EFF has filed the final brief in its dispute with the government over evidence preservation in Jewel v. NSA, one of our ongoing lawsuits against mass surveillance. As the brief explains, the government has admitted to destroying years of evidence of its mass spying, and this destruction continues today. In fact, at an emergency hearing in June, the government claimed that it was incapable of complying with a court order to preserve evidence relating to the mass interception of Internet communications it is conducting under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The new brief responds to questions posed by…
Author: EFFSource
The Federal Communications Commission is about to make a critical decision about whether Internet providers will be allowed to discriminate against certain websites. The issue is network neutrality—the principle that Internet providers must treat all data that travels over their networks equally. On Tuesday, EFF filed comments with the FCC to weigh-in on this critical debate. Without network neutrality, companies like Comcast and Verizon will be permitted to charge websites to reach users faster. This would be a disaster for the open Internet. When new websites can’t get high-quality service, they’ll be less likely to reach users and less likely…
In Call of Duty: Black Ops II, players engage in a variety of missions. In some, they encounter nonfiction characters, including a character based on General Manuel Noriega, the former military dictator of Panama. As with movies or books, a creator of a video game might include real-world people as part of its historical narrative, to heighten realism, or for purposes of political satire or social commentary. The First Amendment should provide robust protection for this kind of creative expression. But some terrible court decisions regarding the so-called ‘right of publicity’ have opened the door to censorship by persons depicted…
The Yorba Foundation, a non-profit group that produces open source Linux desktop software, reported last week that it was denied tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status by the IRS. The group had waited nearly five years for a decision. The IRS stated that, because the software Yorba develops can be used commercially, the organization has a substantial non-exempt purpose and is disqualified from tax-exempt status. We think the IRS’ decision rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of open source software. This decision comes against the backdrop of previous “be on the look out” (BOLO) orders for open source software organizations’ applications for 501(c)(3) status. …
The UN High Commissioner on Human Rights has released an excellent report today on the right to privacy in the digital age, blasting the digital mass surveillance that has been taking place, unchecked, by the U.S., the U.K, and other world governments. The report is issued in response to a resolution passed with unanimous approval by the United Nations General Assembly in November 2013. That resolution was introduced by Brazil and Germany and sponsored by 57 member states. This report turns the tide in the privacy debate at the United Nations and opens the door for more substantive scrutiny of…
The UK government is currently forcing through Parliament a wide-ranging set of changes to that country’s digital surveillance and data retention law. The pace of the progression of the new amendments, called the Digital Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill (or “DRIP”) has been astounding. Introduced without warning last Friday, if not opposed by peers in Britain’s House of Lords, it looks like it may become law within the week. Opponents of the bill are having to work as individuals, as the leadership of all the major parties support the bill, including Labour, the main opposition party, and governing coalition partners…
In the flurry of activity yesterday surrounding the FCC’s comment deadline on the net neutrality debate, members of Congress are quietly trying to slip through a bill that will block the development of real alternatives for high-speed Internet. Representative Marsha Blackburn introduced an amendment late last night that aims to limit FCC authority to preempt state laws that restrict or prohibit municipal and community high-speed Internet projects or investment. Blackburn’s amendment will go up for a vote today, so we must act now to tell our representatives how important it is that cities and communities maintain their right to build…
Court of Appeals Agrees to Expedite Case Over Telephone Records CollectionCoeur d’Alene, Idaho – The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho have announced they will join Anna Smith’s legal team in her challenge of the government’s bulk collection of the telephone records of millions of innocent Americans. Smith, an emergency neonatal nurse and pregnant mother of two, filed her suit against President Obama and several U.S. intelligence agencies shortly after the government confirmed revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) was conducting bulk collection of telephone records under…
Agency Must Abandon Dangerous Traffic-Discrimination PlanSan Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has told the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that the agency must abandon its current, dangerous plan to allow for Internet traffic discrimination. Instead, EFF is urging the FCC to reclassify the Internet as a “common carrier” and also to restrict itself to limited and tightly bounded regulation. In formal comments submitted to the FCC, EFF argues that defending the neutral Internet is critical to protecting new online applications and services – innovations that have made the Internet a global platform for free expression and commerce of every…
EFF joined a group of thirty-five civil society organizations, companies, and security experts that sent a letter on Monday encouraging President Obama to veto S. 2588, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (“CISA”) of 2014. The letter states: CISA fails to offer a comprehensive solution to cybersecurity threats. Further, the bill contains inadequate protections for privacy and civil liberties. Accordingly, we request that you promptly pledge to veto CISA. Bad cybersecurity bills appear to be habit-forming for Congress. CISA, which is appropriately being called a “zombie bill” by privacy advocates and journalists, rehashes two similar (and equally flawed) bills: the Cyber…
