EFF and Other Civil Liberties Organizations Call on Congress to Support Uncompromising Reform Since the introduction of the USA FREEDOM Act, a bill that has over 140 cosponsors, Congress has been clear about its intent: ending the mass collection of Americans’ calling records. Many members of Congress, the President’s own review group on NSA activities, and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board all agree that the use of Section 215 to collect Americans’ calling records must stop. Earlier today, House Leadership reached an agreement to amend the bipartisan USA FREEDOM Act in ways that severely weaken the bill, potentially…
Author: EFFSource
Say it ain’t so, Google. Two weeks ago, the awesome activists at the Peng! Collective launched a funny and smart satirical site, google-nest.org, which purported to offer a host of new Google “products,” pairing the launch with a public announcement at the Re:publica 2014 conference in Berlin. The spoof site included products such as Google Trust (data “insurance”), Google Bee (personal drones), Google Hug (location-based crowdsourced hug matching) and Google Bye (an online profile for the afterlife). The goal: raise awareness about Google’s privacy policies, which Peng! believes are hypocritical. The spoof was great success, prompting a wave of commentary…
For the second year in a row, Investigative Reporters and Editors solicited nominations from the public for one of the least coveted prizes in government: the Golden Padlock. The award recognizes “the most secretive publicly-funded agency or person in the United States,” and the U.S. Border Patrol last year took home the inaugural honor for stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests related to agent-involved shootings along the border. While we’ve had our own FOIA battles with Customs & Border Protection in the past, it’s nothing compared to what we’ve encountered trying to shine light on how the NSA conducts mass…
If you’ve been imagining NSA surveillance as something distant, with analysts sitting in remote data centers quietly analyzing metadata—stop now. NSA surveillance has become a part of day-to-day law enforcement fabric in the United States. The Snowden disclosures that were made public as part of Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide drive this point home, and they emphasize why we need real change to government surveillance, not minor reforms. There are two key points necessary to understand the domestic aspect of NSA surveillance: the integral role of the FBI in helping the NSA spy on Americans, and the acceptance…
It’s always a pleasure when anything patent-related enters the mainstream. Recently, Stephen Colbert took on the absurd inventions that companies attempt to patent. In this case, the host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report lampoons Amazon’s new patent on a method of photography in front of a white background. The patent, like many patents issued today, uses seemingly complex language to describe a fairly simple idea. While the patent gives examples in its claims of a specific set up, down to particular F-stop settings and ISO values, the patent features typical boilerplate language: “variations and modifications may be made […]…
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is about to get an earful on net neutrality. He’s testifying at a hearing in front of the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology tomorrow, and Congress members from both sides of the aisle are asking for constituents to contribute questions at the hearing as well using the hashtag #AskWheeler. This is an important moment because the FCC is supposed to get its marching orders from Congress. As we all learned in middle school, Congress passes laws (in this case, about television, telephones, radio, wire, satellite or cable services) and the FCC (as part of the…
NSA reform is finally moving in Congress. Last year, Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Jim Sensenbrenner introduced the USA Freedom Act, one of the first comprehensive bills to address multiple aspects of the NSA’s spying. The Senate version has languished since October, but last week the House Judiciary Committee (chaired by Rep. Bob Goodlatte) introduced and passed out of committee a heavily rewritten House version. As a result, two versions of the USA Freedom Act exist: the narrowed House version and the more encompassing Senate version. The movement in the House is a good indication that Congress is still engaged…
“The US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide” Glenn Greenwald, No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State June 5th marks the first anniversary of the beginning of the Edward Snowden revelations–a landmark event in global awareness of the worldwide spying machine. It has been a year where the world has learned that the NSA and its four closest allies in the Five Eyes partnership (United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) have been spying on much of world’s digital communications. What have we…
Students are starting to speak out about how mass surveillance affects life on campus. Two different open letters from students—at the University of Oregon and New York University—have been published in the last two weeks. And both point to the real life consequences of mass government surveillance on academic freedom and life on campus. The letter from the University of Oregon notes that government surveillance “impairs our collective ability to imagine and organize.” Penned by law students, but open for signatures from the entire campus community, the letter discusses how U.S. government surveillance targets non-U.S. persons and thus undermines their…
There’s good news: the nationwide outcry against the Federal Communications Commission’s troublesome proposal for new Open Internet rules is clearly having an impact. At a public meeting this morning, commissioners were factoring in questions that—according to previous accounts—weren’t on the table only days ago. The bad news: the FCC still is considering a set of rules that will allow Internet providers to discriminate how we access websites with only vague and uncertain limits, endangering network neutrality and threatening the vibrant growth of the Internet. We’re still waiting for the full proposal. But according to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s statements at…
