The Department of Justice has finally admitted it in court papers: The nation’s telecom companies are an arm of the government–at least when it comes to secret spying.

Fortunately, a judge says that relationship isn’t enough to squash a rights group’s open records request for communications between the nation’s telecoms and the feds.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to see what role telecom lobbying of the Justice Department played when the government began its year-long, and ultimately successful, push to win retroactive immunity for AT&T (T) and others being sued for unlawfully spying on American citizens.

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Kayak, the popular multi-airline airfare search engine, thinks Microsoft Bing’s new travel search engine looks so much like its own that it’s confusing Kayak users. The travel search company sent Microsoft (MSFT) a legal letter last week telling them to cut it out, Wired.com has learned.

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When Google (GOOG) announced its integrated phone service called Google Voice Thursday, it said something very loudly.

Google is saying it wants to be the world’s communication hub, and hundreds of companies–ranging from mobile phone operators to Skype to Microsoft (MSFT) better be listening.

Google Voice is a free service that offers “one number for life,” so that one incoming call to that number gets forwarded to all your other numbers–work, mobile, home or hotel room. Users get free calls across the United States and international rates cheaper than Skype. Landlines, computers and cellphones can all access its services.

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If a false entry in a database leads to a unconstitutional police search that reveals illegal drugs, does the government get to hold it against you?

That’s the question the Supreme Court will tackle on Tuesday in a case civil liberties groups such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center argue will have broad implications in a world where we are constantly being evaluated against databases and watch lists that are riddled with frustratingly persistent errors.

“In these interlinked databases, one error can spread like a disease, infecting every system it touches and condemning the individual to whom this error refers to suffer substantial delay, harassment, and improper arrest,” EPIC director Marc Rotenberg argued in a friend of the court brief.

Not surprisingly, the government disagrees.

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If there’s a candidate for the worst future violator of your privacy, look no further than the company you pay for broadband.

So says University of Colorado law professor and former federal prosecutor Paul Ohm, who argues in a new article that ISPs have the means, motive and opportunity to kill your online privacy.

Nothing in society poses as grave a threat to privacy as the Internet Service Provider (ISP). ISPs carry their users’ conversations, secrets, relationships, acts, and omissions. Until the very recent past, they had left most of these alone because they had lacked the tools to spy invasively, but with recent advances in eavesdropping technology, they can now spy on people in unprecedented ways.”

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If elected president, Sen. John McCain would reserve the right to run his own warrantless wiretapping program against Americans, based on the theory that the president’s wartime powers trump federal criminal statutes and court oversight, according to a statement released by his campaign Monday.

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Google finalized its $3.1 billion purchase of ad-delivery giant DoubleClick Tuesday after European Union regulators ruled that the purchase does not violate anti-monopoly rules in Europe, which removed the last legal hurdle for the hotly contested acquisition. … DoubleClick is an ad serving and management company that Web publishers use to display and target visual and rich-media advertising. The technology uses a DoubleClick cookie that reports back every time a user visits a site using the system, letting DoubleClick know that user 453689 likes to read motocross stories and GQ magazine and spends a lot of time playing online Flash games. Google can merge that database with its deep knowledge of users’ search histories, along with its growing database of URLs visited by Google users who don’t realize that Google opts-in users to its “Web History” program, which continually tracks their every step on the Internet.

So what does the purchase mean for citizens on the Web?

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