The Times called the bill the “biggest revamping of federal surveillance law in 30 years.” FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, will be significantly changed.

The law reads: “The Department of Motor Vehicles may issue ‘I Believe’ special motor vehicle license plates to owners of private motor vehicles registered in their names. The plate must contain the words ‘I Believe’ and a cross superimposed on a stained glass window. The biennial fee for this special license plate is the same as the fee provided in Article 5, Chapter 3 of this title. The guidelines for the production of this special license plate must meet the requirements contained in Section 56-3-8100.”

Americans United executive director Rev. Barry W. Lynn said that these license plates “will not see the light of day” as they give preference to one religion over all others.

South Carolina permits any organization to get special license plates with 400 prepaid applications for the special plate or $4,000 from the individual or organization requesting the plates.

Editorial: South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has said he is willing to pony up the $4,000 for the plates (another entanglement between church and state?). Interestingly, South Carolina also had a law permitting “Choose Life” license plates, with fees going to crisis pregnancy support programs, and explicitly NOT to “any agency, institution, or organization that provides, promotes, or refers for abortion.” In fact, South Carolina is one of 17 states (according to Guttmacher) with “Choose Life” plates, but the law has been permanently enjoined (see Planned Parenthood v. Rose, 361 F.3d 786 (4CA 2004)).

In Center for Bio-Ethical Reform v. Los Angeles County Sheriff Dept., a panel of the Ninth Circuit said that police violated the First Amendment when they required the activists to remove their truck from an area adjacent to the middle school. There was some disruption to normal school activities, but the court said that it was not acceptable to remove the speakers just when they started to get reactions from their intended audience and noted that “listeners’ reaction to speech is not a content-neutral basis for regulation.” The court added, “Plaintiffs’ speech was permitted until the students and drivers around the school reacted to it, at which point the speech was deemed disruptive and ordered stopped under § 626.8. This application of the statute raises serious First Amendment concerns.”

Read the opinion here. Read California Penal Code 626.8 here. The truck is the Canadian version of the Center’s trucks — presumably similar to those driven around the middle school. The Center’s website is here — WARNING, as soon as you access the website, a graphic video of an actual abortion in progress loads.

Even bloggers get coverage under the law as long as their work is in the public interest. HB 2557 can be read here.

Editorial: “Noncumulative”?  It should also be noted that this shield law focuses on the person writing the material, not the content of the material. The law will apply to individuals whose positions are “materially similar or identical to that of a journalist or newscaster, taking into account the method of dissemination.”

Privacy advocate Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out that even without identifiable information such as IP numbers and user names, search histories can be used to identify a person as was done when AOL released search engine data in 2006.

Editorial: Shouldn’t YouTube be in compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act if it responds to notices of infringement by taking down the allegedly infringing content? Viacom says it needs the records to demonstrate routine posting and watching of copyrighted works. Why should this matter if YouTube appropriately responds to each notification?

Image from TechShout.

New Europe

Editorial: The report is not long (8 pages, 6 if you take off the title page and table of contents), and it doesn’t contain much to get too hyped up about, with one exception. In among all the “whereases” is a small section: “It [European Parliament] recommends clarification of the legal status of different categories of weblog authors and publishers as well as disclosure of interests and voluntary labelling of weblogs.” It’s one thing if it’s voluntary — another if mandated. And what kinds of categories did the Parliament or the author have in mind? Cooking vs. sewing, or more like liberal vs. conservative?

Would a non-voluntary categorizing scheme for bloggers fly in the U.S.? I doubt it.

Editorial: This approach is not that much different from a law review article from some years back that suggested that the best way to determine the community standard of the Internet for purposes of obscenity prosecutions was to, well, survey it. Focus the survey on a particular area rather than the Internet as a whole, and there’s the Florida attorney’s approach. The law review author wrote, “Survey data may well be the best way to assess community standards, since a jury, absent such data, will likely apply a standard based on the particular beliefs of those twelve individuals.” See Rebecca Dawn Kaplan, “Cybersmut: Regulating Obscenity on the Internet,” 9 Stan. L. & Pol’y Rev. 189 (1998).

The “Hot Coffee” minigame lets the main character improve a relationship with any of his girlfriends through their offers for him to come to their places for “coffee.” The Entertainment Software Rating Board, in charge of assigning ratings to video games, reclassified GTA: SA in 2005 with an “adults only” rating.

Editorial: Shouldn’t parents who buy their kids games rated “adults only” expect more than mere stomping of pedestrians and fragging of prostitutes and cops?