Cultivated Compendium

President Barack Obama promises that "I'll be proposing some self-restraint on the NSA" in an interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, according to Politico. However, the president provided few details on what form that would take.

The president also said the NSA is reasonable in the amount of domestic surveillance it conducts in terms of "not reading people's emails, not listening to the contents of their phone calls" but that the NSA's foreign surveillance needs to be curbed more.

The Pennsyvlania Supreme Court has been asked to allow a Montgomery County clerk to once again issue licenses to same-sex couples, The Legal Intelligencer reports. The clerk, D. Bruce Hanes, argues that the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court should have considered the constitutionality of Pennsylvania's ban on same-sex marriage when it ordered him to stop issuing licenses, The Legal further reports.

The Hosue of Representatives passed bipartisan legislation to curb so-called patent trolls, The Legal Times' blog reports. The legislation, if enacted, would change intellectual property law "with provisions to strengthen pleading requirements, require the litigation's loser to pay for high-cost patent fights and create new rules about discovery," BLT further reports.

The Senate is expected to make its own changes to patent legislation, BLT also reports.

Patent trolls have become an increasing issue in recent years in which business entitites buy larges troves of patents and then assert them to make money by threatening lawsuits.

If you want a fascinating primer on the issue of patent trolls, then listen to the episode This American Life program did about patent trolls.

The digital divide isn't just about access to the Internet.

The Guardian reports that most Internet traffic on the cloud comes from the developed world: "an estimated 60% of such cloud traffic came from Europe and North America, followed by the Asia-Pacific region (33%). Latin America, the Middle East and Africa together accounted for only 5%." Similarly, the rule of law to protect privacy is more advanced in the developed world than in the developing world (albeit with the caveat that the National Security Agency is engaged in massive surveillance that undermines that rule of law): as of this year, 101 countries had data privacy laws or bills in place, but only 40 developing economies have such laws or bills, according to The Guardian.

The Guardian also reports: "The Information Economy Report 2013, released on Tuesday by Unctad, the UN trade and development body, warns that the global shift towards cloud computing, which allows users to store and access data remotely, brings a range of legal as well as technological and infrastructure challenges for poor countries."

The Sixth Circuit has ruled that state-law tort claims against generic drugmakers are federally pre-empted, according to Squire Sanders' Sixth Circuit blog. The Sixth Circuit majority cited Supreme Court precedent: PLIVA, Inc. v. Mensing and Mutual Pharmaceutical Co. v. Bartlett.  The majority also "reads those cases as broadly holding that state law failure-to-warn claims based on generic drugs are preempted by the FDA’s requirement that the labels on generic drugs conform to the labels on the brand-name drugs," according to the blog.

U.S. District Court Judge Robert J. Shelby of the District of Utah heard oral arguments yesterday on a lawsuit challenging that state's ban on same-sex marriage, the Salt Lake Tribune reports. Shelby said the constitutionality of the ban will turn on whether the copules are "seeking a new right or establishing access to an existing, fundamental right to state-sanctioned marriages," The Tribune further reports.

State attorneys argue that the plaintiffs are seeking to establish a new right and the ban should get rational basis scrutiny "to determine if Utah’s law promotes a legitimate government interest in supporting responsible procreation and the 'gold standard' of two biological parents for child rearing," according to The Tribune.

In contrast, the plaintiffs’ attorney "advocated a heightened-scrutiny standard, which would recognize same-sex couples as an unprotected class such as racial minorities or women."

In the view of state attorneys, the lawsuit is aimed at establishing a new right, one that no other federal court has recognized. In the view of attorneys representing the plaintiffs, it is about gaining access to the fundamental right to chose whom to love and marry.

The Washington Post has another revelation on the basis of leaker Edward Snowden's materials: The National Security Agency is "gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world."

The Post further reports: "The NSA’s capabilities to track location are staggering, based on the Snowden documents, and indicate that the agency is able to render most efforts at communications security effectively futile."

After a nearly year-long open-records fight, a prosecutor relented on his opposition to the Associated Press's request to get copies of the 911 calls made as Adam Lanza shot schoolchildren and school professionals within 11 minutes of entering Sandy Hook Elementary School. The calls were released today, according to the AP. 

Teresa Rousseau, whose daughter Lauren was among the six educators killed and an editor at the Danbury News-Times, said "there was no need to play the tapes on the radio or television," the AP said. '"I think there's a big difference between secrecy and privacy," she said. "We have these laws so government isn't secret, not so we're invading victims' privacy,'" the AP also reported.

NPR's Michelle Andrews did an interview with Jennifer Mathis of Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law on the final rule from the federal government to enforce parity in health insurance coverage between physical health and mental health.

A couple interesting nuggets:

One- Since interim parity regulations came out, only a small percentage of plans have dropped mental health or substance use coverage.

Two- The final rules make clear in a way that the interim rules didn't that "intermediate-level mental health services, including residential treatment and intensive outpatient services," have to be covered in parity.

Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and writing in The Huffington Post, asked whether distributed denial of service attacks are a legitimate form of protest --- such as when Anonymous hackers targeted Paypal for refusing to send donations to Wikileaks. Fourteen criminal defendants facing federal charges for the Paypal DDOS attacks are due in court this week.

On one hand, "a denial of service attack is damaging and costly. Many of PayPal's customers rely on PayPal for their livelihood," Omidyar says. On the other hand, Omidyar writes "I can understand that the protesters were upset by PayPal's actions and felt that they were simply participating in an online demonstration of their frustration. That is their right, and I support freedom of expression, even when it's my own company that is the target."

However, Omidyar concludes such attacks are not the same as other forms of free expression because one protestor's computer is turned over to a central controller and has a magnified impact of making "hundreds of web page requests per second."