In the week leading up the first year anniversary of the 13 Necessary and Proportionate Principles, EFF and the coalition behind the 13 Principles will be conducting a Week of Action explaining some of the key guiding principles for surveillance law reform. Every day, we’ll take on a different part of the principles, exploring what’s at stake and what we need to do to bring intelligence agencies and the police back under the rule of law. You can read the complete set of posts at: https://necessaryandproportionate.org/anniversary. Let’s send a message to Member States at the United Nations and wherever else…
Author: EFFSource
A proposed anti-terrorism law in France has freedom of expression advocates concerned. The bill, as our friends at La Quadrature du Net frame it, “institutes a permanent state of emergency on the Internet,” providing for harsher penalties for incitement or “glorification” of terrorism conducted online. Furthermore, the bill (in Article 9) allows for “the possibility for the administrative authority to require Internet service providers to block access to sites inciting or apologizing for terrorism” without distinguishing criteria or an authority to conduct the blocking. Apart from specific concerns that the bill treats online speech as distinct from other speech, other…
EFF was in Washington DC this week to deliver our Fast Track petition to Senator Ron Wyden, and we’ve asked him to fix the secretive, Hollywood-captured process that taints current trade negotiations and leads to international agreements with draconian copyright provisions. At the time of the delivery, the petition was signed by 4,950 US users.* Sen. Wyden has been a vocal advocate for the public to have access to the trade negotiations. One of the most notable moments was from a Senate Finance Committee hearing in 2012, where he challenged the US Trade Representative (USTR) on the secrecy that shrouds…
In a fantastic victory for fair use and common sense, a federal court has rejected Fox’s effort to use copyright and the largely moribund “hot news” doctrine to shut down a video “clipping” service, TVEyes. TVeyes creates a searchable database of TV and radio station broadcasts. Subscribers can search the database and view a portion of the original broadcast in which their search terms appear. The database enables research, commentary, and criticism that would otherwise be impossible for many of its users. In July of 2013, Fox News sued TVEyes for copyright infringement and “hot news misappropriation.” Despite ample evidence that customers…
Back in June, we urged companies offering educational or communications tools to apply for licenses to make their products available in sudan. Last week, we were thrilled to learn that Coursera—an online educational course provider that Sudanese activists have told us is “in great demand”—successfully applied for and was granted a license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) granting them permission to offer courses in sudan and Cuba. While EFF is critical of the piecemeal approach undertaken by the U.S. government in updating sanctions provisions to allow for greater access to technology, we can’t ignore the fact that…
After all its hard work this year Congress is almost done with its summer recess. Lawmakers are due back Sept. 8 and have much to tackle. Two bills are of paramount importance to EFF: one—the USA FREEDOM Act—must be passed by Congress, while the other—the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA)—must be killed. The USA FREEDOM Act is a good first step to rein in the NSA’s “Business Records” program, which collects Americans’ calling records using Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Since July, we’ve urged people to contact their senators to cosponsor the bill. We’ve even created a scorecard to…
While all eyes are on the disturbing evidence of police militarization in Ferguson, are you paying attention to what’s happening with law enforcement in your own back yard? In the San Francisco Bay Area, the answer is yes. A coalition of community groups has come together to call attention to Urban Shield, a four-day long “preparedness” exercise for law enforcement and other agencies that will take place from September 4-8. They’ve organized a week of education, including a march and demonstration outside of the event on Friday, September 5. To these community groups, Urban Shield represents state violence and political…
PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is the government-run online system used by lawyers, the press, and the public to access public federal court records in the United States. The administrators of that system recently announced that a huge number of documents from five federal courts have been permanently removed from its database and are no longer publicly viewable. For one circuit court, only documents filed within the last 2.5 years are now available; for two other circuit courts, documents now go back only 4 years. Though this change appears to be part of PACER’s attempt to join the…
The Texas Supreme Court today ruled that orders preventing people who have been found liable for defamation from publishing further statements about the plaintiff are “prior restraints,” a remedy that the First Amendment rarely permits. Adopting a position advocated by EFF in an amicus brief, the court also delightfully quoted The Big Lebowski’s Walter Sobchak: “For your information, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint.” It further rejected the argument that the ability of Internet publication to reach millions of readers almost instantaneously somehow required a change in First Amendment law. EFF filed the amicus brief on behalf of…
Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation, io9, and a coalition of fan groups over Labor Day weekend for Project Secret Identity, a cosplay photo campaign to raise awareness of how online anonymity and privacy are key to free expression. Visit ProjectSecretIdentity.org during Dragon Con (Aug. 29 – Sept. 1) to participate online or visit us on the second floor of the Hilton Atlanta or the Southeastern Browncoats booth, #1000 at AmericasMart. For the first time in my life, I’m donning a costume at a convention. At Dragon Con this weekend, I’ll put on a balaclava, a utility vest and a pair…