Back in June, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched their terms of service tracker, which keeps an eye on company TOS for any changes that might be of interest to consumers. At launch the tracker didn't track any broadband ISPs, something the EFF told us they'd correct. They have, and now track 56 companies, including Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Earthlink, T-Mobile and Sprint. The company has now announced that they've launched a new blog specifically dedicated to tracking company abuse of their customers through mouse print. The new resource tracks ongoing litigation and developments regarding AUP and TOS changes, and will provide white papers aimed at giving the average Internet user "a general background on many of the legal issues that surround Terms of Service agreements."

A Federal Judge has demanded, three times now, that the Obama Administration hand over documents that highlight how major phone companies AT&T and Verizon lobbied for legal immunity for their involvement in the government's warrantless wiretap program. The government, with no real legal footing to stand on, has now tried to delay that release three times in order to keep those documents out of the ongoing Congressional discussion about domestic wiretapping. According to the EFF they're finally making headway, and some documents should be released this week:In a very clear act of non-transparency, there's still a significant number of baby bell lobbying documents the government is protecting. The Obama administration also still plans to redact the identities of any specific companies from any documents they do release -- and are not disclosing communications within the Executive Branch concerning telco lobbying.

A Federal Judge has demanded, three times now, that the Obama Administration hand over documents that highlight how major phone companies AT&T and Verizon lobbied for legal immunity for their involvement in the government's warrantless wiretap program. The government, with no real legal footing to stand on, has now tried to delay that release three times in order to keep those documents out of the ongoing Congressional discussion about domestic wiretapping.

As we mentioned last week a U.S. Judge has repeatedly demanded that Uncle Sam hand over documents highlighting how AT&T and Verizon lobbied the government for immunity from prosecution in their role in the government's warrantless wiretapping program. But the Obama administration lawyers have repeatedly tried to stall the release of the documents -- likely so they aren't released while Congress is busy discussing the government's domestic surveillance programs. For the third time the courts have denied Uncle Sam's efforts to delay the release of these documents, arguing that release is in the public interest:Needless to say (though the Judge says it anyway), the Obama Administration's refusal to hand over this documentation during Congressional discussions of domestic wiretapping flies in the face of the administration's claims that transparency is a priority.

According to the EFF, the Obama Administration is doing everything in its power to keep the public away from documents that would show the depth of AT&T and Verizon lobbying efforts aimed at getting immunity for their involvement in the government's warrantless wiretap program. In a website post, the EFF says that despite a Judge ruling that the government must hand over the lobbying documents, the Obama Administration continues to stall via a series of emergency motions aimed at keeping those documents sealed.

Most consumers are completely clueless about their online privacy. For example, ISPs have quietly been selling your browsing data without your consent for years without anybody bothering to notice. Even during the recent stink over behavioral advertising -- which most consumers also know nothing about -- people remained oblivious to clickstream sales.

Despite the Obama administration's decision to support immunity for the phone companies involved in the government's warrantless wiretapping program, a group of senator's are trying to strip the telco's of this protection, notes Techdirt. "Congress should not have short-circuited the courts' constitutional role in assessing the legality of the program," notes Russ Feingold, who with Chris Dodd and Jeff Merkley is pushing a new law to repeal immunity. "If the programs were actually legal, then let a court say that," notes Masnick. "If the programs were illegal, then there is no good reason to have made the telcos immune." Of course this was never about reason, it was about protecting the phone companies from billions in penalties and Uncle Sam from any further investigations into the depth of our domestic wiretap practices.

Alongside the Postal Service, Verizon this week was awarded the title of one of the "Most Trusted Companies for Privacy" by the Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe. Verizon is the second most trusted company, according to a survey of 6,486 adults, and an "an expert review panel at the Ponemon Institute" which judged the companies on a "rigorous" list of criteria that included the clarity and readability of privacy statements, policy change notice, access to account information, cookie management, and data sharing practices.

Declan McCullagh has for years had a nasty habit of actually reading the laws Congress passes into law, which is frequently more than can be said of Congress itself. Last week, McCullagh wrote a piece for CNET exploring a new bill aimed at shoring up the nation's cybersecurity defenses.

AT&T this week politely informed reformed hacker Kevin Mitnick that they could no longer serve him as a customer, at least according to Kevin Mitnick. The one time master of phreaking apparently hired a lawyer this week to complain to the provider that people were obtaining his personal information and posting it to public hacker forums.

