The battle over the privacy of electronic communications sought in government investigations shifted against the Justice Department last week.
The inquiry by the campaign finance unit of the Justice Department started after Republicans accused the White House of concealing private electronic communications sought by investigators in Congress, the Justice Department, and the independent counsel's office.
Julian Assange, the whistleblowing journalist wanted by the US for leaking thousands of diplomatic and military communications, sought asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in London three years ago because of his fears of extradition to the US should he comply with Swedish demands to travel to Stockholm for interrogation over sexual assault allegations.
Of these, only a minority (19%, or 0.8% of total communications) are seeking additional knowledge regarding interpretation, and most (81%, or 3.3% of total communications) are inquiries regarding file formats and access to additional data files, made by participants interested in self-pursuit of additional analysis.
The new company, called Adir Technologies, will sell software to communications companies seeking to route calling traffic over the Internet.
The revelation that President Bush directed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop (and use data-mining technology) on such communications without seeking warrants has raised the question of whether the president had the power to do so.
One of the biggest objections to what we now understand as the Prism and Tempora spying programmes is the way in which they were conducted around or outside statute, even while the draft communications bill seeking authority for mass on-line data gathering was dropped for lack of public and political support.
The story follows the trials of a pair of college dropouts who head up the Free Network Foundation, a peer-to-peer communications initiative seeking to liberate the global internet from corporate clutches by building their own decentralized, cooperatively owned, free network, one wi-fi hotspot at a time.
Its company policy is to inform Twitter users when their communications are sought by law enforcement and to allow them to challenge this in court.
Camille Johnston, Mrs. Obama's communications director, sought out "Iron Chef" as a way to reach people who might otherwise know nothing about the first lady's efforts.
