Are you a student who’s passionate about Internet and technology policy? Come work with EFF this summer as a Google Policy Fellow! The Google Policy Fellowship program offers students interested in Internet and technology policy the opportunity to spend the summer working on these issues at public interest organizations—including EFF!—in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America. Students will work for 10 weeks over the summer of 2014. This is the seventh year we’ve offered the Fellowship, an opportunity for undergraduate, graduate, and law students to work alongside EFF’s international team on projects advancing debate on key public policy…
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Two Hearings This Week: Appeal of Andrew “weev” Auernheimer CFAA Conviction in Philadelphia; License Plate Reader Records Case in Los AngelesCourts in Los Angeles and Philadelphia will hear arguments about coder’s rights and the collection of license plate data in noteworthy Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) cases this week. Andrew “weev” Auernheimer Case CFAA Case: On Wednesday, George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr will argue on behalf of computer security researcher Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, who was prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act after he revealed a massive security flaw in AT&T’s website. EFF is part of Auernheimer’s appeals…
Over the last year, thousands of pages of sensitive documents outlining the government’s intelligence practices have landed on our desktops. One set of documents describes the Director of National Intelligence’s goal of funding “dramatic improvements in unconstrained face recognition.” A presentation from the Navy uses examples from Star Trek to explain its electronic warfare program. Other records show the FBI was purchasing mobile phone extraction devices, malware and fiber network-tapping systems. A sign-in list shows the names and contact details of hundreds of cybersecurity contractors who turned up a Department of Homeland Security “Industry Day.” Yet another document, a heavily…
Sunshine Week is often a time for transparency advocates to collectively lament about government secrecy and institutional resistance to accountability. But the week of advocacy is also an opportunity to highlight how, through patience and a lot of court motions, organizations such as EFF can pry important documents from agencies that would rather operate in the shadows. EFF recently won favorable rulings in two hard-fought Freedom of Information Act cases involving reports of intelligence agency misconduct and agency attempts to mandate backdoors into our internet communications. In light of recent revelations about illegal NSA and FBI surveillance, the records produced…
The House Judiciary Committee heard testimony Thursday on a law that underpins the Internet as we know it today: the copyright notice-and-takedown system and the safe harbor for service providers that comes with it, set up in Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This is the committee’s eighth hearing in a series reviewing various aspects of copyright law in anticipation of a possible revision that’s been dubbed “The Next Great Copyright Act.” As has become the standard, this hearing brought together a handful of stakeholders with very different relationships to the law—two academics, a composer and a company…
Many problems with the patent system—from the explosion in patent trolling to the wasteful smartphone wars—can be traced to the flood of software patents issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). These patents are often both broad and vague and are the favorite tool of trolls. A recent study concluded that, even under today’s highly permissive standards for patentability, about 50 percent of software patents would be found invalid if challenged in court. When it comes to software patents, review by the PTO seems to do no better than tossing a coin. Why is the PTO so bad…
If you’re as much a transparency geek as we are, then you want the whole world to feel the radiation of Sunshine Week. To help blast out the message, EFF Senior Designer Hugh D’Andrade has created a series of banners and backgrounds to brighten up your Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ profiles. Twitter Facebook Google+ Related Issues: TransparencyShare this: || Join EFF Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) – eff.org
Monday marks the second day of “Sunshine Week”—a week to focus on the importance of open government and how to ensure accountability of our leaders at the federal, state, and local levels. When US intelligence agencies were caught spying on Americans 40 years ago, Congress answered the public outcry by creating an investigative task force to bring these covert, and potentially illegal, practices into the light. The Church Committee, as it was commonly known because of its chairman, Sen. Frank Church, interviewed 800 people, held 271 hearings and published volumes upon volumes of reports—all of which paved the way for…
Sunshine Week starts today. What better way to kick it off than sharing this astute quote from phone phreak Phil Lapsley and attorney Michael Ravnitzky, who turned the Freedom of Information Act into a hacking tool? Imagine. Imagine a database. A database of documents. Every document the U.S. Government has ever created. That database exists. It even has a name. It’s called … “Every document the U.S. Government has ever created and hasn’t gotten around to throwing out yet.” You can query this database by using an obscure search engine called FOIA. – “Rummaging in the Government’s Attic: Lessons Learned…
Russia’s government has escalated its use of its Internet censorship law to target news sites, bloggers, and politicians under the slimmest excuse of preventing unauthorized protests and enforcing house arrest regulations. Today, the country’s ISPs have received orders to block a list of major news sites and system administrators have been instructed to take the servers providing the content offline. The banned sites include the online newspaper Grani, Garry Kasparov’s opposition information site kasparov.ru, the livejournal of popular anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny, and even the web pages of Ekho Moskvy, a radio station which is majority owned by the state-run…
