Photo by Steve Rhodes; CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 “We want information to flow like water,” protesters yelled outside San Francisco City Hall in the pouring rain, rallying in support of keeping the Internet open. The rally was in advance of a public forum inside City Hall on the looming net neutrality debate. The San Francisco Bay Area has been one of the most vocal places in the nation in the fight for net neutrality, and there’s a reason: Internet openness is crucial to the path-breaking artists, technologies, and businesses that thrive in this state. The Bay Area is home to some…
Author: EFFSource
It’s looking like we might be on the brink of another crypto war. The first one, in the 90s, was a misguided attempt to limit the public’s access to strong, secure cryptography. And since then, the reasons we need the good security provided by strong crypto have only multiplied. That’s why EFF has joined 20 civil society organizations and companies in sending a letter to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to “re-emphasize the importance of creating a process for establishing secure and resilient encryption standards, free from back doors or other known vulnerabilities.” As the letter points…
This week EFF attended a meeting of the Human Rights Working Group of the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), a global industry forum that includes many of the world’s largest IT and communications companies, including AT&T, BlackBerry, HP, Microsoft, Telefónica, Verizon, and Vodafone. Responding to both global and regional calls for industry to share more responsibility for the human rights impacts of ICT products and services, GeSI’s human rights project aims to enliven greater vigilance amongst its members as to the human rights impacts of their activities throughout the supply chain. GeSI members themselves are the best evidence of the need…
We are disappointed that the Senate has failed to advance the USA Freedom Act, a good start for bipartisan surveillance reform that should have passed the Senate. The Senate still has the remainder of the current legislative session to pass the USA Freedom Act. We continue to urge the Senate to do so and only support amendments that will make it stronger. We strongly oppose any amendment that would water down the strong privacy, special advocate, and transparency provisions of the bill. We also urge the Senate to remember that the USA Freedom Act is a first step in comprehensive…
Non-Profit to Offer One-Click Process to Implement Secure Web BrowsingSan Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is helping to launch a new non-profit organization that aims to dramatically increase secure Internet browsing. Let’s Encrypt is scheduled to offer free server certificates beginning in summer 2015. “This project should boost everyday data protection for almost everyone who uses the Internet,” said EFF Technology Projects Director Peter Eckersley. “Right now when you use the Web, many of your communications—your user names, passwords, and browsing histories—are vulnerable to hackers and others. By making it easy, fast, and free for websites to install…
EFF Joins Local and National Groups in Call to Protect the InternetSan Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is joining a broad coalition of local and national public interest groups for a rally and forum in support of strong net neutrality rules at San Francisco City Hall on Thursday, November 20, at 5:30 pm. “Bay Area Speaks: A People’s Hearing on the Future of the Internet” comes at a key moment in the debate over net neutrality. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has a proposal that does not provide full protections for the Internet and could vote to enact…
On September 9, 2009, a patent troll called Ultramercial sued a bunch of Internet companies alleging infringement of U.S. Patent 7,346,545. This patent claims a method for allowing Internet users to view copyrighted material free of charge in exchange for watching certain advertisements. Yes, you read that correctly. Ultramercial believed that it owned the idea of showing an ad before content on the Internet. In the years that followed, the litigation became a central battleground over the legitimacy of abstract software patents. The Federal Circuit, in opinions written by former Chief Judge Randall Rader, twice found the patent valid. The…
A court filing unsealed late Wednesday shows that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) made a highly misleading argument to an appeals court in October during a hearing on the constitutionality of National Security Letters (NSLs). On October 8, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act that prohibit service providers from discussing NSLs they may have received violates the First Amendment. During the hearing, the judges’ questioning addressed concerns that the government is using its NSL authority to stifle recipients’ constitutionally protected right to…
We’re pleased to see Sen. Harry Reid move toward a final vote on the Senate version of the USA FREEDOM Act, S. 2685. EFF has consistently urged the Senate to move forward on the bipartisan bill since it was first introduced in July. The USA FREEDOM Act is a good first step towards successful surveillance reform. It will limit the NSA’s program collecting Americans’ calling records, introduce a special advocate into the secretive court overseeing the spying, and introduce much needed transparency requirements. While this bill is not a comprehensive solution to overbroad and unconstitutional surveillance, EFF urges the Senate…
Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer’s web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie. Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. In recent months, researchers have reported ISPs in the US and Thailand intercepting their customers’ data to strip a security flag—called STARTTLS—from email traffic. The STARTTLS flag is an essential security and privacy protection used by an email server to request encryption when talking to another server or client.1 By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the…
