iByte

Today, the Senate passed the controversial FISA Amendements Act which broadly expands the Executive branch’s warrantless wiretapping authority and provides retroactive immunity to telecommunications firms which provided information to the US government under the illegal domestic wiretapping program of the NSA.

Last month the House of Representatives passed the same bill and as such, both bills will now go back to the House to have any differences resolved and once finalized, the bill will go onto the President to be signed into law.

What this bill does is not only seriously invade the rights of United States citizens in the name of protecting them, it also grants immunity to telecom companies who participated in an illegal warrantless domestic wiretapping program under the order of the President of the United States operated by the National Security Agency.

We encourage every single person who feels that this is an egregious and gross violation of their civil rights and freedoms to contact their represantives, especially those who voted in approval of the bill to express their outrage and to contact those who voted against the bill to thank them for standing up for your rights.

According to Threat Level at Wired, Google has been ordered by the court to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users including users’ names and IP addresses to Viacom.

Viacom is seeking the information to prove that infringing material is more popular than the user-created content which could be used to increase and prove Google’s liability if found guilty of contributory infringement.

Back in March of 2007, Viacom filed suit against Google for more than $1 billion dollars in damages for allowing users to upload copyrighted clips of Viacom property. Google has argued that the law provides a safe harbor for online services such as YouTube as long as the fully comply with DMCA Takedown notices.

In spite of the fact that turning over such data invades the privacy of its users, the judge called such an argument “speculative” and ordered the data turned over on a set of four terabyte hard drives. The judge cited Google’s own defense of its data retention policies that IP addresses aren’t personally revealing in and of themselves to justify the order to turn over the data.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls the court order a violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 which prevents disclosure of personally identifiable video rental records from being distributed without consumer consent or valid warrant or court order to police officials.

Also part of the order is the requirement for Google to turn over all copies of videos that it has taken down for any reason including those not affected by the Viacom claims.

Viacom also made requests for the source code of YouTube, the source code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked as private by users and Google’s advertising database schema. All of those requests were denied in whole except that Google will have to also provide data about how often each private video has been watched and by how many people.