Peter Scheer

Thumbs up to federal District Judge Charles Breyer, who has come up with a brilliant—and hilarious—way to register displeasure with the practice of over-sealing documents and information in the official record of court cases. Judge Breyer (whose brother is Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer) has presided for several years over a shareholders’ lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard concerning the company’s ill-fated acquisition of a British software company that turned out to be worth billions less than HP thought

The First Amendment Coalition has reached a highly favorable settlement in a PRA suit against Marin County for records relating to a stream conservation ordinance. The outcome should serve as a warning to local governments proposing to withhold records on grounds they reflect how official decisions are made. FAC and its co-plaintiff, environmentalist David Schnapf, will receive over 700 pages of records, including multiple drafts of the ordinance and notes taken by members of the Board of Supervisors

Police need a warrant to rifle through papers in your desk drawer, so the same should go for sensitive digital data like email, text messages, location history and stored documents of all kinds. Tell your assemblymember to support S.B. 178 (text of bill), the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA), to protect our private digital lives from government overreach. California’s electronic privacy laws were written in, and for, the digital ecosystem of the  1970s and 80s. CalECPA is