EFF continues its case against the US telecoms industry

Image via Wikipedia

The EFF are continuing a case against the telecoms industry that the US Government has wanted to sweep aside. Problem is the EFF won’t let it.

From Boing Boing:

Remember when the Electronic Frontier Foundation discovered that the NSA had been wiretapping the entire Internet, illegally, with collaboration from the nation’s phone companies? Remember when they sued the phone companies in order to discover the full extent of this illegal, warrantless domestic spying?

Remember when Congress — including both presidential candidates — voted to give the phone companies immunity from prosecution, even though they had clearly broken the law, on the grounds that the president had asked them to? (If the president asked you to shoot someone, would Congress let you off the hook, too?)

Well now EFF is suing to have the immunity — the unconstitutional immunity — overturned. Go EFF! “The immunity law puts the fox in charge of the hen house, letting the Attorney General decide whether or not telecoms like AT&T can be sued for participating in the government’s illegal warrantless surveillance,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “In our constitutional system, it is the judiciary’s role as a co-equal branch of government to determine the scope of the surveillance and rule on whether it is legal, not the executive’s. The Attorney General should not be allowed to unconstitutionally play judge and jury in these cases, which affect the privacy of millions of Americans.”

In the public version of his certification to the court, Attorney General Mukasey asserted that the government had no “content-dragnet” program that searched for keywords in the body of communications. However, the government did not deny the dragnet acquisition of the content of communications. In support of its opposition, EFF provided the court with a summary of thousands of pages of documents demonstrating the broad dragnet surveillance of millions of innocent Americans’ communications. Eight volumes of exhibits accompanied the detailed summary, including eyewitness accounts and testimony under oath.

“We have overwhelming record evidence that the domestic spying program is operating far outside the bounds of the law,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. “Intelligence agencies, telecoms, and the Administration want to sweep this case under the rug, but the Constitution won’t permit it.”

Future of Web Apps.

Image via CrunchBase

Today I’m at FOWA in the docklands. Julie Meyer who I work with at Ariadne Capital is on stage @ 15:45 – 16:15 The Future of Entrepreneurship.

Relatated Links

There is a great summary from yesterday here from Benjamin:

http://bendyer.wordpress.com/2008/10/10/day-1-fowa/

Mediatronica does mash-up like you’ve never seen

Eli and the gang at Mediatronica are doing some brilliant work – this time with a video mixer for innerpartysystem. Outstanding.

User generated content affects Apples stock. SEC probes

Image via Wikipedia

cnet reports a CNN ireport story on its user generated site impacted apples stock by 9% yesterday.

Its a really interesting situtaion where the un verified story on a CNN service get picked up by other mainstream media and has a real impact.

Does this mean that mainstream news media cannot even associate its brand with user generated content? If you understand how the iReport system works you realise that until CNN add an ‘ON CNN’ Logo its not been on the network. But in the snack media world we live in someone has seen this and blogged it withoutchecking, and boom – its the story is everywhere and the original poster is going down.

Related articles

• CNN iReport Falsely Claims Jobs Heart Attack
• Apple’s stock hit by Web rumor
• CNN/ Jobs Heart Attack Scandal: 100% not a failure of citizen journalism
• Shorting a stock, 2.0 style

ITV advertising overlay trial

Image via Wikipedia

Just spotted an article in the Times (News pg.11) about ITV working with Keystream to do real time video analytics and advertising overlays and embedding – don’t see how this will fit with ofcom guidelines regarding editorial and advertising separation though. Perhaps going to be used by ITV to negotiate a more relaxed (and potentially lucrative) advertorial approach. I’ll try to dig out an example from the ITV local website.

Related articles by Zemanta

• ITV plans to embed adverts inside programmes
• ITV website benefits from EURO 2008
• ITV creates online channel for Notting Hill Carnival
• ITV rethinks plans to save £40m in regional news cuts

Industry Moves: BBCWW Confirms Microsoft’s Dobson To Run Global Ad Sales

Just picked this up on paid content:

BBC Worldwide has now confirmed Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) UK’s online services group VP Chris Dobson is joining it, as we reported last month. His job title’s a big one – EVP and general manager of global ad sales. Dobson will oversee advertising across TV channels and online including BBC World News, and will sit above both Jonathan Howlett and Mark Gall, who were brought to head digital ads for international and US respectively in November, when BBC.com launched with its controversial advertising. Dobson, who will report to Darren Childs, has a remit to grow advertising income from the BBC’s commercial arm, which reinvests in BBC content. BBC.com made £1.5 million from ads between November and March, and BBCWW plans to grow that significantly.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Industry Moves: BBCWW Confirms Microsoft’s Dobson To Run Global Ad Sales
• BBC trials new link boxes