Speaking of Boing Boing, they have word that Electronic Frontier Foundation - the "first line of defense" in our right to free speech, privacy, awesome innovation, and consumer rights - is having a birfday party. For those of you unfamiliar with EFF, ahem: Blending the expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists, EFF achieves significant victories on behalf of consumers and the general public. EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing......

Rejoice, space believers! For there is finally - yes, finally! - someplace you can go on l'Internet to read about such sci-fi-ness (excuse us, "science fiction-ness" for all of you purists) ranging from Samuel R. Delany to Joss Whedon to Small Wonder. Io9, a Bay Area-based blog care of Gawker, launched yesterday, and we couldn't be more thrilled. That is, until we read about their editor, Annalee Newitz. Newitz seems like a fantastic piece......

Image: EFF The secret room at AT&T's Folsom Street facility is in the news again. Staffers from the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation are in DC this week and next, trying to convince Congress that telecoms shouldn't be given retroactive immunity for their cooperation with the NSA's secret (and illegal? or illegal-ish?) wiretapping programs. Mark Klein, the AT&T technician who spotted the NSA's wiretapping room in the AT&T building and blew the whistle, is......

It's another East Bay/West Bay collision! After months of Sampling Oakland, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (701 Mission St. at 3rd) sets its sights on Berkeley's Kala (rhymes with ta-dah) Art Institute for an exhibition entitled, Cultivating Creativity: In Residence at Kala. Vampiric gesture or reflection of an "ongoing commitment to celebrating local arts organizations," no matter, check out the work of current and past Kala-affiliated artists working in printmaking, digital media, photography......

So it had to happen and it did-- somebody sued the federal government about all those extra security measures going down in the airports. The dude who did it, John Gilmore, did so under the guise that the policy violated his right to be free of unreasonable searches. He lost most of the cases and the Supreme Court, perhaps due to Judge Rehnquist undergoing some sort of bad acid flashback, rejected the case. ...

That eavesdropping case we've been following took another step to eventually seeing the light of as an appeals court has decided to review the decision by U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker that the lawsuit should move forward despite the whining of the Federal Government. The eavesdropping case, for those who don't remember, was brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the Government and AT&T for reading things they shouldn't be reading. Of what, we don't know but its super serious and of utmost importance to the War on Terror. And porn. We're sure somewhere they're checking out porn. ...

Just as we were putting away the original Jason Fortuny Seattle Craigslist scandal, a copy-cat comes along and tries to run the same prank again. This time with "better" results (Better only in the sense that he is now getting sued). This story started a few months ago when Jason Fortuny decided to put up a pretty intense women seeking men ad on Craigslist, then proceeded to publish the "results", people's phone numbers, names,......

Okay, here's an update on that lawsuit against AT&T and the Federal Government for illegally snooping on people's phone calls and e-mails. Basically, there are about seventeen similar lawsuits out there in the midst of the legal world and because they're all sort of similar-- whiny Al Queda supporters suing the telecoms and government for doing something unconstitutional, they've been mashed together into one big lawsuit sandwich. That sandwich will be heard in San Francisco's very own Federal Court by one U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker. The reasoning is because out of all the various suits out there, the AT&T one is the most advanced. Bully to the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation and how awesome would it be if they started their own University just so people could say they go to EFF U?) and the ACLU for being on the ball. ...

There actually is a local component to this whole NSA wiretapping/eavesdropping scandal, one that is about to make the scandal more scandal-y. It involves AT&T and the claims of former AT&T technician Mark Klein that sometime in 2002, AT&T allowed the U.S. Government to build a secret room in their Folsom Street office for the express purpose of eavesdropping not just on phones, but the internet too. And yes, whenever we read about this, we picture guys in black suits, black ties, and black shades running around the AT&T offices led by a mysterious figure smoking a cigarette. ...

On an irregular holiday schedule... We'll be keeping a close eye on new blog Oaky Ton, devoted to all things Oaksterdam. Speaking of Smokeland, after getting raided by the DEA, HopeNet is robbed the next day, and blame the feds for crashing through the door even though they had a key. Guest blogger Corey recaps the recent Warriors loss to the Pistons as though it were an IMDB entry. And M. C- shares a......

SFist interviews Andalee Newitz...

We just got a note that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has not only gotten a draft copy of the new PATRIOT Act, but they've published it online! Sure, Paul Krugman probably got this a week ago, and is probably sitting down over a caramel macchiato, chuckling about the New York Times charging people for the privelege of reading his columns online, and coming up with zingers that will slay -- just slay -- Bob......

Late last month, the law firm Shearman & Sterling delivered a subpoena to Craigslist, Inc. as a plaintiff in a suit against a disgruntled employee in order to determine her name. Apparently Steve Hibbard of their San Francisco office (who recently helped represent Oracle in their case against PeopleSoft while with Bingham McCutchen) is not happy about a nasty email sent to the firm's staff manager, and he wants the emailer to be held......

We've joked on the site before that the only other editorial job in the nascent 'ist empire that we'd like to take would be the one in Crescent City, AKA The Big Easy, AKA New Orleans. Lord almighty do we love that town. The taste of a chicory café au lait with a sugar-dusted beignet, grits and eggs with a beer at seven in the morning, and the bourbon before getting into a cab......

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is hosting an event tonight to highlight "endangered gizmos," or technology products that are on the cutting edge of innovation but that could fall prey to increasingly more restrictive intellectual property laws. Basically, the Mouse and friends are leading congress around by the nose, and all sorts of crap could become hobbled or even illegal. For instance -- want to turn your home computer into a DVR capable of recording......

To follow up on our previous story regarding RFID tags being the Mark of the Beast, it looks like evangelicals will have to wait just a little longer for the Rapture, since their good friends at the ACLU of Northern California, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center have successfully helped concerned parents keep their children from being tagged and tracked via RFID technology. It seems that under pressure from parent......

We just received a press release from the Northern California chapter of the ACLU via our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Seems Brittan School District of Sutter, California (about an hour north of Sacramento) has started requiring that their students wear identity badges prominently around their neck at all times during the school day. The new badges are also enabled with a Radio Frequency Identifier Device, or RFID chip, so that the children's......

So while we want to play up the reefer angle on this -- the Bay Area being pothead heaven and all -- since we've been so politically inspired, we're going to have to go with the voter-disenfranchisement approach on this one. So Berkeley's Measure R, which would have loosened the restrictions within the city on opening new marijuana dispensaries and how much a patient with a prescription could purchase at a visit, lost by a......

Northern California and Southern California are locked in battle. It's not over the quality of coffee, the issue of transportation, of taxes or water or real estate or celebrity sightings. It's a battle for the freedom of information and the tools used to distribute that information. Case in point is SB 96, introduced by former entertainment industry critic turned patsy Kevin Murray, Democratic state Senator from Los Angeles County. Murray has taken on the cause......