This morning's Washington Post reveals that the Department Of Justice has been pressuring Congress to expand its power to obtain records of Americans' private Internet activity through the use of National Security Letters (NSLs).

"The Supreme Court of New Jersey became the first court in the nation yesterday to rule that people have an expectation of privacy when they are online, and law enforcement officials need a grand jury warrant to have access to their private information..."

"A high court adviser says Internet service providers are not required to disclose data on people suspected of music piracy"

RMS: « The UK dropped its plan to set up a centralized big brother database to track all communications. Instead it will use a decentralized big brother database.

Most of Moscow's ISPs blocked PirateBay's BitTorrent tracker. That forced me to thought about privacy, anonymity and freedom-related questions in Internet. And possible solutions to stay free and protected from moneyloving ISPs and their "rulers".

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users' attempts to reach certain websites' URLs.

I thought you might like to see the court's order regarding Microsoft, extending the US District Court for the District of Columbia's oversight. There are actually two documents, one released for the public, a kind of executive summary [PDF], and then a much longer (78 pages compared to 6) Memorandum and Order, which is available from the US District Court for the District of Columbia's website's daily list of orders. I have them both as text.

"La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Net) has seen the draft "Trust Online” Charter (FR) that the Ministry of the Interior is asking ISPs to sign by June 10th. The text confirms La Quadrature’s worst fears. Under the pretext of protecting users, the French government is attempting to put in place an all-encompassing Internet monitoring and filtering system.

By putting legal and monetary pressure on Internet service providers (in a most subtler way than in previous versions of the text), ACTA will give the music and movie industries a weapon to force them to police their networks and users themselves. Such a private police and justice of the Net is incompatible with democratic imperatives and represent a real threat for fundamental freedoms.