Author: EFFSource

The Federal District Court in Maryland this week dismissed Du Daobin v. Cisco Systems, a case brought by Chinese dissidents alleging that Cisco knowingly customized, marketed, sold, and provided continued support and service for technologies as part of China’s Golden Shield, a digital censorship and surveillance system used by the Chinese government to facilitate human rights abuses. EFF filed an amicus brief urging the court to let the case go forward and we also launched an activism campaign calling on Cisco to stand up for writer Du Daobin and human rights in China. We’re deeply disappointed by the court’s decision to…

It’s an old legal adage that bad facts lead to bad legal decisions, and today we’ve got a classic example in Garcia v. Google—the “Innocence of Muslims” case. Based on a copyright claim that is dubious at best, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered Google to take offline a video that is the center of public controversy. We can still talk about it, but we can’t see what we are talking about. We’re hard-pressed to think of a better example of copyright maximalism trumping free speech. For those who haven’t been following this, the case was brought by…

In a win for online fair use and the free speech it makes possible, a federal district court judge has ruled that using a campaign headshot as part of a critical, noncommercial blog post does not infringe copyright. The case started back in April, when California Republican Party Vice Chairman Harmeet K. Dhillon sued an anonymous blogger over the use of a five year old headshot on “The Munger Games” website—a site dedicated to criticism of Charles Munger Jr., donor and current chairman of the Santa Clara County Republican Party, and his perceived political allies. The headshot was part of…

Open Letter to Tech Companies Includes 10 Principles to Protect Users From NSA Sabotage In the past nine months, our trust in technology companies has been badly shaken. Today, in collaboration with prominent security researchers and technologists, EFF presents an open letter to technology companies, urging them to protect users from NSA backdoors and earn back the trust that has been lost. From the Snowden revelations emerge stories of collusion between government spy agencies and the companies whose services are integral to our everyday lives. There have been disturbing allegations published by Reuters indicating that RSA, an influential information security…

Nearly three months since his arrest, the Egyptian blogger, software developer and activist Alaa Abd El Fattah remains imprisoned. Charged in December with organizing a demonstration to protest the failure of the draft constitution in legislating against military court martialing of civilians, Abd El Fattah is awaiting trial in prison. In mid-January, a group of bloggers from across the Arab region came together in Amman for the fourth iteration of the Arabloggers conference, a community which Abd El Fattah had been a part of since its beginnings in 2008. It was at this gathering that we released a statement—along with…

In the latest blow to patent trolls, 42 state and territorial attorneys general—that’s right, 42!—wrote a letter today calling on the Senate to pass meaningful patent reform. As the AGs write: So-called patent trolls stifle innovation and harm our economy by making dubious claims of patent infringement and using the threat of expensive litigation to extort money from small businesses and nonprofits. We have received many complaints from these businesses and nonprofits, our constituents, who are desperate for relief from the misuse of the patent system. While these threats were once focused on tech businesses, they are now levied at…

The U.S. Trade Rep announced last week that it will create a new “Public Interest Trade Advisory Committee,” in an attempt to allow public interest groups to provide more input into U.S. proposals in trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). That aim is important, and underserved by many USTR policies, but this proposal is an inadequate remedy to fix the gross imbalance of influence from corporate interests. The main problem with these Trade Advisory Committees (TACs) is that all of their members are forced to sign non-disclosure agreements. This means that any civil society representative who joins this new…

FBI agents arrested a Mexican tycoon named Jose Susumo Azano Matsura at his Coronado, Calif. home on Wednesday as part of a political bribery investigation based on captured emails, seized banking records, and covertly recorded conversations. The unfolding scandal is soaked in irony: Azano is a surveillance evangelist whose company won a secret, no-bid contract with the Mexican military for computer and mobile phone hacking and spying technology in 2011. He is chairman of a company called Security Tracking Devices SA de CV, and he is now chained to a tracking device—on house arrest. When documents leaked to the Mexican…

In July 2012, the United Nations Human Rights Council issued the first-ever UN resolution affirming that human rights in the digital realm must be protected and promoted to the same extent and with the same commitment as human rights in the off-line world. In September 2013, at the 24th U.N. Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva, States such as Austria, Germany, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland organized an event to specifically focus on the protection of the right to privacy in the digital age. At the end of 2013, the United Nations General Assembly approved a key resolution on the…

The NSA appears to have been involved in the surveillance of privileged attorney-client communications, and the legal community is not happy about it. The New York Times reports that communications between an American law firm and its foreign client may have been among the information one of the NSA’s “five eyes” intelligence partners, the Australian Signals Dictorate, shared with the NSA. The American Bar Association has responded to these allegations by urging the NSA to clarify its procedures for minimizing exposure of privileged information- and rightly so. Surveillance of attorney-client communications is anathema to to the fundamental system of justice…

