Free Talk Live

A federal appeals court has struck down the Defense of Marriage Act – Congress's key legislation to block gay marriage – as unconstitutional in a ruling that will propel the issue to the supreme court. The Boston-based first district appeals court upheld a lower court decision that gay marriage is a matter for individual states to decide and that the federal government does not have the authority to deny recognition of same-sex unions.

US president Barack Obama has issued an executive order, enabling the government to take over all private communications in the country under the pretext of ensuring national security.

You know the world has gone insane when FOX is on the side of liberty. This week the Supreme Court is hearing arguments in the case of FOX v. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over “fleeting expletives” uttered by Nicole Richie and Cher at the Billboard Music Awards almost 10 years ago (That’s the swift hand of justice for you).

The constitutional chamber of Honduras' Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that privately run cities in the Central American country would be unconstitutional, threatening a project to build "model cities" with their own police, laws, government and tax systems. The five-judge panel voted 4-to-1 in a ruling that goes against the Honduran government and the country's elite. Because the decision was not unanimous, the case now goes to the full 15-member Supreme Court, which is expected to take it up within 10 days.

As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986...A coalition of internet service providers and other groups, known as Digital Due Process, has lobbied for an update to the law to treat both cloud- and home-stored e-mail the same, and thus require a probable-cause warrant for access.

The Canadian Government is set to enact the Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communications Act which will mark the return of "lawful access" within a single legislative package. This will require the disclosure of customer information by ISPs without court oversight, force ISPs to institute real-time surveillance of their customer and allow for law enforcement to obtain that information with or without a warrant. The bill set to pass is bill C-30.

According to Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing: “If granted, those expanded spying powers would make it easier for the government to snoop on email, webmail, Skype, Facebook, even Xboxes.”
if the government trots out “child pornography” as a reason to have these invasive and ever-expanding powers, don’t believe it. They’ve ignored hundreds of cases already.

A court paperwork oversight resulted in an erroneous warrant being issued for Cynthia Stanley's arrest. Her crime, sending a check into the Court which was accepted and entered by Court personnel on the day Cynthia's fine was due. Warrant was issued by the Court and served by two Amesbury police officers on the same day the fines were due/paid. Woman had to sit in jail for 4 hours.

The Wall Street Journal today published an in-depth review of a new, relatively unknown program run by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Although we have been warning about the dangers of the program for months, and I testified before Congress about the issue in July, the Journal’s story conveys how controversial the program was even inside the government. It also describes the broad scope of new authority the government is granting itself.