News & Opinion

A new Electronic Frontier Foundation white paper makes suggestions to site developers for protecting themselves against being shut down by the subjects of their criticism and parody. -DB Electronic Frontier Foundation May 15, 2009 By Corynne McSherry Here’s a story we hear a lot at EFF: You think BadCo, Inc. is a bad actor and you’ve developed a really cool site to tell the world why. Maybe just by griping about them or maybe through

San Francisco police want a student journalist who took photos at a crime scene to surrender them to help identify the person who committed the murder. For a number of reasons, the student has refused to hand over the photos, instead invoking the state shield law. -DB San Francisco Chronicle May 19, 2009 By Jaxon Van Derbeken A potentially key witness to a killing last month in San Francisco – a college journalism student –

FBI letters sent to internet service providers to obtain information about clients and subscribers came with gag orders which precluded judicial review. After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the ruling that the gag orders were unconstitutional, the Obama administration failed to meet the time limits for an appeal. The appeals court ordered the FBI to develop procedures for justifying any gag order it requests for national security letters. -DB American

When President Obama decided to withhold photos of prisoners abused in Iraq and Afghanistan, it reopened the question of whether disclosure of such information would better serve the country. New York Times reporter Adam Liptak writes that the Pentagon Papers case during the Vietnam War is instructive in determining the best course of action. -DB The New York Times Analysis May 17, 2009 By Adam Liptak WASHINGTON, D.C. — It was a hypothetical question in

Efforts to thwart “libel tourism” – the practice of suing in countries with less stringent standards for proving defamation – are gaining ground as a bill advanced that would ban enforcement of most foreign libel verdicts in California. -DB San Francisco Chronicle May 15, 2009 By Bob Egelko Legislation designed to thwart “libel tourism” – the practice of trying to silence one’s critics by suing them in England, where defamation is easier to prove than