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One of my heroes is Paul Levy who spoke at the 2006 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference in DC. He works at public citizen and is one of their main guns when it comes to protecting people online. You see, companies have this bad habit of bullying people out of their domain names or first amendment rights. Public Citizen offers free legal services in defense of innocent people in the face of bad corporations everywhere.

Their latest: a situation where a company sent a cease and desist letter with an interesting twist. They claimed that the cease and desist letter was copyrighted and that posting it online would result in a lawsuit. This, of course, was to try and prevent someone from making the letter public in an effort to get public opinion on their side.

Well, Public Citizen has a copy of the letter and has posted it on their site along with their excellent response explaining why sending a letter like that is a waste of time.

Update 2007.10.12

George W. Bush

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Another neat nugget from Public Citizen: A consumer's translation of the Bush's Speech.

After seven years of State of the Union addresses from the Bush administration, the American public has learned that President Bush’s policy recommendations are often based on misinformation. As such, Public Citizen has prepared the following guide to the 2007 speech so consumers can get complete and accurate information about the issues.

The No-fly list needs to work or be gone

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Public Citizen reports one of their recent victories against American Airlines on behalf of John Cerqueira, who was denied the right to fly after airline authorities thought he might be "Arab, Middle Eastern or South Asian descent".

$400,000 dollars is a small price to pay for taking away an American's freedoms. I hope they eat lawsuit after lawsuit until they fix this issue.