We’ve asked the companies in our Who Has Your Back Program what they are doing to bolster encryption in light of the NSA’s unlawful surveillance of your communications. We’re pleased to see that four five six seven companies—Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Sonic.net, SpiderOak, and Twitter—are implementing five out of five of our best practices for encryption. See the infographic.By adopting these practices, described below, these service providers have taken a critical step towards protecting their users from warrantless seizure of their information off of fiber-optic cables. By enabling encryption across their networks, service providers can make backdoor surveillance more challenging,…
EFF Represents Computer Scientists in Explaining Why “It Is Not Just Metadata”San Francisco – Representing a large group of top computer science experts and professors, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today submitted a brief to a federal appeals court supporting the American Civil Liberties Union’s lawsuit over the NSA’s mass call records collection program. At the core of the brief is the argument that metadata matters. Intelligence officials have often downplayed privacy concerns over the NSA’s interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act by stating that the agency does not collect the “content” of calls, but only the metadata—who…
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released its annual “Enemies of the Internet” index this week—a ranking first launched in 2006 intended to track countries that repress online speech, intimidate and arrest bloggers, and conduct surveillance of their citizens. Some countries have been mainstays on the annual index, while others have been able to work their way off the list. Two countries particularly deserving of praise in this area are Tunisia and Myanmar (Burma), both of which have stopped censoring the Internet in recent years and are headed in the right direction toward Internet freedom. In the former category are some of…
Senator Dianne Feinstein—who traditionally is a stalwart defender of the intelligence community—came out swinging against them this week. While on the floor of the Senate, she laid bare a two year long struggle concerning CIA spying on Senate Intelligence Committee staffers investigating CIA’s early 2000s torture and enhanced interrogation techniques. The spying by CIA crosses a line when it comes to Congressional oversight of the intelligence community. And it’s an emblem of the extreme imbalance between the power of Congress and the power of the intelligence community. If the intelligence community thinks they can act in such a way towards…
Getty Images—among the world’s largest providers of stock and editorial photos—has announced a major change to the way it is offering its pictures for sites to use. Beginning this week, in addition to the traditional licensing options, people can embed images in their sites at no cost and with no watermarks, so long as they use the provided embed code and iframe. There’s at least one reason this move is exciting and positive: it’s encouraging to see companies experimenting with different business models and using the proverbial carrot instead of the stick. In other words, Getty is making it easier…
Last week, the federal government finally dismissed 11 controversial counts from its overzealous prosecution of journalist Barrett Brown. These counts charged Brown with identity theft for sharing a link to records documenting improper and potentially illegal activities by the U.S. intelligence contractor, Stratfor Global Intelligence. The fact that Brown has been in jail for 18 months, based in large part on these charges, has threatened and continues to threaten press freedom in the United States. Before the government dropped its charges, we were less than five days away from filing an amicus brief in the case on behalf of EFF…
This past Monday, the Human Rights Committee commenced its one hundredth and tenth session in Geneva from March 10-28. During this session, the Committee will review the reports of several countries on how they are implementing the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), an international human rights treaty and one of the bedrocks of human rights protections. Countries that have ratified the ICCPR are required to protect and preserve basic human rights through various means including administrative, judicial, and legislative measures. Additionally, these countries are required to submit a report to the Human Rights Committee,…
One of the two cases against satellite TV company DISH Network settled last week, with Disney ending its quest to have DISH’s automatic commercial-skipping feature, AutoHop, made illegal. In addition to calling off its lawyers, Disney agreed to stream some shows from its popular networks like ABC, Disney Channel, and ESPN over the Internet to DISH subscribers. In exchange, DISH agreed to disable the commercial-skipping functionality for three days after a show is aired – corresponding to the period that the Neilsen Company includes in its audience measurements. We’re pleased that Disney dropped its silly legal challenge against DISH’s digital…
As Facebook turned ten years old last month, a legal case it brought against Power Ventures almost six years ago demonstrates the continued hurdles facing developers who seek to empower users to interact with closed services like Facebook in new and creative ways. In a new amicus brief, we caution the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals not to extend crippling civil and criminal liability on services that provide competing or follow-on innovation. Power Ventures made a web-based tool that allowed users to log into all of their social networking accounts in one place and aggregate messages, friend lists, and other data…
The campaign for open access to publicly funded research was going in the right direction: the White House issued a strong mandate last year, federal agencies have taken up the mantle to create public access policies, and the solid open access bill FASTR was introduced in both the House and the Senate. And then yesterday happened. House Science Committee Chair Lamar Smith and Rep. Larry Buchson introduced the First Act (PDF), a scientific research bill that contains language that sends the progress made on the open access front in the exact opposite direction. We’ve written about this bill’s bad draft…