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... Agent in Charge, but by Art Cummings, a top Justice Department counter-terrorism official. Knowing that the Internet Archive is represented by lawyers who would jump at the chance to file a constitutional challenge to national security letters, wouldn't ... because of the gag order -- a ruling that is currently under appeal by the feds. Second, the NSL (.pdf) dropped on the Archive is now public, but curiously the boilerplate section of the letter that advises recipients on what kinds of things to ...

... gag order violates the First Amendment. They also argued that the specific NSL used was illegal since the Internet Archive is a library, not a communications provider. The settlement with the government (.pdf) puts an end to that challenge and ... and his lawyers from discussing -- even in the most general terms -- what the FBI was after and what public information the Internet Archive turned over to the FBI. For instance, the lawyers declined to say what kind of information the target was looking ...

... functions: lending books, providing access to digital books or periodicals in digital format, and providing basic access to the Internet would not be subject to a national security letter. There is no National Security Letter statute existing in current law ... ; the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in that case, Doe v. Mukasey, in June.) The Internet Archive case is the third instance. This begs the question: if the FBI is so willing to back down and withdraw their request at ...

... been excluded under the instructions in the robots.txt file showed up anyway. The plaintiff claimed that by viewing the archived pages on their office computers without authorization (such lack of permission stemming from the exclusion ... that his client was alleged to have infringed." As for the DMCA anticircumvention claims, the court held that because the malfunctioning of the Internet Archive servers made it such that the exclusion instructions in the robots.txt file were not present, there ...

... were not at the time checking to see if a robots.txt header had been added to previously archived material, as it had been to the Healthcare Advocates site. The court's fair use analysis is a little unusual, ... arguments seem sanctionable, as for example the claim that failure to preserve the temporarily cached copies of the site created by using the Internet Archive -- by immediately taking the relevant computers out of service -- "shocks the conscience" and constitutes spoliation of evidence; ...

Wired reports that the FBI subpoenaed the Internet Archive and demanded that Brewster Kahle (the Archive's founder) provide records about one of the library's registered users, asking for the user's name, address and activity ... and when. Julie Cohen's A Right to Read Anonymously: A Closer Look at "Copyright Management" In Cyberspace offers an explanation as to why the Archive's win is so important. In short, reading anonymously involves identity of the reader and how we foster "freedom of thought ...

Silicon Valley dot com reports that the Internet Archive has successfully challenged an FBI attempt to get information about one of its users. The Internet Archive is a non-profit Internet library that offers permanent access to historical collections that exist in digital format. The FBI presented a national security letter in November asking for a library patron's records but the Internet

... finally agreed that their arguments were bogus, or whether IA admitted they were in violation of the law, or whether the issue was not even discussed. I guess the Internet Archives committment to "universal access to human knowledge" and its belief that "open and free access to literature and other writings... [is] essential to education and to the maintenance of an open society" does not extend to its own legal documents.

... move (and I mean that in the best sense of 'slick') to demonstrate the raw computing power of its Web MD product, Sun Microsystems has moved the Internet Archive into one of its modular data centers - or as they aptly describe - the Internet in a box. They've also produced an interactive tour of the product, complete with IA founder Brewster Kahle describing the bi-monthly copying of more than "three petabtyes of ...

The Internet Archive is doing a great service to humanity. It maintains a comprehensive record of all websites and employs a technology called the Wayback machine which automatically archives our cyber-culture for a later day. read more