Update: A few hours after we posted this, New Mexico Corrections Department informed us that inmate Eric Aldaz’s Facebook-related disciplinary infractions have been thrown out. More information at the bottom. Like more than a billion other people on the planet, Eric Aldaz had a Facebook profile. What made Aldaz’s profile different from most is that he was unable to post to it himself: he didn’t hold the login credentials or even have any kind of access to the Internet. He is an inmate of the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) and his family maintained the page on his behalf. New…
The House Judiciary seems to have pulled from a grab bag in scheduling the next hearing in its series reviewing various aspects of copyright law for reform. Tomorrow’s session is titled “Moral Rights, Termination Rights, Resale Royalty, and Copyright Term,” covering four very distinct areas of law and policy. How is this going to work? It’s hard to say. Probably not very well. The hearing structure allows a handful of witnesses to give very brief explanations of their views, but the question-and-answer format hasn’t always been very productive. In the past, we’ve seen lawmakers in the committee raise pet issues…
Imagine that you watched a police officer in your neighborhood stop ten completely ordinary people every day just to take a look inside their vehicle or backpack. Now imagine that nine of those people are never even accused of a crime. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even the most law-abiding person would eventually protest this treatment. In fact—they have.1 Now replace police officers with the NSA. The scenario above is what the NSA is doing with our communications, under cover of its twisted interpretation of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act.…
Yesterday, a new patent reform bill passed out of subcommittee in the House. The bill, called the Targeting Rogue and Opaque Letters Act, or TROL Act, deals with the problem of misleading patent demand letters. While we are pleased that Congress is still taking an interest in patent trolls, this particular bill would achieve very little and is no substitute for real reform. Deceptive demand letters are a significant problem. In one case, a secretive troll called MPHJ sent over 16,000 letters to small businesses demanding payment for using basic “scan to email” technology. To hide who was really behind…
Due to the unprecedented secrecy surrounding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations taking place this week in Ottawa, there was no formal opportunity to engage with negotiators about the concerns that EFF and many others have expressed—over issues such as the extension of copyright protection by 20 years, and the delegation of ISPs as copyright police with the power to remove content and terminate accounts. With the alternative of allowing this round of negotiations to proceed without any public input on these important issues (and bearing in mind the maxim “If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad…”), EFF and its partners…
After months of waiting, a Ninth Circuit panel has finally responded to Google’s plea, supported by public interest groups (including EFF), journalists, librarians, other service providers, and law professors, to reconsider its disastrous opinion in the case of Garcia v. Google. The good news is that we managed to get the panel to revisit its opinion. The bad news is that it essentially doubled down. Quick background: several months ago, and over a vigorous dissent, a panel majority ordered Google to remove copies of the notorious Innocence of Muslims film from YouTube. Why? Because one of the actors in the film…
Last week, Microsoft completed a legal attack on two large and quite nasty botnets by obtaining a court order transferring 23 domain names to Microsoft’s control. The botnets went down and the Internet was a better place for it. But in doing so, Microsoft also took out the world’s largest dynamic DNS provider using a dangerous legal theory and without any prior notice to Vitalwerks Internet Solutions—the company that runs No-IP.com—or to the millions of innocent users who rely on No-IP.com every day. Just two days later, Microsoft reversed course and began returning control of the seized domains to Vitalwerks.…
EFF asked the Second Circuit Court of Appeals today to reject a last-ditch attempt by the Authors Guild to block the Google Books project and rewrite the rules of fair use. This is a long-running case that culminated in a tremendous victory in November. After years of litigation, Judge Denny Chin ruled that Google Books does not infringe copyrights in the books it indexes. But the Authors Guild appealed Judge Chin’s clear-headed decision. EFF—joined by Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy and Technology—filed an amicus brief with the appeals court today, asking the court to affirm the decision below…
When faced with a digital emergency—whether someone has hijacked your social media account or your website is being DDoSed—can be difficult for non-technical people to discern what the problem is and what the appropriate next steps may be for seeking help. To help fill this niche in the universe of privacy and security guides, a group of NGOs ( including EFF, Hivos, Internews, VirtualRoad, and CIRCL) have teamed up to write a guide that combines advice for self-assessment with advice for “first responders” to help non-technical users all over the world identify and respond to their digital emergencies. The Digital…
When EFF joined with a coalition of partners to fly an airship over the NSA’s Utah Data Center, the goal was to emphasize the need for accountability in the NSA spying debate. In particular, we wanted to point people to our new Stand Against Spying scorecard for lawmakers. But while we were up there, we got a remarkable and unusual view. Today, continuing in the spirit of transparency and building on earlier efforts to shed some light on the physical spaces the US intelligence community has constructed, we’re releasing a photograph of the Utah Data Center into the public domain,…