In the latest example of a troubling trend in which companies play the role of law enforcement and moral police, Chase Bank has shut down the personal bank accounts of hundreds of adult entertainers. We’ve written before about the dire consequences to online speech when service providers start acting like content police. These same consequences are applicable when financial services make decisions about to whom they provide services. Just as ISPs and search engines can become weak links for digital speech, too often financial service providers are pressured by the government to shut down speech or punish speakers who would…
Author: EFFSource
Lately it seems every day has a big new patent story. Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard argument in an important case about the problem of vague and ambiguous patents. Today, the Court issued twin rulings, in Octane and Highmark, that will make it easier for defendants in patent cases to get attorney’s fees. This decision is bad news for patent trolls who bring weak cases and use the high cost of defense to extort settlements. While it’s a step in the right direction, we hope it will be followed by broader legislative reform curbing patent troll abuse. Today’s unanimous opinions…
Twenty-three governments have come together this week for the 4th annual Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) conference in Tallinn, Estonia—a meeting where FOC members work together to “coordinate their diplomatic efforts and engage with civil society” in order to advance Internet freedom worldwide. The United States and the United Kingdom are both members of the FOC—meaning they’ve committed to protecting human rights and freedom online. However, when former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, Edward Snowden, disclosed the purported mass surveillance capabilities of the NSA and the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), it left civil society wondering how these two…
Patent reform language floated around the Hill last week while Congress was on recess. A recent draft included a retroactive effective date of April 24, 2014. While final phrasing for the upcoming Senate patent bill isn’t known, rumors of this start date were enough to spur action: on Wednesday, April 23—a day before reforms would presumably come into effect—trolls filed a total of 184 lawsuits against businesses big and small. Clearly, the proposed reforms have patent trolls shaking in their boots. But in order for these changes to actually pass, the Senate needs to hear from you—you the user, you…
Six Ethiopian bloggers, all members of the Zone Nine bloggers’ collective, were arrested this weekend. Befekadu Hailu, Atnaf Berahane, Natnael Feleke, Mahlet Fantahun, Zelalem Kibret, and Abel Wabela were reportedly arrested in the streets or in their offices. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, police also searched their homes and confiscated private laptops and literature. After being held incommunicado in Maekelawi, a detention center in Addis Ababa, all six bloggers appeared before the Federal First Instance Court First Criminal Bench in Arada, where they were charged with “Working with foreign organizations that claim to be human rights activists…
Here’s what the Deputy Solicitor General of the United States had to say during Tuesday’s Aereo Supreme Court argument when asked directly whether a ruling might throw the United States out of line with international agreements: We haven’t made that argument. We we believe that existing U.S. copyright law properly construed is fully sufficient to comply with our international obligations. But that that doesn’t mean that we think that whenever a court misconstrues the statute, we will automatically be thrown into breach. It’s certainly possible. But if this case were decided in Aereo’s favor that some of our…
Today, April 26, is the day marked each year since 2000 as “Intellectual Property Day” by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). There are many areas where EFF has not historically agreed with WIPO, which has traditionally pushed for more restrictive agreements and served as a venue for domestic policy laundering, but we agree that celebrating creativity is a good thing. As the saying goes, though: when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. For the World Intellectual Property Organization, it may seem like creativity and “intellectual property” are inextricably linked. That’s not the case. In the spirit of…
President Obama is on a diplomatic tour of Asia this week and one of his top priorities is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement that includes restrictive copyright enforcement measures that pose a huge threat to users’ rights and a free and open Internet. In particular, he’s seeking to resolve some major policy disagreements with Japan and Malaysia—the two countries that have maintained resistance against some provisions in the TPP involving agriculture and other commodities. Despite some reports of movement on some of the most controversial topics during meetings between Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Abe, it seems that…
EFF has been on the road, traveling to cities and towns across the country to bring our message of digital rights and reform to community and student groups. And while we had the tremendous opportunity to talk about our work and our two lawsuits against the NSA, the best part of the trip was learning about all of the inspiring and transformative activism happening everyday on the local level to combat government surveillance and defend our digital rights. We met students and professors in Eugene, Oregon who held a campus-wide digital rights event at the University of Oregon. There, students…
At the start of her opening address to the NETmundial conference in Sao Paolo this Tuesday, Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff ceremonially signed the Marco Civil, Brazil’s long fought-for Internet Bill of Rights, into law. Even as she did so, activists from the floor below waved Ed Snowden masks and banners protested the bill’s inclusion of a data retention mandate. It was a prefiguration of the battle between high hopes, user rights, anti-surveillance activism, and the forces of compromise that would take place in this forum over the next two days. Over a thousand delegates, from advocacy groups like EFF, companies…
