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Posted on Techdirt - 15 October 2011 @ 12:00pm

BearGriz72's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week

from the government-for-the-people? dept

To lead off I have to say that Senator Ron Wyden is making me prouder to be an Oregonian every week. When he called out the Obama administration on trying to do an end run around Congress by allowing the USTR to agree to ACTA without Congressional ratification, it made me want to cheer. Then the New York Times jumped into the fray and filed suit against the federal government for not revealing its interpretation of the PATRIOT Act, something Senators Wyden and Udall have been agitating about for weeks.

This week has been a morass of stories about security issues including wiretapping Skype and vulnerabilities at American Express; as well as government and corporations trying to break the Internet. In response we're seeing alternative DNS systems show up, as well as more backlash against PROTECT IP (AKA: the Internet censorship bill).

From the governmental-idiocy dept: We have California governor Jerry Brown leading off with the ridiculous notion that it is OK to search your mobile phone during a traffic stop without a warrant, even though the California legislature said no. Apparently, in California, "it's better for the courts to decide" than our elected representatives. Next up is the news that the Taiwanese government is putting together a "patent bank" to Protect Taiwanese Companies Against Patent Lawsuits. I think Mike said it best with, "... when governments... have to create special institutions to protect their own companies from the patent system. Shouldn't that raise questions about the patent system itself?" Back to the US we have the winner of the "it would be funny if it wasn't true" award for the week: an Environmental Protection Agency agent manufacturing a case/evidence so that he could spending more time with his mistress. In addition, apparently releasing the office phone numbers of public affairs staff the Department of Homeland Security poses "a clearly unwarranted invasion" of employee privacy.

My honorable mention for the week is: Mike's article on a member of the EU Parliament (Christian Engstrom) of the Pirate Party with a blog post about how copyright law today simply doesn't mesh with current technology and that the laws we are passing have the effect of making nearly everyone a criminal.

Finally for the sheer humor of it, the request from Aiplex (apparently an Indian anti-piracy group) for Techdirt to take down a post on another site! Granted the post is on a copycat blog that appears to just scrape Techdirt posts, but for basic understanding of the interwebs, it is a fail of the first order.

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