The New York Times discusses the Google privacy case in Italy and the differences it highlights in how the United States and European nations view privacy rights. Recap: In September 2006, a video showing a disabled boy being harassed by classmates that was uploaded to Google Video’s Italian site. Google removed the video in November 2006 within 24 hours of a removal request being made. Prosecutors charged Google executives with defamation and violating the country’s privacy code. Last week, an Italian court found three Google executives guilty of violating the country’s privacy code and sentenced them to six-month suspended jail terms. Google is appealing.

In one sense, the ruling was a nice discussion starter about how much responsibility to place on services like Google for offensive content that they passively distribute.

But in a deeper sense, it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression and could restrict the flow of information on the Internet to everyone. [...]

“The framework in Europe is of privacy as a human-dignity right,” said Nicole Wong, a lawyer with the company. “As enforced in the U.S., it’s a consumer-protection right.” Read more »

Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy and Julian Sanchez and Jim Harper (of Cato and the Tech Liberation Front) take a look at the Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure questions behind the Pennsylvania Webcam case. Recap: In a class-action lawsuit — Robbins v. Lower Merion School District (pdf) — in Pennsylvania, the Robbins family alleged that the Lower Merion School District misused Webcam-enabled laptops it issued to students in order to remotely peep into the students’ homes, take photographs and violate their privacy. The school district has denied violating anyone’s privacy, claiming the Webcams were only turned on in case of lost or stolen computers. The FBI and local officials are investigating. The Stryde Hax blog has an excellent breakdown of the technology that the school district used to remotely control Webcams in 2,300 laptops it issued to students.

Kerr’s argument: “The schools violated the Fourth Amendment rights of students when they actually turned the cameras on when the computers were at home. On the other hand, the schools did not violate the federal statutory surveillance laws.” Read his post for details concerning the case as related to the federal and state wiretap acts, the Stored Communications Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Fourth Amendment.

Then, head over to the Tech Liberation Front, where Sanchez and Harper are also debating the Fourth Amendment issues in this case. Read more »

Newsweek is the latest to weigh in on the issue of law-enforcement tracking of individuals’ cellphones — without getting warrants to access the mobile phone info. Previously, The Legal Intelligencer previewed a case in the Third Circuit concerning the rights individuals have in the privacy of cellphone data and ACLU staff attorney Catherine Crump wrote an opinion piece about the case, privacy and cellphone use. Newsweek says:

Amid all the furor over the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all. Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers’ cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact. The prosecutors said they needed the records to trace the movements of suspected drug traffickers, human smugglers, even corrupt public officials. But many federal magistrates—whose job is to sign off on search warrants and handle other routine court duties—were spooked by the requests. Some in New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas balked. Prosecutors “were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device,” said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. “And I started asking the U.S. Attorney’s Office, ‘What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?’ ” Read more »

Last year, Oklahoma passed a controversial new abortion law (pdf); one of the law’s provisions required the online posting of personal details of women who had undergone the procedure, a violation of the women’s privacy rights. An Oklahoma County District Court judge has ruled as unconstitutional the Statistical Reporting of Abortions Act (Oklahoma House Bill 1595), but not for privacy or civil liberties reasons. Instead, Judge Daniel Owens said the law violated the state’s “single-subject rule,” which requires that each law cover only one subject, ABC News reports. The lawsuit by the Center for Reproductive Rights said the Act had four subjects: redefining multiple abortion-related terms used in Oklahoma law; banning gender-selective abortion; establishing reporting requirements; and creating new responsibilities for the state Department of Health, state Board of Medical Licensure and Supervision, and state Board of Osteopathic Examiners.

There are several controversial provisions in the Statistical Reporting of Abortions Act, including several reporting requirements. One of them mandated doctors require women seeking abortions to fill out a highly invasive questionnaire, then pass the information to the state health department. Doctors not fulfilling the Act’s requirements faced criminal sanctions and loss of their medical licenses.

The state would have created a new Web site to publish answers to the required questionnaire. The 37 questions include: Read more »

The Stryde Hax blog has an excellent breakdown of the technology that the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania used to remotely control Webcams in 2,300 laptops it issued to students. (Short recap: In a recent class-action lawsuit — Robbins v. Lower Merion School District (pdf) — in Pennsylvania, the Robbins family alleged that the Lower Merion School District misused Webcam-enabled laptops it issued to students in order to remotely peep into the students’ homes, take photographs and violate their privacy. The school district has denied violating anyone’s privacy, claiming the Webcams were only turned on in case of lost or stolen computers. The FBI and local officials are investigating.)

Stryde takes a close look at Michael Perbix, a network technician for the school district, and his support of remote-activation technology:

Mr. Perbix has a large online web forum footprint as well as a personal blog, and a lot of his posts, attributed to his role at Lower Merion, provide insight into the tools, methods, and capabilities deployed against students at LMSD. [...] Read more »

A few months ago, Texas announced that, as part of a lawsuit settlement agreement with the Texas Civil Rights Project, it would destroy five million blood samples taken from babies without their parents’ consent, a tactic that raised substantial privacy questions. Now, the Texas Tribune has learned, Texas officials also “were turning over hundreds of dried blood samples to the federal government to help build a vast DNA database.”

A Texas Tribune review of nine years’ worth of e-mails and internal documents on the Department of State Health Services’ newborn blood screening program reveals the transfer of hundreds of infant blood spots to an Armed Forces lab to build a national and, someday, international mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) registry. The records, released after the state agreed in December to destroy more than 5 million infant blood spots, also show an effort to limit the public’s knowledge of aspects of the newborn blood program, and to manage the debate around it. But the plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit never saw them, because the state settled the case so quickly that it never reached the discovery phase.

DSHS spokeswoman Carrie Williams says that while the department’s general philosophy was to save blood spots for public health research, “we did not have an exclusive policy.” She says DSHS participated in the project because officials believed it would help in missing-persons cases — and knew the blood spots could not be linked back to a particular individual. [...] Read more »