The Federal District Court in Maryland this week dismissed Du Daobin v. Cisco Systems, a case brought by Chinese dissidents alleging that Cisco knowingly customized, marketed, sold, and provided continued support and service for technologies as part of China’s Golden Shield, a digital censorship and surveillance system used by the Chinese government to facilitate human rights abuses. EFF filed an amicus brief urging the court to let the case go forward and we also launched an activism campaign calling on Cisco to stand up for writer Du Daobin and human rights in China. We’re deeply disappointed by the court’s decision to…
Author: EFFSource
It’s an old legal adage that bad facts lead to bad legal decisions, and today we’ve got a classic example in Garcia v. Google—the “Innocence of Muslims” case. Based on a copyright claim that is dubious at best, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered Google to take offline a video that is the center of public controversy. We can still talk about it, but we can’t see what we are talking about. We’re hard-pressed to think of a better example of copyright maximalism trumping free speech. For those who haven’t been following this, the case was brought by…
In a win for online fair use and the free speech it makes possible, a federal district court judge has ruled that using a campaign headshot as part of a critical, noncommercial blog post does not infringe copyright. The case started back in April, when California Republican Party Vice Chairman Harmeet K. Dhillon sued an anonymous blogger over the use of a five year old headshot on “The Munger Games” website—a site dedicated to criticism of Charles Munger Jr., donor and current chairman of the Santa Clara County Republican Party, and his perceived political allies. The headshot was part of…
Open Letter to Tech Companies Includes 10 Principles to Protect Users From NSA Sabotage In the past nine months, our trust in technology companies has been badly shaken. Today, in collaboration with prominent security researchers and technologists, EFF presents an open letter to technology companies, urging them to protect users from NSA backdoors and earn back the trust that has been lost. From the Snowden revelations emerge stories of collusion between government spy agencies and the companies whose services are integral to our everyday lives. There have been disturbing allegations published by Reuters indicating that RSA, an influential information security…
Nearly three months since his arrest, the Egyptian blogger, software developer and activist Alaa Abd El Fattah remains imprisoned. Charged in December with organizing a demonstration to protest the failure of the draft constitution in legislating against military court martialing of civilians, Abd El Fattah is awaiting trial in prison. In mid-January, a group of bloggers from across the Arab region came together in Amman for the fourth iteration of the Arabloggers conference, a community which Abd El Fattah had been a part of since its beginnings in 2008. It was at this gathering that we released a statement—along with…
In the latest blow to patent trolls, 42 state and territorial attorneys general—that’s right, 42!—wrote a letter today calling on the Senate to pass meaningful patent reform. As the AGs write: So-called patent trolls stifle innovation and harm our economy by making dubious claims of patent infringement and using the threat of expensive litigation to extort money from small businesses and nonprofits. We have received many complaints from these businesses and nonprofits, our constituents, who are desperate for relief from the misuse of the patent system. While these threats were once focused on tech businesses, they are now levied at…
The U.S. Trade Rep announced last week that it will create a new “Public Interest Trade Advisory Committee,” in an attempt to allow public interest groups to provide more input into U.S. proposals in trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). That aim is important, and underserved by many USTR policies, but this proposal is an inadequate remedy to fix the gross imbalance of influence from corporate interests. The main problem with these Trade Advisory Committees (TACs) is that all of their members are forced to sign non-disclosure agreements. This means that any civil society representative who joins this new…
FBI agents arrested a Mexican tycoon named Jose Susumo Azano Matsura at his Coronado, Calif. home on Wednesday as part of a political bribery investigation based on captured emails, seized banking records, and covertly recorded conversations. The unfolding scandal is soaked in irony: Azano is a surveillance evangelist whose company won a secret, no-bid contract with the Mexican military for computer and mobile phone hacking and spying technology in 2011. He is chairman of a company called Security Tracking Devices SA de CV, and he is now chained to a tracking device—on house arrest. When documents leaked to the Mexican…
In July 2012, the United Nations Human Rights Council issued the first-ever UN resolution affirming that human rights in the digital realm must be protected and promoted to the same extent and with the same commitment as human rights in the off-line world. In September 2013, at the 24th U.N. Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva, States such as Austria, Germany, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland organized an event to specifically focus on the protection of the right to privacy in the digital age. At the end of 2013, the United Nations General Assembly approved a key resolution on the…
The NSA appears to have been involved in the surveillance of privileged attorney-client communications, and the legal community is not happy about it. The New York Times reports that communications between an American law firm and its foreign client may have been among the information one of the NSA’s “five eyes” intelligence partners, the Australian Signals Dictorate, shared with the NSA. The American Bar Association has responded to these allegations by urging the NSA to clarify its procedures for minimizing exposure of privileged information- and rightly so. Surveillance of attorney-client communications is anathema to to the fundamental system of justice…