An interesting and important ruling came out of the UK last week, as a journalist had a lawsuit against her thrown out by a judge, because it appears that much of the evidence came from police wiretapping her phone conversations with a source in the police department. The judge ruled that journalists have a right to protect their sources, and the police wiretaps were illegal. I'm not familiar enough with UK wiretapping laws to know if they needed a court's approval for the wiretap in the first place -- but on the whole this seems like a reasonable decision, as the case itself was quite troublesome. Basically, it sounded like the police wanted to plug leaks from within the department, and then bugged the journalist to find out who the leaker was, and with that info charged both the source and the journalist. That certainly seems like an abuse of police power to try to prevent future leaks, so it's good to see the court dismiss the whole thing.

The FBI, which still can't even get its own computer network working properly, would rather just have more widespread access to spy on the computer network everyone else uses: the internet. Talking to Congress today, the FBI proposed a few different things, including the right to more widely spy on internet activity as well as legislation to force ISPs to retain log file data for an extended period of time. While the Congressional reps in attendance seemed to respond by saying "sure, sounds great" to both of these suggestion, both should actually be looked at much more closely.

More freedom to spy on internet usage potentially violates the 4th Amendment as well as federal wiretap laws. Given the evidence that the FBI has widely abused its ability to wiretap, this should be a major concern. As for data retention, problems with such an idea have been chronicled for years. It tends to put a tremendous expense on ISPs for no real reason -- and it tends to make it even harder to find the type of data authorities actually need to deal with criminal activities. If you're in the FBI, it's no surprise that you'd want both things in place, but that hardly means Congress should roll over and give them to the FBI.

The MPAA has been pushing the courts to force TorrentSpy to spy on its users -- something TorrentSpy refuses to do, noting that it would break their own privacy policy and is simply ethically questionable. It should come as no surprise, of course, that the MPAA has no such qualms. In fact, it came out today that the MPAA had, in fact, been snooping through TorrentSpy's executives' emails. So, which organization looks more ethically challenged? This stems from a case TorrentSpy filed last year, after finding out that a former co-worker gave the MPAA access to TorrentSpy emails. While a court has found that the MPAA's actions did not violate wiretap laws, it's still pretty questionable. What appears to have happened, is that a former TorrentSpy employee who had access to the company's email system set it up so all executives' emails also forwarded to a gmail account he owned. He then sold access to that gmail account to people at the MPAA. Clearly, the MPAA knew that the TorrentSpy execs thought these emails were private, and yet they still eagerly paid up for access to them, which is really sleazy. TorrentSpy is appealing the case, but they'd probably have a much stronger case against the former employee who set up the email forwarding system in the first place.