EFF's legal director Cindy Cohn has written a great op-ed in today's San Francisco Chronicle about the Democratic Congress's move to immunize AT&T from liability for its complicity in illegally wiretapping every single American Internet user for the NSA.

Now is the time for Speaker Pelosi to make good on that promise, or at least prevent any further harm.

Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sez, "Tuesday (June 26) is the 10 Anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in ACLU v. Reno, the landmark case that established that speech online is protected under the First Amendment. The outcome seems obvious now, but it wasn't at the time. — Read the rest

The EFF's Cindy Cohn says,

Have you had any difficulties entering or leaving the
United States? If so, EFF would like to hear from you.

After focusing attention on the Department of Homeland
Security's secret Automated Targeting System (ATS), we're
keen to uncover and document its effect on the law-abiding
public.

Cindy Cohn, EFF's stellar Legal Director, sez, "Senator Specter and the Bush Administration today announced that they have reached a deal to send all of the cases concerning the illegal NSA wiretapping (including EFF's) to the secret FISA court. This is being spun in the press as a big concession by the Administration but in truth it's an abomination — the FISA court acts in secret and doesn't even hear argument from both sides. — Read the rest

Cindy Cohn says: "Oakland Tribune article about Stephen Heller, a
courageous whistleblower who publicized some internal documents from electronic voting machine vendor Diebold. He's been charged with three
felonies in Los Angeles Superior Court, for felony access to computerdata, commercial burglary and receiving stolen property, and has pled
not guilty. — Read the rest

AOL/Yahoo's plan to tax email will be a disaster for free speech. Last week I blogged about AOL and Yahoo's plan to employ Goodmail's email-taxing service, which charges mail-senders a quarter of a cent every time they want to send guaranteed email to their customers. — Read the rest

Snip from Electronic Frontier Foundation announcement:

"The proposed settlement will provide significant benefits for consumers who bought the flawed CDs," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "Under the terms, those consumers will get what they thought they were buying–music that will play on their computers without restriction or security risk.

SiliconValley.com is hosting a weeklong online roundtable about all that is Google. Along with Om Malik, Cindy Cohn, and other experts, BB band manager John Battelle, author of The Search, is weighing in. Link

On Dave Farber's Interesting People list, a gang of luminaries like EFF's Cindy Cohn, Julian Dibell, Seth Finkelstein and Tim himself have been hashing out the debate over Google Print this weekend — it's fascinating reading, and Tim has provided links to the best of the debate:

So what are the Authors Guild and the publishers complaining about?

This Tuesday evening, Brewster Kahle blogged:

Tonight we launched our bookscanning initiative and presented a vision of an Open Library. At the event, Microsoft Network (MSN) joined the Open Content Alliance and committed to kick off their support by funding the digitization of 150,000 books in 2006!

My cow-orker Cindy Cohn is not only EFF's Legal Director, she's also counsel for one of the survivors of a small village in Nigeria that was attacked by a government death squad that Chevron hired to clear the way for oil exploration. — Read the rest

EFF's Legal Director Cindy Cohn recounts the story of how she came to work at EFF, beginning with a pro-bono case that legalized strong crypto in America:

"A doctoral student in mathematics named Dan Bernstein has been told by the government that if he publishes a computer program he wrote on the Internet he could go to jail as an arms dealer."

Ernest Miller liveblogs the conference just held by Grokster supporters:

# Richard Taranto, Farr and Taranto, argued the case before the Supreme Court

A few words, two different aspects to think about this case. What this means for the future of this litigation and how Grokster and Streamcast will fair under the remand directive.

Cindy Cohn, EFF's legal director (whose landmark Bernstein case legalized crypto), sez,

Feel like your democracy is a bit opaque these days? Beginning tomorrow, EFF will help shed a little light in two interconnected ways. On Thursday and Friday, June 9th and 10th, EFF will provide a series of weblog reports of a two-day lobbying effort by a coalition of activist groups fighting for transparent, auditable electronic voting.

Given that the datestamp is 4/1/2005, I'm guessing this may be a spoof. But. According to Copyfight: En route to the Supreme Court Grokster hearing, former MPAA chief Jack Valenti — who famously predicted in 1982 that the VCR would choke the life out of the movie biz — stops to sign a Betamax tape for EFFer Annalee Newitz. — Read the rest

My cow-orkers at EFF, Annalee Newitz and Cindy Cohn, have co-authored a brilliant white-paper on how spam-fighting is endangering the ability of nonprofit mailing-list operators to send email to people who ask for it.

MoveOn.org is a politically progressive organization that engages in online activism.

My cow-orker Cindy Cohn, EFF's Legal Director, gave a hell of a talk at the last USENIX Security Conference, a kind of geek-security-law 101 crash-course, usingthe fight over the leaked Diebold code as her example. EFF's just posted that talk in audio and as a set of slides. — Read the rest

Mitch Wagner sez, "I've been blogging the Usenix security conference here in San Diego, including a talk by EFF counsel Cindy Cohn:"

– EFF is deeply involved in projects to ensure honesty in e-voting. In California, she said, voters have the option to choose a paper ballot.

An appeals court ruled last Tuesday that bloggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish. I covered the story for Wired News:

Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory.

Cindy Cohn, the EFF's Legal Director, spoke at the FTC's spam conference last week on the ways that over-broad spam filtering is turning into censorship of First-Amendment-protected political speech.

1. I'm here because EFF was approached by a subscriber to a large e-mail
list, Moveon.org,