It hasn't been a particularly good few weeks for Phorm, the snoopvertising (adversnooping?) agency that began life as a spyware company dedicated to rootkits. British Telecom this week confirmed they wouldn't be proceeding with Phorm's Webwise platform, and now major UK telecom player Carphone Warehouse says they'll be terminating their relationship with Phorm as well. Phorm, which partners with ISPs to sniff your time spent on various sites to send you more "tailored" adverts, has global expansion ambitions that may not succeed if they can't find a source of actual revenue. Another major UK ISP, Virgin Media, tells the Wall Street Journal they haven't made up their mind on whether they'll use Phorm's services.

Controversial adversnooping company Phorm used to be named 121Media and has a history with rootkits and spyware. So it wasn't surprising when privacy advocates began opposing the the company's efforts to push behavioral advertising systems in the UK dressed up as anti-phishing solutions.

The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration is "proceeding with a Bush-era plan" that would use the NSA to more closely inspect the traffic traveling between government networks and the private-sector. According to the report, the aim of the classified "Einstein 3" project is to better protect the government from external cyber-threats, particularly those originating at private-sector contracted firms. AT&T was chosen by the Bush Administration to help participate in the project, and the trial has seen delays as AT&T "is seeking legal assurance that it will not be sued for participating in the pilot program." Meanwhile, the Salt Lake Tribune reports on a new $2 billion NSA data center in Utah.

Just like AT&T did a few weeks ago, the folks at the Verizon policy blog say they've refined and clarified the company's privacy policy, creating one "easy to read" privacy policy that applies across all Verizon services. "We've tried to make our policy more customer friendly," says Verizon's Chief Privacy Officer, Kathy Zanowic, who adds the carrier believes consumer trust is an "essential" to their business and an "important responsibility." Why all this touchy-feely privacy love by Verizon and AT&T? The carriers are worried that new Democratic leadership at the FTC and FCC may craft new privacy laws, so they're trying to pre-empt them by illustrating how they're model citizens when it comes to consumer privacy.

New FTC boss Jon Leibowitz has promised that one thing he'll be tough on is consumer privacy. To prevent government from passing tough consumer protection laws (particularly ones that force marketing to be "opt in"), the marketing, advertising and telecom industries recently joined forces to come up with a "self-regulation" plan that has them adhering to a set of privacy best practices created by the industry. Companies like Verizon, who's interested in behavioral advertising, have stated that "public shame" will keep them honest about privacy. The new guidelines, pushed by organizations representing more than 5,000 companies, will be reviewed by Congress today, but as you might expect, consumer advocates think the guidelines are rather flimsy.

The network traffic snooping power of Deep packet inspection (DPI) has many legitimate uses on an ISP network, but has gained notoriety in recent years for its use in delivering behavioral ads, injecting ISP javascript banners into websites, and identifying (and ultimately filtering or throttling) P2P traffic. Like most technology DPI isn't inherently bad, but the way it can be used and mis-used by carriers or governments certainly may be.

Apparently feeling envious of the surveillance powers of their neighbors to the south, Canadian lawmakers have proposed two radical new surveillance bills that shares more than a few similarities to the USA Patriot Act. The two new proposals, if passed, would force ISPs to implement broad new snooping technologies, and require they hand over customer name, address, IP address, and email address information upon request without court oversight. As in the States, concerns about modernizing telecom surveillance laws run smack into privacy advocates and those concerned about government abuse. The viewable bills: C-46 and C-47.

Charter, Cox, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, Comcast and Bright House Networks have collaboratively been working on a system dubbed "canoe," aimed at delivering different ads to different households depending on demographic data. However, progress had been slow going, thanks to kinks between the different companies cable systems. The head of the Canoe venture has now scrapped the initial project, complaining that they were "trying to use 20th-century technology to enable a 21st-century advanced-advertising product." For now, Todd Spangler of Multichannel News says cable operators will be settling on simply making advertising more interactive.

Controversial adversnooping company Phorm used to be named 121Media and has a history with rootkits and spyware. So it wasn't particularly surprising when privacy advocates began opposing the the company's efforts to push behavioral advertising systems in the UK that were dressed up as anti-phishing solutions.

Each time there's a concerted effort by ISPs to throttle cap or filter P2P users you'll note a subsequent push in solutions aimed at making P2P users "anonymous." With the exception of some VPNs, most of these solutions are little more than snake oil. There is of course TOR, though the sluggish TOR is designed to fight government and corporate censorship, and it's generally considered bad form to use TOR for generic P2P. This week finds Torrent Freak taking a look at BitBlinder, a new free proxy-based system that promises to "give you back your online freedom." BitBlinder's creator Josh Albrecht tells Torrent Freak the service is "built on much of the same technology as Tor," but uses a different network. Those interested can find a technical description here.