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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) went to court to defend the First Amendment rights of a citizen-journalist to link from a public “wiki” to electronic copies of damaging internal Eli Lilly documents relating to the controversial prescription drug Zyprexa.

At the hearing, federal district Judge Jack B. Weinstein refused to change his order blocking publication of material that would “facilitate dissemination” of the Lilly documents.

EFF’s client, an anonymous citizen-journalist, posted the links on the wiki located at http://zyprexa.pbwiki.com. Eli Lilly complained, and Judge Weinstein issued his order on January 4. EFF went to court to challenge this order as an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech in violation of the First Amendment and to ensure that the right of nonparties in the litigation to link to publicly important information remains protected.

“Preventing a citizen-journalist from posting links to important health information on a public wiki violates the First Amendment,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann. “Eli Lilly’s efforts to censor these documents off the Internet are particularly outrageous in light of the information reported by The New York Times, which suggests that doctors and patients who use Zyprexa need to know the information contained in those documents.”

According to The New York Times reports, the Eli Lilly documents show that the company intentionally downplayed the drug’s side effects, including weight gain, high blood sugar, and diabetes, and marketed the drug for “off-label” uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The documents were leaked from the ongoing Zyprexa products liability lawsuit, where Weinstein is the presiding judge.

Copies of the leaked Eli Lilly documents have appeared on a variety of websites and other Internet sources. The links to the documents that were posted on the wiki at http://zyprexa.pbwiki.com were part of extensive, in-depth analysis from a number of citizen journalists. A wiki is a website that allows many users to collaborate on its content, creating a kind of simple database for collecting information — in this case, about the controversy surrounding Zyprexa.

Zyprexa is Eli Lilly’s best selling drug, used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Eli Lilly has agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle claims relating to Zyprexa. This latest settlement brings the total paid by Eli Lilly to resolve lawsuits involving Zyprexa to more than $1.2 billion.

Full motion filed in the Zyprexa products liability litigation.

The court’s order of January 4.

http://eff.org/legal/cases/zyprexa/jan4_order.pdf

Posted under Privacy

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T Tuesday, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.

The NSA program came to light in December, when the New York Times reported that the president had authorized the agency to intercept telephone and Internet communications inside the United States without the authorization of any court. Over the ensuing weeks, it became clear that the NSA program has been intercepting and analyzing millions of Americans’ communications, with the help of the country’s largest phone and Internet companies.

Reporting has also indicated that those same companies—and AT&T specifically—have given the NSA direct access to their vast databases of communications records, including information about whom their customers have phoned or emailed with in the past. And yet little has been accomplished by this illegal spying: recent reports have shown that the data from this wholesale surveillance has done little more than waste FBI resources on dead leads.

“The NSA program is apparently the biggest fishing expedition ever devised, scanning millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls and emails for ’suspicious’ patterns, and it’s the collaboration of US telecom companies like AT&T that makes it possible,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “When the government defends spying on Americans by saying, ‘If you’re talking to terrorists we want to know about it,’ that’s not even close to the whole story.”

In the lawsuit, EFF alleges that AT&T, in addition to allowing the NSA direct access to the phone and Internet communications passing over its network, has given the government unfettered access to its over 300 terabyte “Daytona” database of caller information—one of the largest databases in the world.

“AT&T’s customers reasonably expect that their communications are private and have long trusted AT&T to follow the law and protect that privacy. Unfortunately, AT&T has betrayed that trust,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. “At the NSA’s request, AT&T eviscerated the legal safeguards required by Congress and the courts with a keystroke.”

By opening its network and databases to unrestricted spying by the government, EFF alleges that AT&T has violated the privacy of AT&T customers and the people they call and email, as well as broken longstanding communications privacy laws.

While other organizations are suing the government directly, EFF is seeking to protect Americans’ privacy by stopping the collaboration of AT&T with the illegal NSA spying program and making it economically impossible for AT&T to continue to give its customers’ information to the government.

“Congress has set up strong laws protecting the privacy of your communications, strictly limiting when telephone and Internet companies can subject your phone calls to government scrutiny,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. “The companies that have betrayed their customers’ trust by illegally handing the NSA direct access to their networks and databases must be brought to account. AT&T needs to put a sign on its door that reads, ‘Come Back With a Warrant.’”

In the suit filed Tuesday, EFF is representing the class of all AT&T customers nationwide. EFF is seeking an injunction to stop AT&T participation in the illegal NSA program, as well as billions of dollars in damages for violation of federal privacy laws

Posted under Customer Service