Photo by Steve Rhodes; CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 “We want information to flow like water,” protesters yelled outside San Francisco City Hall in the pouring rain, rallying in support of keeping the Internet open. The rally was in advance of a public forum inside City Hall on the looming net neutrality debate. The San Francisco Bay Area has been one of the most vocal places in the nation in the fight for net neutrality, and there’s a reason: Internet openness is crucial to the path-breaking artists, technologies, and businesses that thrive in this state. The Bay Area is home to some…
Author: EFFSource
It’s looking like we might be on the brink of another crypto war. The first one, in the 90s, was a misguided attempt to limit the public’s access to strong, secure cryptography. And since then, the reasons we need the good security provided by strong crypto have only multiplied. That’s why EFF has joined 20 civil society organizations and companies in sending a letter to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to “re-emphasize the importance of creating a process for establishing secure and resilient encryption standards, free from back doors or other known vulnerabilities.” As the letter points…
This week EFF attended a meeting of the Human Rights Working Group of the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), a global industry forum that includes many of the world’s largest IT and communications companies, including AT&T, BlackBerry, HP, Microsoft, Telefónica, Verizon, and Vodafone. Responding to both global and regional calls for industry to share more responsibility for the human rights impacts of ICT products and services, GeSI’s human rights project aims to enliven greater vigilance amongst its members as to the human rights impacts of their activities throughout the supply chain. GeSI members themselves are the best evidence of the need…
We are disappointed that the Senate has failed to advance the USA Freedom Act, a good start for bipartisan surveillance reform that should have passed the Senate. The Senate still has the remainder of the current legislative session to pass the USA Freedom Act. We continue to urge the Senate to do so and only support amendments that will make it stronger. We strongly oppose any amendment that would water down the strong privacy, special advocate, and transparency provisions of the bill. We also urge the Senate to remember that the USA Freedom Act is a first step in comprehensive…
Non-Profit to Offer One-Click Process to Implement Secure Web BrowsingSan Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is helping to launch a new non-profit organization that aims to dramatically increase secure Internet browsing. Let’s Encrypt is scheduled to offer free server certificates beginning in summer 2015. “This project should boost everyday data protection for almost everyone who uses the Internet,” said EFF Technology Projects Director Peter Eckersley. “Right now when you use the Web, many of your communications—your user names, passwords, and browsing histories—are vulnerable to hackers and others. By making it easy, fast, and free for websites to install…
EFF Joins Local and National Groups in Call to Protect the InternetSan Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is joining a broad coalition of local and national public interest groups for a rally and forum in support of strong net neutrality rules at San Francisco City Hall on Thursday, November 20, at 5:30 pm. “Bay Area Speaks: A People’s Hearing on the Future of the Internet” comes at a key moment in the debate over net neutrality. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has a proposal that does not provide full protections for the Internet and could vote to enact…
On September 9, 2009, a patent troll called Ultramercial sued a bunch of Internet companies alleging infringement of U.S. Patent 7,346,545. This patent claims a method for allowing Internet users to view copyrighted material free of charge in exchange for watching certain advertisements. Yes, you read that correctly. Ultramercial believed that it owned the idea of showing an ad before content on the Internet. In the years that followed, the litigation became a central battleground over the legitimacy of abstract software patents. The Federal Circuit, in opinions written by former Chief Judge Randall Rader, twice found the patent valid. The…
A court filing unsealed late Wednesday shows that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) made a highly misleading argument to an appeals court in October during a hearing on the constitutionality of National Security Letters (NSLs). On October 8, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act that prohibit service providers from discussing NSLs they may have received violates the First Amendment. During the hearing, the judges’ questioning addressed concerns that the government is using its NSL authority to stifle recipients’ constitutionally protected right to…
We’re pleased to see Sen. Harry Reid move toward a final vote on the Senate version of the USA FREEDOM Act, S. 2685. EFF has consistently urged the Senate to move forward on the bipartisan bill since it was first introduced in July. The USA FREEDOM Act is a good first step towards successful surveillance reform. It will limit the NSA’s program collecting Americans’ calling records, introduce a special advocate into the secretive court overseeing the spying, and introduce much needed transparency requirements. While this bill is not a comprehensive solution to overbroad and unconstitutional surveillance, EFF urges the Senate…
Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer’s web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie. Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. In recent months, researchers have reported ISPs in the US and Thailand intercepting their customers’ data to strip a security flag—called STARTTLS—from email traffic. The STARTTLS flag is an essential security and privacy protection used by an email server to request encryption when talking to another server or client.1 By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the…