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Wheeler is circulating a proposal for new FCC rules on the issue of network neutrality, the idea that Internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all data that travels over their networks equally. Unfortunately, early reports suggest those rules may do more harm than good. The new rules were prompted by last January’s federal court ruling rejecting the bulk of the FCC’s 2010 Open Internet Order on the grounds that they exceeded the FCC’s authority, sending the FCC back to the drawing board. According to reports, Chairman Wheeler’s new proposal embraces a “commercially reasonable” standard for network…
Narenji (“Orange”) was Iran’s top website for gadget news, edited daily by a team of tech bloggers who worked from a cramped office in the country’s city of Kerman. The site was targeted at Iran’s growing audience of technology enthusiasts. Like Gizmodo or Engadget in the United States, it had a simple but popular formula: mixed reviews of the latest Android and iPhones, summaries of new Persian-language apps and downloads, as well as the latest Internet memes (such as the ever-popular “An Incredible Painted Portrait of Morgan Freeman Drawn with a Finger on the iPad”). But now it’s gone. Narenji’s…
In an era when email and messaging services are being regularly subject to attacks, surveillance, and compelled disclosure of user data, we know that many people around the world need secure end-to-end encrypted communications tools so that service providers and governments cannot read their messages. Unfortunately, the software that has traditionally been used for these purposes, such as PGP and OTR, suffers from numerous usability problems that make it impractical for many of the journalists, activists and others around the world whose lives and liberty depend on their ability to communicate confidentially. Particularly in the post-Snowden era, there has been…
EFF recently filed comments with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) concerning Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FAA), one of the key statutes under which the government claims it can conduct mass surveillance of innocent people’s communications and records from inside the US. EFF maintains that the government’s activities under Section 702 that we know about are unconstitutional, not supported by the statutory language, and violate international law.1 The PCLOB, created as a result of recommendations by the 9/11 Commission, is an agency charged with ensuring privacy and civil liberties are included in the…
Across the Arab world, LGBTQ communities still struggle to gain social recognition, and individuals still face legal penalties for consensual activities. In Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iraq, homosexuality is punishable by death. In 2001, 52 men were arrested for being gay in Cairo. And in Syria, Algeria, and the United Arab Emirates, being outed as homosexual means facing years in prison. While activists in some countries, such as Lebanon, have made progress toward greater rights, personal security remains an imperative. In countries where homosexuality remains taboo or punishable by law, it makes sense for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and other…
All too often bills are proposed and laws are passed in the United States that are in grave violation of the United States’ obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. And all too rarely does U.S. domestic policy get spoken about in terms of human rights laws. A case in point: the recent spate of bills responding to the unlawful mass surveillance conducted by the NSA revealed in the flood of disclosures from whistleblower Edward Snowden. The NSA’s actions are fundamentally at odds with the human rights to privacy, free expression, freedom of information, as well as…
In the highly anticipated oral arguments of ABC v. Aereo yesterday, the Supreme Court expressed serious concerns about the unintended consequences that their ruling could have on technology and cloud services. The start-up Aereo provides subscribers online access to a DVR that can hold recordings of over-the-air broadcasts made using dime-sized antennas in local markets where it’s available. Broadcasters, which make a portion of their money from charging retransmission fees to cable companies, sued Aereo in New York and elsewhere on the theory that its user-directed transmissions are public performances under the law. As such, the broadcasters argue, it is…
Congress has been poised to move on powerful legislation to reform the NSA for months, so what’s slowing things down? It’s been over ten months since the Guardian published the first disclosure of secret documents confirming the true depths of NSA surveillance, and Congress has still not touched the shoddy legal architecture of NSA spying. There have been myriad NSA bills presented in Congress since last June. None of them are comprehensive proposals that fix all the problems. Many of them seem to be dead in the water, languishing in committee. However, several proposals remain contenders. Some are deceptive…
The patent office has issued its first ruling in our challenge to Personal Audio’s so-called podcasting patent. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) found that we have established a “reasonable likelihood” that we will prevail, based on two key pieces of “prior art” evidence. This isn’t a final ruling, but it is an important step forward. Last October, we filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) at the PTAB. The IPR process provides an expedited means for the patent office to take a second look at a patent it has already issued. This kind of challenge proceeds in…
Two days ago, we asked web developers for help. EFF and Sunlight Foundation published an open call for help testing a tool and populating an open data format that would make it easier for everyday people to contact members of Congress. We already had a prototype, but we needed volunteers to conduct tests on each and every Congressional website. We expected the project would take about two weeks to complete, but feared it might take a month or longer. We worried that web developers wouldn’t want to spend hours working on a boring, frustrating, often technically complex task. Instead, volunteers…