Spam continues to blight e-mail exactly 15 years after the term was first coined and almost 30 years since the first spam message was sent.

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The term was picked up in internet chat rooms in the early 1970s and used in a variety of contexts until it became best-known as a reference to unsolicited bulk e-mail, according to research carried out by Brad Templeton, who is chairman of the board at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

U.S. Attorney general Michael Mukasey choked-up with emotion today as he defended the Bush Administration's warrant-less wiretapping.

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"I'm not sure what they mean by losing intelligence because they get to tap first and get authority later," said Cindy Cohn from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is correct in saying the Federal Intelligence surveillance Act or FISA, allows for the government to wire tap first and submit the paper work later, and the warrants are routinely granted.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley are coming to the rescue of a California man sued for posting code and instructions that allow shoppers to circumvent copy protection on downloadable, printable coupons.

The coupons, for General Foods, Colgate, Disney and others, are distributed by California-based Coupons Inc. through ad banners, e-mail and its website -- coupons.com. To access them, consumers must install Coupons Inc.'s proprietary software. The software assigns each user's computer a unique identifier, which the company uses to track and control the consumer's coupon-printing practices, usually limiting each user to two coupons per product. Each printed coupon has its own unique serial code.

The world's largest website name registrar, Network Solutions, is blocking web surfers from accessing an anti-Islam site - prompting concerns that fear of Islamic violence has become so powerful that it even controls WWW content.

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The Post reported that Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation - an organization that aims to champion free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights in digital and electronic issues - said it was the first case he'd heard of in which a U.S.-based registrar had preemptively suspended a domain name for violating its use policy. He admitted, however, that Network Solutions was within its legal rights in doing so.

Maybe it was just an act of "imprudent curiosity" by low-level employees, as State Department spokesman Sean McCormack dubbed it on Friday.

But others saw something more sinister in the breach of privacy that allowed at least four State Department workers to rifle the electronic passport files of all three leading presidential candidates.

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David Sobel, senior counsel for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted that the State Department's software would probably never catch an employee who simply wanted to glance at the private files of his neighbor.

"They have put in place a mechanism for the flagging of access involving prominent people," Sobel said. "But what about everyone else?"

As the Internet moved into the mainstream in the mid-1990s, John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, coined the phrase "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

Gilmore's comments were a reference to the architecture of the Internet, which was designed to ensure that information was delivered by the most efficient means possible and render attempts to block content nearly impossible. Yet years later, a growing number of countries seem determined to challenge Gilmore's maxim.

In the wake of the suicide of 13-year-old MySpace member Megan Meier, officials are stepping up efforts to crack down on online bullying.

In the latest example, Kentucky state legislator Tim Couch has proposed a bill that would ban anonymous comments on boards or message boards. Among other provisions, the act, introduced this month, would demand that operators of blogs or message boards require commenters to register their names, addresses and e-mail addresses.

But civil liberties advocates say that such legislation, no matter how well-intentioned, violates First Amendment rights to free speech. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that people have the right to speak anonymously, said Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. While that right isn't absolute--judges, for instance, can order the disclosure of users' identities when they've defamed someone--courts also have protected online commenters' anonymity in numerous cases.

"There's certainly an impulse, a desire on the part of various people across the spectrum to try to pierce the anonymity of online speakers," Zimmerman said. But, he added, courts turn down such requests unless there are solid legal grounds to order disclosure. "You have to demonstrate that there's a reason to do it other than wanting to know."

Big Brother may be tracking you.

Most people don't realize it, but driving around with your cell phone on leaves a precise electronic trail of where you've been and when you've been there stored in your phone company's data banks.

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No one knows exactly how many times the Justice Department has received phone tracking records without a warrant, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group that fights these dangerous government fishing trips.

After its first secret session in a quarter-century, the House on Friday rejected retroactive immunity for the phone companies that took part in the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program after the Sept. 11 attacks, and it voted to place greater restrictions on the government’s wiretapping powers.

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“Companies that may have helped us save lives should be thanked for their patriotic service, not subjected to billion-dollar lawsuits that will make them less willing to help in the future,” the president said. “The House bill may be good for class action trial lawyers, but it would be terrible for the United States.”

In fact, while some private lawyers are assisting in the litigation, the groups leading the efforts, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, are nonprofit advocacy groups.

