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(EFF) San Francisco - A federal judge today dismissed dozens of lawsuits over illegal domestic surveillance of American citizens, ruling that telecommunications companies had immunity from liability under the controversial FISA Amendments Act (FISAAA). The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) California and Illinois affiliates are planning to appeal the decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that FISAAA is unconstitutional.

"We're deeply disappointed in Judge Walker's ruling today," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "The retroactive immunity law unconstitutionally takes away Americans' claims arising out of the First and Fourth Amendments, violates the federal government's separation of powers as established in the Constitution, and robs innocent telecom customers of their rights without due process of law."

Signed by President Bush in 2008, the FISAAA allowed for the dismissal of the lawsuits over the telecoms' participation in the warrantless surveillance program if the government secretly certifies to the court that the surveillance did not occur, was legal, or was authorized by the president. Then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey filed that classified certification with the court in September and demanded that the cases be dismissed.

(EFF) By Jennifer Granick - Today brings great news for location privacy, especially if you live in New York. The highest court for that state ruled today in People v. Weaver that police may not use a GPS device to track the movements of your vehicle without first getting a warrant. (Opinion here.) In Weaver, state police placed a GPS tracking device on the defendant’s car and tracked it for 65 days for no apparent reason. GPS devices are sophisticated tracking devices that give officers extremely detailed, round-the-clock information about the movements of a vehicle or tagged suspect. As the Court recognized, the GPS unit will disclose trips of an indisputably private nature from which the government can infer not simply where we go, but our political, religious and amorous associations. Since the “potential for a similar capture of information or ‘seeing’ by law enforcement would require, at a minimum, millions of additional police officers and cameras on every street lamp,” GPS poses a categorically different kind of privacy threat than simple tracking beepers previously allowed without a warrant in U.S. Supreme Court cases from the early 1980s. For these reasons, suspicionless, warrantless GPS tracking violates the state guarantees against unreasonable searches and seizures.

(EFF) Boston - A justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has ordered police to return a laptop and other property seized from a Boston College computer science student's dorm room after finding there was no probable cause to search the room in the first place. The police were investigating whether the student sent hoax emails about another student. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Boston law firm Fish and Richardson are representing the computer science student, who was forced to complete much of the final month of the semester without his computer and phone. Boston College also shut off the student's network access in the wake of the now-rejected search.

"The judge correctly found that there was no legitimate reason to search and seize this student's property," said EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick. "Our client was targeted because law enforcement was improperly suspicious of our client's computer skills and misunderstood computer crime laws. We're grateful that the court was able to see through the commonwealth's smokescreen and rectify this mistake."

(Computerworld) By Sharon Gaudin - After South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster said efforts by Craigslist Inc. to eliminate racy ads aren't enough to halt his criminal investigation, the head of the online classified advertising company demanded an apology. "The Craigslist South Carolina site continues to display advertisements for prostitution and graphic pornographic material," McMaster wrote on the state's Web site earlier this week. "This content was not removed as we requested. We have no alternative but to move forward with criminal investigation and potential prosecution."

McMaster's complaint came a week after Craigslist submitted to mounting pressure from the law enforcement community and announced that it will remove the Erotic Services category from its classified advertising Web site within seven days. That move prompted Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who had been vocal in his criticism of Craigslist -- going so far as to call it an "online brothel" -- to applaud the company's decision to remove the category.

Thus Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster took issue with McMaster's online statement.

(Computerworld) By Mary K. Pratt - Imagine a world where your phone is smart enough to order and pay for your morning coffee. No more giving orders, handing over your payment or waiting in lines. No more face-to-face chit-chat or human interaction.

For many, this might seem like a blessing. Who likes to wait in line? But on a grand scale, might this kind of automated world dramatically change -- perhaps even eliminate -- how we communicate and connect with one another? Could it change something about us as individuals, or as a whole society? "My short answer is yes. It's absolutely changing society and the way people are," says Melissa Cefkin, an ethnographer at IBM. "But there's nothing new in that. We've always had the introduction of new technologies that transform and move society in new ways. It changes our interactions, our sense of the world and each other."

(IDG News Service) He's been in jail for seven months now, but former San Francisco network administrator Terry Childs said he's going to keep fighting to prove he's innocent of computer crime charges. Childs was arrested on July 12, charged with disrupting San Francisco's wide-area network during a tense standoff with management. In his first interview since the arrest, given a week ago, Childs contended that he did nothing illegal while working for the city and argued that his actions, depicted as criminal by prosecutors, were in line with standard network security practices.

By Gregg Keizer (Computerworld) - A Russian "cybermilitia" has knocked the central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan off the Internet, a security researcher said today, demonstrating that the hackers are able to respond even faster than last year, when they waged a digital war against another former Soviet republic, Georgia. Since Jan. 18, the two biggest Internet service providers in Kyrgyzstan have been under a "massive, sustained distributed denial-of-service attack," said Don Jackson, the director of threat intelligence at SecureWorks Inc. The attacks, which are ongoing, have knocked most of the country offline and disrupted e-mail to and from a U.S. air base there, Jackson said. The public affairs officer at Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan was not immediately available to answer questions about whether the attacks have disrupted operations or other activities.

Boris Johnson calls efforts to extradite UFO hacker example of "American bullying"
By Sharon Gaudin (Computerworld) - In a column published today in London's Telegraph newspaper, the mayor of London called upon President Barack Obama to call off the U.S. effort to extradite and prosecute the British hacker who in 2001 broke into computer systems in the Department of Defense, NASA and the U.S. Army. Mayor Boris Johnson called U.S. efforts to prosecute self-acknowledged hacker Gary McKinnon a "legal nightmare."

"To listen to the ravings of the U.S. military, you would think that Mr. McKinnon is a threat to national security on a par with Osama bin Laden," Johnson wrote. "According to the Americans, this mild-mannered computer programmer has done more damage to their war-fighting capabilities than all the orange-pyjama-clad suspects of Guantanamo combined."

(Computerworld) To hear Joel Tenenbaum's version of the story, at least, it isn't hard to see why the Recording Industry Association of America's campaign against music piracy has earned the RIAA so many enemies — perhaps contributing to the trade group's decision this week to stop filing lawsuits against people like Tenenbaum.

Tenenbaum, who turns 25 on Christmas day, is a doctoral student in physics at Boston University. He also is involved in a high-profile legal fight with the RIAA for allegedly downloading and distributing songs belonging to several music labels. The recording companies claim to have discovered more than 800 songs stored illegally in a shared folder on Tenenbaum's computer, although the RIAA's case against him only identifies seven of the songs.

The RIAA says that despite its change in strategy, it doesn't plan to drop existing lawsuits. If found guilty of willful copyright infringement, Tenenbaum faces financial penalties that could exceed $1 million dollars — $150,000 per song, the maximum fine allowed by the federal statute under which he is being sued.

(The Raw Story) A federal appeals court ruling late Monday is the cause célèbre of the American Civil Liberties Union, as another provision of the Bush administration's Patriot Act falls to the judicial system. Until the ruling, recipients of so-called "national security letters" were legally forbidden from speaking out. The letters, usually a demand for documents, or a notice that private records had been searched by government authorities, were criticized as a cover-all for FBI abuses.