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“The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has upheld a lower court ruling against Google in a case arising out of the Street View interception of private Wi-Fi communications. The lawsuit alleges that Google’s ongoing interception of Wi-Fi payload data through its Street View program violated several laws, including the federal Wiretap Act. The court rejected …
EPIC: “The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has just released new documents concerning the NSA’s surveillance programs. The documents, which include numerous filings with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, date back to 2006. The documents specifically relate to the governments collection of information under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. In a …
COMMUNITY COLLEGES – New Federal Research Center May Enhance Current Understanding of Developmental Education – GAO-13-656, Sep 10, 2013 EDUCATION RESEARCH – Preliminary Observations on the Institute of Education Sciences’ Research and Evaluation Efforts – GAO-13-852T, Sep 10, 2013 FAA FACILITIES – Improved Condition Assessment Methods Could Better Inform Maintenance Decisions and Capital- Planning Efforts – GAO-13-757, Sep 10, 2013 FEDERAL JUDGESHIPS – The General …
“The United States’ National Security Agency intelligence-gathering operation is capable of accessing user data from smart phones from all leading manufacturers. Top secret NSA documents that SPIEGEL has seen explicitly note that the NSA can tap into such information on Apple iPhones, BlackBerry devices and Google’s Android mobile operating system. The documents state that it …
Ellen Nakashima: “The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material. In addition, the court extended …
ACLU: “[On August 26, 2013], we filed the opening brief in our lawsuit challenging the NSA’s ongoing collection of the call records of virtually everyone in the United States, including the ACLU’s. We’re asking the court for a preliminary injunction ordering the government to stop collecting our data and to bar any use of the …
Ewen MacAskill in New York, The Guardian, Thursday 22 August 2013: “The National Security Agency paid millions of dollars to cover the costs of major internet companies involved in the Prism surveillance program after a court ruled that some of the agency’s activities were unconstitutional, according to top-secret material passed to the Guardian. The technology companies, which the NSA says includes Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook, incurred …
Follow up to previous posting, Amazon’s lawsuit released against GAO in cloud computing contract case, see this new CRS report, GAO Bid Protests: Trends and Analysis, August 9, 2013: “Bid protests on federal government contracts filed with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) have recently received increased congressional scrutiny due to protests of high-profile awards and …
“In the last five years, there has been a gradual but steady decline in the number of civil lawsuits filed each month in federal courts for the drug-related seizure of property, according to case-by-case information analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). Such suits are filed as part of the Department of Justice Asset …
ABA Journal, Debra Cassens Weiss “A federal judge in Manhattan has ruled that New York police violated the Constitution when they targeted “the right people” with stop-and-frisk tactics. Minorities were disproportionately targeted under policies that encouraged more police stops to combat crime, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin wrote in a 195-page decision (PDF). “A police …
Vanhuysse, Pieter, Intergenerational Justice in Aging Societies: A Cross-National Comparison of 29 OECD Countries (April 20, 2013). Available at SSRN “I present the Intergenerational Justice Index (IJI) – a simple four-dimensional indicator developed with the Bertelsmann Stiftung in order to compare intergenerational justice in practice across 29 OECD member states. The unit of analysis is …
CRS – The 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: Natural Resource Damage Assessment Under the Oil Pollution Act. Adam Vann, Legislative Attorney; Robert Meltz, Legislative Attorney. July 24, 2013 “The estimated 4.1 million barrels of oil released during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill is considered to be the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry …
