CITIZENFOUR, Laura Poitras’ riveting documentary about Edward Snowden’s efforts to shed light on gross surveillance abuses by the United States government and its partners, just won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Tonight’s Oscar win recognizes not only the incredible cinematography of Poitras, but also her daring work with a high-stakes whistleblower and the journalism that kick-started a worldwide debate about surveillance and government transparency. We suspect this award was also, as the New York Times pointed out, “a way for Academy members to make something of a political statement, without having to put their own reputations on…
Author: EFFSource
We recently learned that PC manufacturer Lenovo is selling computers preinstalled with a dangerous piece of software, called Superfish, that uses a man-in-the-middle attack to break Windows’ encrypted Web connections for the sake of advertising. (Here’s a list of affected products.) Research from EFF’s Decentralized SSL Observatory has seen many thousands of Superfish certificates that have all been signed with the same root certificate, showing that HTTPS security for at least Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari for Windows, on all of these Lenovo laptops, is now broken. Firefox users also have the problem, because Superfish also inserts its certificate into the…
Patent trolls are still at it. A new report from Unified Patents, found that 449 patent cases were filed in district court in January 2015—a 36% increase over January 2014. The growth was fueled largely by patent trolls, who filed more than half of the month’s cases. This marks the second month in a row where we have seen an increase in patent litigation from the same period a year ago. Of course, data from two months does not necessarily establish a long-term trend. But the data is important because it rebuts one of the main talking points from opponents…
Fighting against the sanctions regime for the right to information and innovation can sometimes feel like a cat and mouse game, but today, citizens of sudan are like the cats that got the cream. After years of campaigning from Sudanese and international activists alike, a success: The Office of Foreign Assets Controls (OFAC) at the US Department of Treasury has issued a general license for the export of hardware and software “incident to personal communications” to sudan. The fight for a general license for Sudan has been an ongoing one. When, a little over one year ago, a general license…
EFF’s Clients’ Identities Must Remain Secret, But Still Speak Out About Unconstitutional Gag OrdersSan Francisco – Two companies who must remain anonymous about their fight against secret government demands for information known as national security letters (NSLs) are backing Twitter’s lawsuit over its rights to publish information about NSLs it may have received. The companies—a telecom and an Internet company—are represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Twitter filed its suit in October, saying users deserved to know certain basic facts about NSLs that the government did or did not serve on the social media company. NSLs—issued by the federal…
EFF has joined seventy human rights and free speech organizations in calling on the Syrian government to release Mazen Darwish, Hani Al-Zitani and Hussein Ghrer, three free speech activists who were arrested on February 16, 2012 in a raid on the offices of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM). Darwish is a journalist and the director of the SCM while Al-Zitani and Ghrer are both staff members. Ghrer is also a long-time blogger. The three men are also the subject of a campaign from Free Syria’s Silenced Voices. The letter is published below in its entirety.…
What do drag queens, burlesque performers, human rights activists in Vietnam and Syria, and Native Americans have in common? They have all been the targets of “real names” enforcement on Facebook. And despite reports from the media last year that seemed to indicate that Facebook has “fixed” the issue, they’re still being targeted. The account suspension of Lakota woman Dana Lone Hill got some media attention earlier this week. Lone Hill has had a very similar experience to other users who’ve been booted of the site for name policy violations—with one important difference. Last year, when drag queens were affected…
The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways. It will force other TPP signatories to accept the United States’ excessive copyright terms of a minimum of life of the author plus 70 years, while locking the US to the same lengths so it will be harder to shorten them in the future. It contains extreme DRM anti-circumvention provisions that will make it a crime to tinker with, hack, re-sell, preserve, and otherwise control any number of digital files and devices that you own. The TPP will encourage ISPs to monitor and police…
In the South Carolina prison system, accessing Facebook is an offense on par with murder, rape, rioting, escape and hostage-taking. Back in 2012, the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) made “Creating and/or Assisting With A Social Networking Site” a Level 1 offense [PDF], a category reserved for the most violent violations of prison conduct policies. It’s one of the most common Level 1 offense charges brought against inmates, many of whom, like most social network users, want to remain in contact with friends and family in the outside world and keep up on current events. Some inmates ask their…
En junio del 2015, el watchdog de la libertad de expresión de las Naciones Unidas, David Kaye, presentará un nuevo informe sobre el anonimato y el cifrado ante los 47 Estados miembros del Consejo de Derechos Humanos con sede en Ginebra. Ayer, EFF presentó un informe instando al Sr. Kaye a reafirmar la libertad de usar la tecnología de cifrado y proteger el derecho a expresarse, acceder y leer la información de forma anónima. El informe del Sr. Kaye podría ser una de las oportunidades más importantes para fortalecer nuestras libertades fundamentales en la era digital a nivel internacional. El…