Following his pledge to “wipe out” Twitter last week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered ISPs to block the site, which they did by tweaking DNS settings and redirecting traffic from the page to a government blockpage. The move was futile; Turkish Internet users have been dealing with censorship for many years and were immediately able to circumvent the ban. Within hours, Turkey’s prolific Twitter users had created hashtags like #TurkeyblockedTwitter, which subsequently landed on the trending topics list. Despite the block, more than an estimated half million tweets were posted within ten hours. By Saturday, authorities had…
Author: EFFSource
There was a moralistic, unnecessary, and wholly unscientific new restriction enacted on funding for the National Institute of Health as part of the appropriations bill passed in January. The new legislative mandate forces researchers who rely on government funding to place anti-pornography filters on their computer networks. There are serious potential consequences, such as filters overblocking sites that are anatomical rather than pornographic in nature as well as lost funding for scientific research that may legitimately need to access pornographic sites. The end result? Members of Congress, rather than the scientific community, imposing restrictions on what researchers should be investigating.…
Today we learned that the Obama administration and the House Intelligence Committee are both proposing welcome and seemingly significant changes to the mass telephone records collection program. Both the Obama administration and the Intelligence Committee suggest that mass collection end with no new data retention requirements for telephone companies. This is good news, but we have not seen the details of either and details, as we have learned, are very important in assessing suggested changes to the NSA’s mass spying. But comparing what we know, it appears that the Obama administration’s proposal requires significantly more judicial review—not just reviewing procedures…
Most of the problems with the patent system stem from the flood of low quality patents granted by the Patent Office. Once a bad patent issues, it is expensive and challenging to fight. The much better solution is for overbroad patents not to issue in the first place. And one way to help that happen is to submit prior art (the pre-existing publications and technology that could invalidate a patent by showing that the invention wasn’t new) while a patent application is still pending. Last year, EFF partnered with the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School to challenge six 3D…
If you’re looking for proof that new cultural works speak to and are embedded within a vast array of pre-existing works and ideas, you can’t do much better than “The Office Time Machine,” a new art project by video remix artist Joe Sabia. Over the course of the last 18 months, Sabia has isolated every pop culture and real world reference from the US television show “The Office,” and arranged them by the date of the events, people, and media they reference. It’s much more fun to look at than to read about, so feel free to check it out…
After months of hearing about their own vulnerability at the hands of intelligence agencies like the NSA and GCHQ, next Wednesday, European Parliamentarians and their staff will have an opportunity to learn about defending Internet communications using strong encryption and trusted hardware and software. Unfortunately, unless the Parliament’s own IT department shifts ground, it will be a theoretical discussion, rather than the practical first steps to a secure European Parliament that its organizers had hoped. DebianParl is a version of the popular free software Linux distribution Debian, intended for use in parliaments around the world. It is intended to be…
When it comes to trade policy, we’ve learned over and over that leaks are no substitute for transparency. Leaks can reveal inconvenient facts about what negotiators are advancing in the public’s name; they can help inform and mobilize activists to push back against egregious provisions that haven’t yet been finalized; they can expose lies and half-truths in public statements by officials; but they can’t provide the kind of real accountability that true transparency-by-design can. In the case of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the more recent Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP, or TAFTA), the governments of other countries appear…
EFF has long argued that law enforcement agencies must get a warrant when they ask Internet companies for the content of their users’ communications. In 2013, as part of our annual Who Has Your Back report, we started awarding stars to companies that require warrants for content. It is now unclear whether Microsoft, one of our inaugural “gold star” companies in that category, is willing to live by its own maxim. This controversy was brought to light by the arrest of an ex-Microsoft employee named Alex Kibkalo. According to a criminal complaint sworn in a Seattle federal court, Kibkalo stole…
If you do any kind of shopping online, then you’re probably already familiar with the concept of a metasearch engine—a search engine that searches other search engines. When you’re looking for airline tickets or a used copy of The King in Yellow, you might use a metasearch engine to find out which online retailer is offering the best price. There is also a metasearch for public records: Scout. Created and lovingly maintained by the Sunlight Foundation, Scout will take a search query and run it through six different continually updated databases of documents. The site also allows you to create…
It’s another troubling example in a frustrating trend: despite repeated and pointed calls for answers, the NSA is still relying on word games and equivocation to avoid answering recent questions surrounding potential surveillance of privileged attorney-client communications. The New York Times reported in late February that an American law firm’s privileged attorney-client communications were monitored by the Australian Signals Directorate and potentially shared with the NSA. A few weeks ago, we wrote about the legal community’s response to this issue, highlighting a February 20 letter from the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), James Silkenat, to outgoing NSA director…