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…
Author: EFFSource
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…