We’ve asked the companies in our Who Has Your Back Program what they are doing to bolster encryption in light of the NSA’s unlawful surveillance of your communications. We’re pleased to see that four five six seven companies—Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Sonic.net, SpiderOak, and Twitter—are implementing five out of five of our best practices for encryption. See the infographic.By adopting these practices, described below, these service providers have taken a critical step towards protecting their users from warrantless seizure of their information off of fiber-optic cables. By enabling encryption across their networks, service providers can make backdoor surveillance more challenging,…
Author: EFFSource
EFF Represents Computer Scientists in Explaining Why “It Is Not Just Metadata”San Francisco – Representing a large group of top computer science experts and professors, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today submitted a brief to a federal appeals court supporting the American Civil Liberties Union’s lawsuit over the NSA’s mass call records collection program. At the core of the brief is the argument that metadata matters. Intelligence officials have often downplayed privacy concerns over the NSA’s interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act by stating that the agency does not collect the “content” of calls, but only the metadata—who…
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released its annual “Enemies of the Internet” index this week—a ranking first launched in 2006 intended to track countries that repress online speech, intimidate and arrest bloggers, and conduct surveillance of their citizens. Some countries have been mainstays on the annual index, while others have been able to work their way off the list. Two countries particularly deserving of praise in this area are Tunisia and Myanmar (Burma), both of which have stopped censoring the Internet in recent years and are headed in the right direction toward Internet freedom. In the former category are some of…
Senator Dianne Feinstein—who traditionally is a stalwart defender of the intelligence community—came out swinging against them this week. While on the floor of the Senate, she laid bare a two year long struggle concerning CIA spying on Senate Intelligence Committee staffers investigating CIA’s early 2000s torture and enhanced interrogation techniques. The spying by CIA crosses a line when it comes to Congressional oversight of the intelligence community. And it’s an emblem of the extreme imbalance between the power of Congress and the power of the intelligence community. If the intelligence community thinks they can act in such a way towards…
Getty Images—among the world’s largest providers of stock and editorial photos—has announced a major change to the way it is offering its pictures for sites to use. Beginning this week, in addition to the traditional licensing options, people can embed images in their sites at no cost and with no watermarks, so long as they use the provided embed code and iframe. There’s at least one reason this move is exciting and positive: it’s encouraging to see companies experimenting with different business models and using the proverbial carrot instead of the stick. In other words, Getty is making it easier…
Last week, the federal government finally dismissed 11 controversial counts from its overzealous prosecution of journalist Barrett Brown. These counts charged Brown with identity theft for sharing a link to records documenting improper and potentially illegal activities by the U.S. intelligence contractor, Stratfor Global Intelligence. The fact that Brown has been in jail for 18 months, based in large part on these charges, has threatened and continues to threaten press freedom in the United States. Before the government dropped its charges, we were less than five days away from filing an amicus brief in the case on behalf of EFF…
This past Monday, the Human Rights Committee commenced its one hundredth and tenth session in Geneva from March 10-28. During this session, the Committee will review the reports of several countries on how they are implementing the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), an international human rights treaty and one of the bedrocks of human rights protections. Countries that have ratified the ICCPR are required to protect and preserve basic human rights through various means including administrative, judicial, and legislative measures. Additionally, these countries are required to submit a report to the Human Rights Committee,…
One of the two cases against satellite TV company DISH Network settled last week, with Disney ending its quest to have DISH’s automatic commercial-skipping feature, AutoHop, made illegal. In addition to calling off its lawyers, Disney agreed to stream some shows from its popular networks like ABC, Disney Channel, and ESPN over the Internet to DISH subscribers. In exchange, DISH agreed to disable the commercial-skipping functionality for three days after a show is aired – corresponding to the period that the Neilsen Company includes in its audience measurements. We’re pleased that Disney dropped its silly legal challenge against DISH’s digital…
As Facebook turned ten years old last month, a legal case it brought against Power Ventures almost six years ago demonstrates the continued hurdles facing developers who seek to empower users to interact with closed services like Facebook in new and creative ways. In a new amicus brief, we caution the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals not to extend crippling civil and criminal liability on services that provide competing or follow-on innovation. Power Ventures made a web-based tool that allowed users to log into all of their social networking accounts in one place and aggregate messages, friend lists, and other data…
The campaign for open access to publicly funded research was going in the right direction: the White House issued a strong mandate last year, federal agencies have taken up the mantle to create public access policies, and the solid open access bill FASTR was introduced in both the House and the Senate. And then yesterday happened. House Science Committee Chair Lamar Smith and Rep. Larry Buchson introduced the First Act (PDF), a scientific research bill that contains language that sends the progress made on the open access front in the exact opposite direction. We’ve written about this bill’s bad draft…