A few weeks ago we fought a battle for transparency in our flagship NSA spying case, Jewel v. NSA. But, ironically, we weren’t able to tell you anything about it until now. On June 6, the court held a long hearing in Jewel in a crowded, open courtroom, widely covered by the press. We were even on the local TV news on two stations. At the end, the Judge ordered both sides to request a transcript since he ordered us to do additional briefing. But when it was over, the government secretly, and surprisingly sought permission to “remove” classified information…
Author: EFFSource
Last week, the UK’s House of Lords Select Committee on Communications released a report on “social media and criminal offences.” Britain has faced a number of high-profile cases of online harassment this year, which has prompted demands for new laws, and better enforcement of existing laws. “Our starting point,” the peers begin, “is that what is not an offence off-line should not be an offence online”. The report is cautious in its recommendations for modifying existing regulation, and reasonable in spelling out how current criminal law can deal with patterns of harassment and bullying, whether they intersect with modern social…
The Internet’s Own Boy Director Brian Knappenberger Releases Short Doc as Senate Introduces New Reform Bill Privacy info. This embed will serve content from youtube-nocookie.com San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today released a video by acclaimed documentarian Brian Knappenberger (The Internet’s Own Boy) that explores how and why an unlikely coalition of advocacy organizations launched an airship over the National Security Agency’s Utah data center. The short documentary explains the urgent need to rein in unconstitutional mass surveillance, just as the U.S. Senate has introduced a new version of the USA FREEDOM Act. The video, Illegal Spying…
Scientific progress relies upon the exchange of ideas and research. The Internet is the most powerful network the world has ever seen, with the capability to enable this exchange at an unprecedented speed and scale. But outmoded policies and practices continue to present massive barriers that collectively stifle that potential. Many major online research databases are kept under lock and key by publishers, making them extremely expensive to access. Given the subscription model for these repositories, most people cannot afford to pay the fees to read or cite to existing research, let alone know what research and studies have already…
In part one of this blogpost, we discuss why it makes good sense to contribute to the Tor project on university campuses, and we offer some examples of students who have been able to set up relays or exit nodes in recent years. EFF realizes that many students may be interested in contributing to the Tor Project, but are unsure of how to get the conversation with their university started. In this post, we offer some tips that we’ve pulled from successful efforts to establish an exit or a relay node on campus. We also provide some suggestions for addressing…
German newspapers recently reported that the NSA targets people who research privacy and anonymity tools online—for instance by searching for information about Tor and Tails—for deeper surveillance. But today, researching something online is the near equivalent to thinking out loud. By ramping up surveillance on people simply for reading about security, freedom of expression easily collapses into self-censorship; speech is chilled; people may become afraid to research and learn. What effect does this threat to research have on university life? Just this summer student groups at seventeen universities across the country penned open letters in protest of NSA surveillance, calling…
As part of our Open Wireless Movement, we set out to create router software that would make it easier for people to safely and smartly share part of their wireless network. Protecting hosts, so their security is not compromised because they offer open networks, is one of the goals of the router software we released. However, as research published by Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) and others has shown, almost every popular home router has serious security flaws. In developing the router software, we realized that we also needed to tackle the more fundamental problem of home router security. Instead of…
Brian Carver co-authored this post. Between the net neutrality debate and the Comcast/TWC merger, high-speed Internet access is getting more attention than ever. A lot of that attention is negative, and rightly so: Internet access providers, especially certain very large ones, have done a pretty good job of divvying up the nation to leave most Americans with only one or two choices for decent high-speed Internet access. Many of us don’t like those options. That’s one reason folks have been looking to the FCC to enact neutrality rules. If there’s no competition, customers can’t vote with their wallets when ISPs…
When the Australian government first began requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block websites in 2012, Australians were assured that it would only be used to block the “worst of the worst” child pornography. This week, a discussion paper was issued that proposes to extend this Web blocking regime, so that it would also block sites that facilitate copyright infringement. Funny how that always seems to happen. You may remember a similar website blocking scenario in the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which prompted an unprecedented online uprising from Internet users in the U.S. and around the world, that…
Here at EFF, we see a lot of stupid patents. There was the patent on “scan to email.” And the patent on “bilateral and multilateral decision making.” There are so many stupid patents that Mark Cuban endowed a chair at EFF dedicated to eliminating them. We wish we could catalog them all, but with tens of thousands of low-quality software patents issuing every year, we don’t have the time or resources to undertake that task. But in an effort to highlight the problem of stupid patents, we’re introducing a new blog series, Stupid Patent of the Month, featuring spectacularly dumb…