From iPods to navigation systems, some of today's hottest gadgets are landing on store shelves with some unwanted extras from the factory — pre-installed viruses that steal passwords, open doors for hackers and make computers spew spam.

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"The photo situation is really a cautionary tale — they were just lucky that the virus that got installed happened to be one that didn't do a lot of damage," said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "But there's nothing about that situation that means next time the virus won't be a more serious one."

As The New York Times reports this morning, the House leadership's draft proposal for a surveillance bill contains a provision that would reject giving retroactive immunity to the telecoms. Instead, it would give the courts authorization to hear the classified material at issue in the case -- in essence disposing with the administration's claim of the state secrets privilege. I had a senior House aide walk me through the proposal, which is sure to infuriate the administration.

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As things currently stand, if the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the plaintiff in the lead suit against AT&T, wins on the state secrets issue, the case is almost sure to be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court. If they were to win that battle -- which will likely take a year or more -- the trial court would still be confronted with the problem of assessing the classified information. The aide said that the process outlined in the draft bill is not substantially different from the situation that would arise in that case. What the House bill essentially does is leapfrog over that issue.

Gathered at the Legal Futures Conference at California's Stanford University over the weekend, online legal experts have again raised their concerns that the rise and rise of Web 2.0 has come at the expense of individual privacy.

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Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, acknowledged that she finds the location-based technology in her iPhone very convenient when she's trying to avoid traffic congestion but she doesn't want the government to be able to use that technology to track her down.

The fact that all sorts of data about each of us is being gathered and is archived, searchable, and can be compiled to create profiles about each of us is what makes digital privacy intrusions so much scarier than pre-Internet life, she said.

WHEN COMPANIES ARE CAUGHT POSTING fake reviews online, they often can expect a wave of bad publicity. But if the Web site RealSelf.com has its way, they will also have to defend themselves in court. Last week, RealSelf.com accused plastic surgery corporation Lifestyle Lift of breach of contract, computer fraud and other counts for allegedly directing its agents to pose as patients and post good reviews of the company's procedures on the site.

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"It's very difficult to bring suit for a terms of service violation," said Matt Zimmerman, an attorney with the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation. He added that RealSelf.com might have a difficult time proving it had been harmed by the allegedly phony reviews. "It seems like a bit of a stretch."

Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn't disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

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NSA gets access to the flow of data from telecommunications switches through the FBI, according to current and former officials. It also has a partnership with FBI's Digital Collection system, providing access to Internet providers and other companies. The existence of a shadow hub to copy information about AT&T Corp. telecommunications in San Francisco is alleged in a lawsuit against AT&T filed by the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, based on documents provided by a former AT&T official. In that lawsuit, a former technology adviser to the Federal Communications Commission says in a sworn declaration that there could be 15 to 20 such operations around the country.

[RADIO] The lead plaintiff in a warrantless wiretapping lawsuit against AT&T is talking publicly about the case. Congress may grant AT&T and other firms retroactive legal immunity. That could end a flurry of lawsuits opposing the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 eavesdropping program.

Julius Baer & Company LTD on Wednesday abandoned, for now, its legal quest to shut down whistleblower website Wikileaks.

Lawyers for the Swiss bank filed a motion to dismiss the case five days after a federal judge in San Francisco ruled the website's postings of leaked documents is protected as free speech by the US Constitution.

"I think they are recognizing what the judge made clear on Friday," said Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Matt Zimmerman, who was on the Wikileaks defense team.

"It seems the plaintiff decided there wasn't much point in going forward and we agree with that."

A US federal court has reversed an order which had shut down the Wikileaks.org website.

The whistleblower site had been ordered to disable the domain after an earlier court ruled in favour of Swiss bank Juilus Baer which complained about leaked documents posted on the site.

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"We are very pleased that Judge White recognised the serious constitutional concerns raised by his earlier orders," said Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The social-networking startup Facebook said it didn't give the Moroccan government information to identify a user who was arrested for impersonating a Moroccan prince on the website.

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Facebook's policies regarding privacy are closely scrutinised by privacy advocates because its users often share detailed personal information on the site, such as their home address, phone number, employer and educational institutions they've attended. The site is "a honey pot of personal information," said Danny O'Brien, international outreach coordinator at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil-liberties group that had raised questions about the incident involving Mr Mourtada.