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…
Author: EFFSource
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…