SOUTH COAST TODAY
Anika Clark | October 27, 2011

The classic debate over what’s appropriate for school children to read and when has a new local chapter — at Old Rochester Regional Junior High School and in the pages of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.”

A few parents are scheduled to meet with staff and School Committee members today about their concerns over the book’s assignment, for the second year, in eighth-grade English. Penned by Sherman Alexie, the novel is a New York Times best-seller, a National Book Award winner and, according to the American Library Association, was one of the top 10 banned or challenged books of 2010.

“I’m a Constitution guy. … But the First Amendment doesn’t say (that) freedom of speech means that a teacher can bring in whatever they want and assign it,” said James Babineau, an eighth-grade parent who helped sound the alarm after reading the book and said that when he first approached administrators about it, they hadn’t read it.

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BIRMINGHAM NEWS
Veronica Kennedy | October 24, 2011

The mission statement of the North Shelby Library indicates it serves anyone who lives and/or works in its service area, but with the passage of the state’s new immigration law, that statement may need some tweaking.

Since Sept. 1, anyone wishing to get a library card from that repository must show proof that they are legally present in the county.

However, that is not what the mission statement on the library website states.

“The mission of the North Shelby Library is to serve all citizens in the North Shelby Library District by offering library services, resources, and facilities to fulfill their educational, information, cultural and recreational needs and/or interests,” the statement reads.

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CNET
Elinor Mills | October 25, 2011

A new report from Google shows a rise in government requests for user account data and content removal, including a request by one unnamed law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality–which the company refused.

The latest Google Transparency Report, released today, also shows historic traffic patterns on Google services via graphs with spikes and drops indicating outages that, in some cases, indicate attempts by governments to block access to Google or the Internet. For instance, all Google servers were inaccessible in Libya during the first six months of this year, as was YouTube in China.

But the truly interesting data are the statistics on requests made to the company by governments for either access to user data or to remove content.

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THE HILL
Former Reps. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) and Mickey Edwards (R-Okla.)
October 25, 2011

When it was enacted in 1986, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) reflected cutting-edge thinking about how to deal with a cutting-edge issue: the rules for government access to private electronic communications. But ECPA’s standards and the privacy safeguards they once provided have been outpaced by advances in technology and the new ways in which Americans use electronic communications.

When ECPA was adopted, for example, almost no one had access to email, and certainly, no one stored documents online “in the cloud.” Cellphones resembled shoebox-sized walkie-talkies and were considered a novelty, not a necessity. Not surprisingly, the rules created by ECPA make little sense when applied to today’s technology and the ways in which electronic communications are central to Americans’ lives. Thus, it is imperative that Congress push forward with efforts to reform and update the law.

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