
Yesterday, the National Restaurant Association announced plans to file a lawsuit against New York City's health department over its requirement that chain restaurants post warning labels on foods that contain more than the recommended daily limit for sodium. The rule takes effect today. It requires chain restaurants with 15 or more locations in New York […]
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation press release: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a complaint today with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Google for collecting and data mining school children’s personal information, including their Internet searches—a practice EFF uncovered while researching its “Spying on Students” campaign, which launched today. The campaign was created to […]
…is the tactic described in a Times article over the weekend: [The] Coalition for Affordable Drugs . . . identif[ies] pharmaceutical patents that they consider weak or abusive. Then they request that a unit of the United States Patent and Trademark Office review the legitimacy of the patents. . . . [Founders] Mr. Bass and Mr. Spangenberg say […]
In the New York Review of Books, here, reviewing Prof. John Coffee's "The Cure for Corporate Wrongdoing."
…in last Wednesday's Times, notes that, "Last month Congress quietly approved a way for computerized callers to tap into the cell phones used by millions of people who owe money on government backed loans." Read more here.
Since I published yesterday’s discussion of the Montana Standard’s retroactive elimination of anonymous commenting on its web site, there have been three informative developments. First, I was able to speak with the Standard’s editor, David McCumber, mostly off the record so that we could talk through some of the issues in a collegial mannner; second, […]
The ABA Journal reports that “The Georgia Secretary of State’s office accidentally sent protected personal information for its states’ registered voters on computer disks to third parties last month, along with the public voter-registration records for which those organizations had paid.” Last week, plaintiffs brought a class action suit under state identity-protection law on behalf […]