For the past two years, EFF has been pushing Congress to pass legislation to rein in patent trolls. Starting with the introduction of the Shield Act in 2012, momentum has built for patent reform. And we saw dramatic results in December of last year when the House overwhelmingly passed the Innovation Act. Since then, the ball has been in the Senate’s court. But weeks and months have gone by without a comparable bill being introduced in the Senate Judiciary Committee. While the Senate dawdles, patent trolls continue their rampage. A new report from legal analytics startup Lex Machina confirms that…
EFF Survey Shows Improved Privacy and Transparency Policies of the Internet’s Biggest CompaniesSan Francisco – Technology companies are privy to our most sensitive information: our conversations, photos, location data, and more. But which companies fight the hardest to protect your privacy from government data requests? Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) releases its fourth annual “Who Has Your Back” report, with comprehensive information on 26 companies’ commitments to fighting unfair demands for customer data. The report examines the privacy policies, terms of service, public statements, and courtroom track records of major technology companies, including Internet service providers, email providers, social…
Today the FCC is meeting to discuss new rules that could determine the future of network neutrality. There’s been a lot of news circulating about what the FCC’s plan will contain. We’ll have some analysis to share shortly. In the meantime, though, Internet users need to tell the FCC that we want real net neutrality, and we don’t want net discrimination. Visit DearFCC.org to submit comments to the FCC’s official Open Internet docket. Fill out the form to submit your comments, and tell the FCC you oppose rules that will stifle Internet innovation and creativity. Personalize it. Tell a story.…
This blog post is co-authored by Heesob Nam, patent attorney, Intellectual Property activist, and a founder and board member of OpenNet Korea. The South Korean government has adopted an aggressive interpretation of their copyright law to block websites in the name of copyright enforcement. In practice, this emulates the kinds of extreme provisions that were in the defeated U.S. SOPA bill. Its takedown system mirrors the SOPA provision on copyright holders being empowered to compel Internet service providers (ISPs) to block foreign sites through a simple allegation of copyright infringing uses of their platform. Recent cases have revealed a blocking…
The European Court of Justice has been taking a stronger role this year in calculating how human rights apply to new technology, most recently with decisions repealing the EU’s digital data retention directive. Now, in Google Spain v. Mario Costeja González, it has outlined how Europeans might have public information about them deleted from search engine listings — even if that data is available elsewhere, part of the legal record, and true. The case concerns a Spanish citizen who sued Google to remove search links to a 1998 article in the newspaper La Vanguardia, which listed a real estate auction…
It’s official: the last holdout for the open web has fallen. Flanked on all sides by Google, Microsoft, Opera and (it appears) Safari’s support and promotion of the EME DRM-in-HTML standard, Mozilla is giving in to pressure from Hollywood, Netflix et al, and will be implementing its own third-party version of DRM. It will be rolled out in Desktop Firefox later this year. Mozilla’s CTO, Andreas Gal, says that Mozilla “has little choice.” Mozilla’s Chair, Mitchell Baker adds, “Mozilla cannot change the industry on DRM at this point.” At EFF, we disagree. We’ve had over a decade of watching this…
Whether you’re filling out a mail-in ballot or planning to rock the polling station in person on election day (June 3), if you’re a California voter we urge you to please vote “yes” on Prop. 42. This statewide ballot measure would ensure that local agencies, such as cities and counties, obey the California transparency laws that guarantee the public’s right to access government documents and attend government meetings. These laws—the California Public Records Act (CPRA) and the Ralph M. Brown Act—are crucial to EFF’s efforts to defend civil liberties, as well as to the work of every investigative journalist and…
People have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their private digital communications such as email, and therefore the Fourth Amendment protects those communications. It’s a simple extension of the Supreme Court’s seminal 1967 ruling in Katz v. United States that the Fourth Amendment protected a telephone conversation held in a closed phone booth. But in a brief recently filed in a criminal terrorism case arising from surveillance of a United States citizen, the government needs only a few sentences to argue this basic protection doesn’t apply, with potentially dramatic consequences for the rest of us. United States v. Mohamud Mohamed…
It’s been hard to go a day without hearing news about the Chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, and his highly contested plan for the future of network neutrality. Google and Netflix signed a letter with nearly 150 other Internet companies calling on the FCC to reconsider its plan, which would purportedly bless the creation of “Internet fast lanes.” Over a million people across the country have spoken out against that idea, worried that a “pay to play” Internet will be less hospitable to competition, innovation, and expression. And while Chairman Wheeler and his fellow commissioners have been blogging about…
During the aftermath of World War II, months before the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the formation of the United Nations, states in the Americas gathered to create the very first international human rights instrument of the modern era. In the midst of military regimes across Latin America, the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man was established in 1948, setting out the obligations for States to promote and protect human rights in the American hemisphere. A few years later, in 1969, States ratified the American Convention on Human Rights, also known as the…