Stop the Spying is a campaign organized to get citizens to literally "show" Congress their opposition to the telecom immunity issue now being fought in Congress. Rather than the usual letter campaigns and phone calls, Stop the Spying is asking voters to speak out against the issue by sending in videos and photos of themselves portraying their opposition.

The addition of multimedia messaging to Congressional leaders is an interesting development in campaign tactics and one that is certainly richer and more powerful than blast emails and jamming Congressional phone lines.

Telecom immunity refers to proposed immunity legislation which could let telephone companies off the hook for any assistance they provided to the National Security Agency's surveillance program after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Such immunity would block lawsuits like EFF's case against AT&T for violating privacy laws by providing the government with customer information without court warrants.

If you would like to join the effort, all you have to do is write your message on a piece of paper and include your city and state, take a photo of you and your statement and send it in. If you would like to send a video clip, include your city and state, and tell your message in a 60 seconds or less video.

Stop the Spying is organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and People for the American Way. To view other photo messages, you can visit the Stop the Spying Flickr site.

If absolute privacy is a concern critics are voicing against Apple's latest move with DRM-less tracks from EMI, they should have filed their complaints over four years ago when the iTunes Store first opened.

As the story goes, many users and industry pundits have announced their disappointment with the discovery that DRM-less iTunes Store tracks contain the owner's name and email address embedded in the file. Even Cory Doctorow and his merry band of EFF compatriots have added their ubiquitous $.0.02 to the mix, calling this an a privacy blunder on Apple's part. A key example cited for how bad this perceived breach of privacy can get is the theft of an iPod: if someone steals your DMP (iPod or otherwise, if you consider the fact that DRM-less iTunes Store tracks will play on any AAC-enabled device, including the Zune now), they could easily check through your files to scrape out your name and email address from any of the new DRM-less tracks. Fortunately, Geeks R Us nails the problem with this line of thinking in this So What post: "Apple embedded your personal information in content that only you should have is no different than them saving your email address in a Mail application preferences." If a thief stole a typical computer user's notebook - Mac, Windows or otherwise - they would easily have full access to quite a bit more information than the owner's name and email address. So why haven't Cory and his fellow perpetual protesters spoken out against this egregious privacy flaw in the wider scope of computing?

The fault with these complaints against Apple's latest non-DRM move runs more than skin deep, however, as this embedding of personal information didn't merely begin last week. Since the first day it was opened over four years ago, the iTunes Store has embedded an owner's email address in purchased files. You can easily verify this by importing a non-EMI iTunes Store track from a friend - iTunes will immediately notify you that your machine must be authorized to play the track, prompting you with a dialog requesting a password and the email address of the file's owner already filled in.

Watch out Cory - all your email addresses are belong to anyone who steals your iTunes Store files; just as they have been for the last four years.

The moral of the story is the same as ever, only a few of the details change this time around: While Apple certainly isn't the first to offer a DRM-free commercial digital download service (In the mainstream that title probably goes to eMusic), they are the first of the major services to take the leap of faith and offer a premium music catalog completely free of DRM. In all likelihood, if you aren't sharing your personally identifiable files over P2P networks, you don't have anything to worry about, and an email address is the last thing you have to fret over if someone steals your iPod. The thief is after your DMP because they want your gadget, not because they want to email you a great offer on viagra.

There is no more of a privacy issue with iTunes Store files (non-DRM or otherwise) than there is with the theft of your computer or mobile phone. Files bought from the store are supposed to remain just as private as the personal information embedded in them. Now, can we all go back to buying high quality, DRM free tracks - and not vindicating the RIAA by sharing them - so more record labels finally invest in DRM-free digital distribution channels like we've been asking for?

Okay, so let's see if we can keep this straight. First Viacom asks YouTube to remove 100,000 videos. Then after Google takes down as many videos as it can, Viacom sues the company for $1 billion, saying Google is profiting from Viacom content including clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

Now, about a week later, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has turned around and sued Viacom, claiming that one of the videos in question was actually a parody of The Colbert Report, and protected under fair use. The video, produced by MoveOn parodies both Stephen Colbert's schtick, and MoveOn's strategy of using online petitions to effect social change.

We'd embed the video, but as we've pointed out, it's no longer up on YouTube. You can, however, still check it out at Falsiness.org.