The White House updated the nation on its commitment to curtail the patent troll problem and tie up some egregious loose ends in our patent system, announcing progress made on all fronts—as well as three new executive actions. While the Innovation Act (and other patent bills) is pending in the Senate, it is encouraging to see the White House and Patent Office taking steps on their own to address these rampant problems. One of the most useful announcements is a toolkit put out by the Patent Office called Been Sued or Gotten a Demand Letter? that highlights a variety of…

For the last month, Venezuela has been caught up in widespread protests against its government. The Maduro administration has responded by cracking down on what it claims as being foreign interference online. As that social unrest has escalated, the state’s censorship has widened: from the removal of television stations from cable networks, to the targeted blocking of social networking services, and the announcement of new government powers to censor and monitor online. Last night, EFF received reports from Venezuelans of the shutdown of the state Internet provider in San Cristóbal, a regional capital in the west of the country. The…

The net neutrality fight is moving in new directions, and quickly. Today FCC Chair Tom Wheeler announced that the FCC would press forward with new “Open Internet” rules, undeterred by last month’s court decision striking down most of the old ones. Last week, Comcast and Time Warner Cable announced plans to merge. The merger would create the largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the nation, with five times the subscribers of its closest competitor. With only one or two broadband providers available in most parts of the country, prices may soar while the quality of services plummets. A lack of…

The Intercept recently published an article and supporting documents indicating that the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ surveilled and even sought to have other countries prosecute the investigative journalism website WikiLeaks. GCHQ also surveilled the millions of people who merely read the Wikileaks website. The article clarifies the lengths that these two spy organizations go to track their targets and confirms, once again, that they do not confine themselves to spying on to those accused of terrorism. One document contains a summary of an internal discussion in which officials from two NSA offices discuss whether to categorize WikiLeaks as…

Senior Staff Technologist Seth Schoen Will Speak at Wednesday ConferenceWashington, D.C. – Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Senior Staff Technologist Seth Schoen will warn attendees at a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) conference Wednesday that most people don’t realize the current extent of mobile device tracking and just how sensitive cell phone location data can be. The conference is set for 10 a.m. on Wednesday, February 17 at the FTC Conference Center. “The ability for marketers and others to recognize where a particular device is located is actually an unintended consequence of technologies like wifi,” said Schoen. “It’s not a designed-in feature…

EFF submitted a letter to the Oakland City Council opposing the Domain Awareness Center, a surveillance system that would aggregate information from multiple sources across the city—including 35 CCTV cameras, 40 live video surveillance cameras, 25 traffic camera sites, license plate readers, and Oakland’s “[gun]shot spotter” system. The project would also include partnerships with other agencies and intelligence centers, such as the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, a fusion center located in San Francisco that has access to the FBI’s eGuardian database, among others. Today’s letter joins earlier statements from ACLU of Northern California and the Oakland Privacy Working Group…

Months of Electronic Espionage Put American Citizen and Family at RiskWashington, D.C. – An American citizen living in Maryland sued the Ethiopian government today for infecting his computer with secret spyware, wiretapping his private Skype calls, and monitoring his entire family’s every use of the computer for a period of months. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is representing the plaintiff in this case, who has asked the court to allow him to use the pseudonym Mr. Kidane – which he uses within the Ethiopian community – in order to protect the safety and wellbeing of his family both in the…

Another day, another stupid copyright claim silences a lawful use online. Copyright abuse is all too common, but some forms deserve special attention and a place in EFF Takedown Hall of Shame. First up: a particularly offensive use of the DMCA to force offline a series of videos debunking AIDS denialists. It seems there’s a community of people trying to convince the world that the medical science behind, and treatment for, HIV/AIDS is all wrong. What is worse, they are trying to convince HIV positive people not to take life-saving medications. One of their principal propaganda tools is the movie…

South Dakota has put forth new legislation to support to a simple principle: if you own something, you ought to be allowed to fix it. The new bill, SB 136, would require manufacturers of electronics and appliances that contain embedded software to make available to consumers and independent repair shops the information and parts they need to repair those devices, and fully disclose any contract provision standing in the way of full repair and reuse. That seems like a pretty uncontroversial goal, but lots of major manufacturers that purport to “sell” you all kinds of products are doing their level…

On February 18, prominent Vietnamese activist and blogger Le Quoc Quan will appear in a Hanoi court to begin the appeal of his politically-motivated October 2013 conviction of evading corporate income tax. The Vietnamese government has pursued a campaign of harassment against Quan for his human rights work since at least 2007, including disbarment, periodic arrests, and an attack by unknown assailants that led to his hospitalization in 2012. The Vietnamese government’s latest efforts to silence the human rights lawyers and high-profile blogger began on December 27, 2012, when Quan was arbitrarily arrested and detained while taking his daughter to…