Este articulo ha sido co-escrito por Maricarmen Sequera, Luis Pablo Alonso Fulchi y Katitza Rodríguez El proyecto de ley de retención de datos de Paraguay obliga a los proveedores de servicios de Internet (ISPs) a conservar, durante 12 meses, los detalles de quién se comunica con quién, por cuánto tiempo, y desde dónde. También permite a las autoridades tener acceso a estos datos mediante una orden del juez de garantías, exponiendo la información de geolocalización que revela el paradero físico de los paraguayos. Este régimen expande la capacidad del gobierno Paraguayo de vigilar masivamente a sus ciudadanos, en última instancia,…
Over the past year, millions of Internet users have spoken out in defense of the open Internet. Today, we know the White House heard us. In a statement issued this morning, President Barack Obama has called on the Federal Communications Commission to develop new “net neutrality” rules and, equally importantly, establish the legal authority it needs to support those rules by reclassifying broadband service as a “telecommunications service.” This is very welcomed news. Back in May, the Federal Communications Commission proposed flawed “net neutrality” rules that would effectively bless the creation of Internet “slow lanes.” After months of netroots protests,…
EFF recently began a new Campaign for Secure & Usable Crypto, with the aim of encouraging the creation and use of tools and protocols that not only offer genuinely secure messaging, but are also usable in practice by the humans who are most vulnerable to dangerous surveillance, including those who are not necessarily sophisticated computer users. The first phase of this campaign is the Secure Messaging Scorecard, which aims to identify messaging systems that are on the right track from a security perspective. In subsequent phases of the campaign, we plan to delve deeper into the usability and security properties…
When you buy a book, a record, or a movie, you can expect to be able to enjoy it, on your own terms, for as long as you want. But the same cannot always be said about video games. Over the past several years, video game publishers have increasingly required connection with one of their own servers in order to “unlock” core functionality for gameplay. Publishers often take those servers offline once they stop being economical to run, leaving a typical gamer unable to play her lawfully purchased games. And this affects not just video game players, but archivists and…
The FTC has announced a settlement with MPHJ, the infamous scanner troll. MPHJ owns some patents that it claims cover the basic business practice of scanning to email. It sent thousands of letters to small businesses around the country demanding $1,000 per employee. Its letters misrepresented how many other businesses were paying up and often included false threats to sue. To make its deceptive activities harder to track, MPHJ set up 101 shell companies with obscure names. The scheme was run by Jay Mac Rust (the owner and manager of MPHJ) with help from Texas law firm Farney Daniels. By…
We at EFF think remix art is an important part of modern culture, one that helps ordinary people critique mass media and create new art that builds on media they love. This week we teamed up with the Organization for Transformative Works to help make sure remix continues to thrive. The problem lies with a particular provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Here’s an experience we’ve had many times at EFF. A remix artist has made a fun, important video and then receives an unfair DMCA takedown notice. She reaches out to us to ask whether she should challenge…
Longtime ED Shari Steele to Step Down After 22 Years at EFFSan Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legal Director Cindy Cohn will become EFF’s new executive director in April, after Executive Director Shari Steele steps down from the post she’s held for 14 years. With more than 20 years at EFF, Steele has been a driving force of the organization since its earliest days. She has overseen the growth of EFF from a handful of staffers to a 60-person organization at the forefront of every major digital rights issue the world faces today. As executive director, she built a…
The reach of copyright law has expanded so far that it now threatens people’s ability to repair their own cars and protect them against malware. Yesterday, EFF launched a legal campaign to fend off that threat. Some background: Section 1201, the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA, was created, supposedly, to help discourage people from breaking DRM restrictions in order to infringe, but in practice it has chilled a wide array of legitimate activities that require users to break DRM in order to do completely legitimate, non-infringing things that were often never even contemplated by device designers and rightsholders. But once…
EFF’s ‘Secure Messaging Scorecard’ Rates Digital Communication ToolsSan Francisco – In the face of widespread Internet data collection and surveillance, we need a secure and practical means of talking to each other from our phones and computers. Many companies offer “secure messaging” products – but how can users know if these systems actually secure? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released its Secure Messaging Scorecard today, evaluating dozens of messaging technologies on a range of security best practices. “The revelations from Edward Snowden confirm that governments are spying on our digital lives, devouring all communications that aren’t protected by encryption,” said…
Back in May the Federal Communications Commission proposed flawed “net neutrality” rules that would effectively bless the creation of Internet “slow lanes.” After months of netroots protests the FCC is now reportedly considering a new “hybrid” proposal. EFF is deeply concerned, however, that this “compromise” risks too much, for too little. To see why, a little background is helpful. As we explained back in June, if the FCC is going to craft and enforce clear and limited neutrality rules, it must first do one important thing: reverse its 2002 decision to treat broadband as an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications…