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Every single day, dozens of requests from law-enforcement officials, courts, and other government agencies pour into Google's offices, requesting that Google hand over different pieces of information its users have amassed

many of these requests are legitimate

It's important for law enforcement agencies to pursue illegal activity and keep the public safe.

Every time you read a newspaper on your computer or buy an ebook, you can leave an electronic trail behind you. That trail is potentially lucrative for business, and is a new source of surveillance for government and law enforcement.

Retailers and search engines, most notably Amazon and Google, can now gather an astonishingly detailed portrait of our book-reading habits: what we buy, what we browse, the amount of time we spend on a page and even the annotations we make in an ebook.

Amazon also reserves the right to disclose information when it "believes release is appropriate to comply with the law". A stronger protection for our privacy should require a warrant before personal data is released.

TWO measures affecting the privacy internet users can expect in years ahead are currently under discussion on opposite sides of the globe. The first hails from a Senate committee’s determination to make America’s online privacy laws even more robust. The second concerns efforts by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an intergovernmental body under the auspices of the United Nations, to rewrite its treaty for regulating telecommunications around the world, which dates from 1988, so as to bring the internet into its fief.

The congressional measure, approved overwhelmingly by the Senate Judiciary Committee on November 29th, would require criminal investigators to obtain a search warrant from a judge before being able to coerce internet service providers (ISPs) to hand over a person’s e-mail. The measure would also extend this protection to the rest of a person’s online content, including videos, photographs and documents stored in the "cloud"—ie, on servers operated by ISPs, social-network sites and other online provider

a warrant is needed only for unread e-mail less than six months old. If it has already been opened, or is more than six months old, all that law-enforcement officials need is a subpoena. In America, a subpoena does not need court approval and can be issued by a prosecutor. Similarly, a subpoena is sufficient to force ISPs to hand over their routing data, which can then be used to identify a sender’s various e-mails and to whom they were sent. That is how the FBI stumbled on a sex scandal involving David Petraeus, the now-ex director of the CIA, and his biographer.

This paper explores the Brazilian cultural practices of illegal downloading of American television programs. Through research on television show forums, fandom websites, fan communities in the social networking website Orkut, the networks' homepages and literature review, piracy is shown to be related to cultural practices and an inadequate broadcasting system. It seems Brazilian fans persist in breaking the law when downloading television shows from unauthorized sources, regardless of the severe legal penalties to transgressors. They use a popular 'problem-solving strategy' (Duarte, 2006) called jeitinho brasileiro to respond to the delay or unavailability of U.S. programming on Brazilian cable and free to air television. The jeitinho brasileiro is exemplified by the fans having organized systems for file sharing of the episodes in Orkut fan communities. The study looks at a group of fans named legenders, who produce subtitles for the downloaded shows as a hobby, also despite of the Brazilian legislation on intellectual property protection. Furthermore, the paper explains why Brazilians who download television shows do not respect the law in reference to cultural, economic and political contexts. It concludes with the idea that the broadcasting industry must update and adapt its television programming distribution system, taking into account the particular context of each country, such as in Brazil.

in the wake of protests by dozens of websites and large numbers of their users, as well as a virtually unanimous chorus of criticism from leading progressive voices and outlets, including Michael Moore, Cenk Uygur, Keith Olbermann, Alternet, Daily Kos, MoveOn and many people associated with Occupy Wall Street. Judging by the fervor of the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests, a casual observer might think the advocates of the anti-piracy bills were in the same moral league as the torturers at Abu Ghraib.

But before we celebrate this “populist” victory, it’s worth remembering that the defeat of SOPA and PIPA was also a victory for the enormously powerful tech industry, which almost always beats the far smaller creative businesses in legislative disputes. (Google alone generated more than $37 billion in 2011, more than double the revenue of all record companies, major and indie combined.)

One example of anti-SOPA rhetorical over-reach was a tendency by some to invent sinister motives for the sponsors. On his usually brilliant show The Young Turks, Uygur said that SOPA’s sponsors were “pushing for a monopoly for the MPAA and to kill their competition on the Internet.” This is untrue. They wanted to kill those entities that steal their movies and make money off them, either directly or indirectly. There really is a difference