David Kravets

Europeans may browse the Internet without fear of infringing copyrights, as the European Union Court of Justice ruled in a decision that ends a four-year legal battle threatening the open Internet.

In the case, the court slapped down the Newspaper Licensing Agency's (NLA) claim that the technological underpinnings of Web surfing amounted to infringement. The court ruled that "on-screen copies and the cached copies made by an end-user in the course of viewing a website satisfy the conditions" of infringement exemptions spelled out in the EU Copyright Directive.

The NLA's opponent in the case was the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA). The PR group hailed the decision. The NLA is the body that distributes reproductions of newspaper content. Its main argument was the cost that the licensing public relations companies pay for the reproductions should factor in to what is temporarily copied on a reader's computer.

The results are in on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's fourth annual "Who Has Your Back" report on the tech sector's customer privacy practices.

The highest ratings -- companies given six stars -- were handed to Apple, Credo Mobile, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Sonic, Twitter, and Yahoo.

The report reviewed 26 companies in all, rating them on everything from whether they require warrants for data handovers to whether they have publicly opposed mass surveillance and fight for "users' privacy rights in courts."

The study found that Snapchat, AT&T, and Comcast lagged "behind others." Snapchat was among the biggest privacy underachievers, earning one star. "This is particularly troubling because Snapchat collects extremely sensitive user data, including potentially compromising photographs of users. Given the large number of users and non users whose photos end up on Snapchat, Snapchat should publicly commit to requiring a warrant before turning over the content of its users’ communications to law enforcement," said the 73-page analysis.

However, the digital rights group cautioned that the report has a major shortcoming: "The categories we evaluate in this report represent objectively verifiable, public criteria and so cannot and do not evaluate secret surveillance."

The State Department unveiled that it is widely employing social media as a method to counter online violent extremism from Al-Qaeda and others.

Buried in an intelligence report, the government said that the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), established in 2011, produced more than 10,000 online postings globally in 2013, some of which included one of 138 government-produced videos.

"CSCC's programs draw on a full range of intelligence information and analysis for context and feedback. CSCC counters terrorist propaganda in the social media environment on a daily basis, contesting space where AQ and its supporters formerly had free rein. CSCC communications have provoked defensive responses from violent extremists on many of the 249 most popular extremist websites and forums as well as on social media," said the document, Country Reports on Terrorism 2013. The paper also said that in 2013, "violent extremists increased their use of new media platforms and social media with mixed results."

Peoria (IL) Mayor Jim Ardis, whose complaints led to a police raid to unveil who was behind a Twitter account impersonating him, now says his "freedom of speech" was at issue.

Mayor Ardis, unhappy over the parody @peoriamayor Twitter handle that was falsely portraying him as a drug abuser who lost his "crackpipe," complained to police, who then stormed a local residence to find the tweeting culprit.

"I still maintain my right to protect my identity is my right," said Mayor ahead of a City Council meeting. "Are there no boundaries on what you can say, when you can say it, who you can say it to?" Mayor Ardis asked. "You can't say [those tweets] on behalf of me. That's my problem. This guy took away my freedom of speech."

The raid netted one arrest on unrelated drug charges. The operator of the account, found via warrants to Twitter and Comcast, has not been charged under an Illinois law that carries a maximum one-year jail term and $2,500 fine for impersonating a public official.

The question of whether online broadcast television is to remain in the hands of a stodgy industry that once declared the VCR the enemy is being put directly before the Supreme Court.

Aereo isn't exactly a cloud provider. Yet what the broadcasters say it can't do has the cloud industry closely following the startup's legal battles and business model. Aereo essentially maintains that they are providing offsite "rabbit ears" for their customers, allowing consumers to record freely available content that their rented antennas captured in their local markets.

If Aereo is blocked from allowing consumers the ability to stream their content at will, what's preventing rights-holders from making the same claim against cloud-storage providers?

