With the conclusion of Roger Stone's trial on Friday, the Justice Department must now disclose additional sections of the Mueller Report to EPIC in EPIC v. DOJ. Previously, the agency argued that it could withhold portions of the Report because disclosure would interfere with Mr. Stone's right to a fair trial. But following Mr. Stone's conviction on seven counts, the DOJ can no longer make that claim. The material withheld by the DOJ would likely reveal the role that Wikileaks played in the 2016 presidential election. In EPIC v. DOJ, EPIC is seeking the public release of the complete and unredacted Mueller Report. A ruling is expected soon. The book EPIC v. DOJ: The Mueller Report is available for purchase at the EPIC Bookstore.
The Director of National Intelligence has notified Congress that U.S. intelligence agencies are no longer obtaining cell site location data without “a showing of probable cause.” The change is a direct result of the Supreme Court’s decision in Carpenter v. United States, which held the Fourth Amendment protects location records generated by mobile phones. The Director wrote that “given the significant constitutional and statutory issues the decision raises,” the intelligence community has “not sought CSLI records or global positioning system (GPS) records” without probable cause “since Carpenter was decided.” EPIC filed an amicus brief in Carpenter, joined by 36 technical experts and legal scholars (members of the EPIC Advisory Board), urging the Court to extend Constitutional protection to cell phone data. Last year, EPIC’s Marc Rotenberg wrote that "Congress now has an opportunity to update federal privacy law, providing greater clarity for digital searches after the Carpenter decision.”
The Internet Society announced that it plans to sell the Public Interest Registry, which manages the .ORG domain, and all of its assets to Ethos Capitol, a private equity firm. The announcement follows a decision to remove price caps on domain name purchases that was widely opposed by the user community. EPIC's Marc Rotenberg, who was a founding board member and former chair of PIR, told Gizmodo he was "very disappointed" by the news. "We built the .org domain with the specific goal of promoting the noncommercial use of the Internet," Rotenberg said. "There are many models, including ICANN itself, that could allow for effective management of the domain by a non-profit corporation. There are critical elements of transparency and accountability that will be lost when the Public Interest Registry is acquired by a private equity firm." The PIR website currently states, "PIR's believes that a best practice is transparency and accountability to itself, its stakeholders, and the public. The release of our annual IRS 990 Form provides publicly-available financial information to maintain our non-profit status in good standing."
