The Obama Administration is resisting efforts to expand Fourth Amendment protections to services like Gmail. That’s unfortunate.

The saga of accused Wikileaks conspirator Bradley Manning continues to get uglier, with the military acknowledging that he was forced to spend the day naked for, well, no apparent reason.

Do journalists have any expectation of privacy in their emails?

Since it seems to be advice day here at OTB, here’s a bit more:  if one is a family-values politician, it is unwise to have an affair with a staffer with whom you made an abstinence-only video. Just sayin’.

Earlier today, James offered the following advice:  “Do not broadcast news of your rectal exams, your misdeeds, or negative opinions about your boss on social media sites!” Thankfully, no rectal exam information, but more or less on the boss front, the AP provides so corroborating evidence:  Waitress fired for griping about tip on Facebook. A [...]

Kieran Healy and Kevin Drum point to the existence of a site that exposes just how public your “private” information on Facebook is.  Kevin: Making use of a public programming interface that Facebook released a few weeks ago, three programmers in San Francisco wrote Openbook, a website that searches Facebook profiles for — well, for [...]

A few weeks back, in a post titled “Elena Kagan Lesbian Rumor Smear Neither Smear Nor Rumor,” I weighed in on the kerfuffle surrounding Ben Domenech’s “outing” of the then-prospective Supreme Court nominee as gay.   The essence of the piece is that, according to several credible accounts, Kagan was widely known in both Cambridge and [...]

There have been a slew of articles in recent days by various people explaining why they’re leaving Facebook and you should, too. While most of them center on Facebook’s ever-shifting privacy policy, which basically mean that anything you’ve ever shared with Facebook is fair game for them to sell to anyone they choose, my frustration [...]

There’s quite a bit of chatter this morning about the fact that two travel bloggers of whom I’d never previously heard have  had their computers confiscated pursuant to subpoenas after publishing unclassified but sensitive TSA screening procedures.  AP’s Eileen Sullivan has the rundown: As the government reviews how an alleged terrorist was able to bring [...]

One of my commenters brought to my attention an issue that’s not receiving much attention:  Residents of several U.S. states could have to show their passports for domestic travel — or to enter a federal government building — starting January 1 because of the REAL ID Act.  Chris Strohm for Congress Daily: More than half [...]

From the Telegraph, not the Onion:  “All men watch porn, scientists find.” Researchers were conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users. But their project stumbled at the first hurdle when they failed to find a single man who had not been [...]

A rather bizarre case in Illinois — even by the standards of that state. For more than a decade, classes of students at Northwestern University’s journalism school have been scrutinizing the work of prosecutors and the police. The investigations into old crimes, as part of the Medill Innocence Project, have helped lead to the release [...]

Yesterday, Radley Balko passed on the story of Eric Williamson, the Springfield, Virginia man who has been charged with indecent exposure for being naked in his own house.    According to Williamson’s version of events, he was making coffee at 5:30 in the morning when a woman and her 7-year-old cut across his yard and spied [...]

Remember when Liskula Cohen forced Google to reveal an anonymous blogger who was using their domain to call her a “skank” and suggest she performed lewd sex acts? Naturally, now that she has been outed — as Rosemary Port, a Fashion Institute of Technology student — is suing Google for violating her privacy. “This has [...]

Pretty sure this is still in Beta: Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village via Hal Hildebrand

Jeff Jarvis notes that there has been some controversy over Google’s Streetview, which allows people to see videos of what’s going on in the streets, including residential neighborhoods, in an ever-expanding number of locations. In a few countries around the world, we’ve seen a backlash against Google’s Streetview as somehow an invasion of privacy, even [...]

A British judge has ruled against a blogger who sought an injunction against having his secret identity published in the Times. Thousands of bloggers who operate behind the cloak of anonymity have no right to keep their identities secret, the High Court ruled yesterday.  In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an [...]

Tim Sandefur passes along this from Shaun Martin: You’re sitting in your car, minding your own business, in the parking lot of a motel. A cop sees you and starts questioning you, and you even consent to a patdown search and a search of your car, which finds nothing. What’s the reasonable suspicion? Nothing. But [...]

People under a certain age have stopped using voice mail, Jill Colvin reports for NYT. When it was introduced in the early 1980s, voice mail was hailed as a miracle invention — a boon to office productivity and a godsend to busy households. Hollywood screenwriters incorporated it into plotlines: Distraught heroine comes home, sees blinking [...]

A debate about the relative desirability of city and suburban living is spreading through the blogosphere at a surprising clip, given the timelessness of the topic.   It began, as best I can determine, by Duncan “Atrios” Black (a PhD economist) explaining that there are tradeoffs to having a big yard. [I]f everyone has a big [...]

The increasing ease of finding public — but previously hard-to-find — information on the Internet has privacy advocates concerned. Last month, PeopleFinders, a 20-year-old company based in Sacramento, introduced CriminalSearches.com, a free service to satisfy those common impulses. The site, which is supported by ads, lets people search by name through criminal archives of all [...]