When does an online threat become worthy of criminal prosecution? The Supreme Court is being asked to decide that unanswered question as prosecutions for online rants, from Facebook to YouTube, are becoming commonplace.

Authorities are routinely applying an old-world 1932 statute concerning extortion to today's online world, where words don't always mean what they seem. The latest case involving the legal parameters of online speech before the justices concerns a Pennsylvania man sentenced to 50 months in prison after being convicted on four counts of the interstate communication of threats. Defendant Anthony Elonis' 2010 Facebook rant concerned attacks on an elementary school, his estranged wife, and even law enforcement.

"That's it, I've had about enough/ I'm checking out and making a name for myself/ Enough elementary schools in a ten mile radius/ to initiate the most heinous school shooting ever imagined/ and hell hath no fury like a crazy man in a Kindergarten class/ the only question is … which one?" read one of Elonis' posts.

Whatever a so-called "true threat" is, it's not protected under the First Amendment. Whether online or not, other forms of speech that do not enjoy the backing of the constitution include child pornography and obscenity.

Only one federal appeals court has sided with Elonis' contention that the authorities must prove that the person who made the threat actually meant to carry it out. Eight other circuit courts of appeal, however, have ruled that the standard is whether a "reasonable person" would conclude the threat was real. The Obama Administration has until April 21 to respond to Elonis' petition to the Supreme Court.

David Medine had not been on the job for a week as chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board when The Guardian dropped its first of many bombs supplied by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

As Medine described it, the revelation that the NSA was bulk-collecting the metadata from every phone call made to and from the United States "was sort of a fast-moving train that we decided to jump on."

"My first week we requested a briefing from the Justice Department. The third week we met in the Situation Room with the president," Medine said. Six months later, the five-member executive branch board released a scathing report, arguing in January that the NSA must cease the bulk collection of the phone numbers of all calls, the international mobile subscriber identity number of mobile callers, the calling card numbers used in calls, and the time and duration of those calls to and from the United States.

By a 3-2 vote, the presidential panel concluded that, among other things, the program "implicates constitutional concerns.”

[Commentary] President Barack Obama says he wants Congress to adopt legislation that would end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of telephone metadata, a surveillance initiative exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

As it currently operates, the NSA's collection program gathers and stores the metadata of every call made to and from the United States. "I have decided that the best path forward is that the government should not collect or hold this data in bulk," President Obama said. "Instead, the data should remain at the telephone companies for the length of time it currently does today." Rights groups are applauding the move. But they say it’s virtually a meaningless gesture in its current form.

As chief executive, President Obama has the power to reform the NSA on his own with the stroke of a pen. By not putting this initiative into an executive order, he punted to Congress on an issue that affects the civil liberties of most anybody who picks up a phone. Every day Congress waits on the issue is another day Americans' calling records are being collected by the government without suspicion that any crime was committed.

“He does not need congressional approval for this,” said Mark Jaycoxx, an Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney. Ultimately, congressional action will be necessary even if the President signs an executive order on the issue. Future Presidents are not bound by former presidential decrees, which means the 44th president does not have to adhere to any President Obama promises of ethical and limited metadata use.

The Supreme Court declined to resolve the constitutionality of the National Security Agency's bulk telephone metadata surveillance program, leaving intact what a lower-court judge described as an "almost-Orwellian" surveillance effort in which the metadata from every phone call to and from the United States is catalogued by US spies.

The move by the justices comes as the Obama administration and Congress consider dramatically revamping the spy program disclosed in June by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The petition before the justices, brought by political activist Larry Klayman, concerned a December decision by US District Judge Richard Leon, who wrote in an opinion that America's founders would be "aghast" at the spying. The President George W. Bush appointee stayed his decision, which concluded that the program infringes the Fourth Amendment, pending appeal because of the case's national security implications. Klayman bypassed a federal appeals court and went directly to the high court, which rarely plucks cases from district courts before they're heard at the federal appellate level.