Oversight boards and congressional subcommittees can occasionally be effective, but nothing keeps the government in check like investigative reporting. Here are eight stories about surveillance that made our jaws drop this year: Counter-surveillance Burglars Reveals Themselves One of the earliest scoops of the year was 43 years in the making. For her 2014 book, “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI,” former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger convinced several members of an activist group, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, to finally go on record about how, in 1971, they stole records showing the agency’s shocking…
Author: EFFSource
At the end of each year, EFF puts together a list of some of the interesting and noteworthy books that have been published in the past 12 months or so. We don’t endorse all of their arguments, but we find they’ve added some valuable insight to the conversation around the areas and issues on which we work. This year, we’ve included two movies as well—both highly-regarded documentaries that have introduced many people to very important issues. Some notes about this list: it’s presented in alphabetical order by author’s last name, and most links contain our Amazon affiliate code, which means…
The Associated Whistleblowing Press released portions of draft text proposed by the United States for the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) this week, revealing some alarming provisions that indicate how tech companies have been involved in influencing a secret international deal. The language of the leaked treaty shows provisions that could impact privacy online, and net neutrality—with no public consultation or opportunities for open debate. What is dispiriting is some of the language of these Internet regulations almost certainly comes from tech companies, who have joined the many other lobbyists fighting for their special interests behind closed doors. TISA is…
For the last three years, EFF has greeted the holiday season by publishing a list of things we’d like to see happen in the coming year. Sometimes these are actions we’d like to see taken by companies, and sometimes our wishes are aimed at governments, but we also include actions everyday people can take to advance our digital civil liberties. This year has seen great progress in areas such as transparency reports and encrypting digital communications. We want to build on that progress in 2015. Here are some of the things we’re wishing for this holiday: News organizations and individual…
A panel of eleven Ninth Circuit federal judges heard oral arguments yesterday in Garcia v. Google, a copyright case arising from the notorious “Innocence of Muslims” video that was associated with violent protests around the world. The appellant, Cindy Lee Garcia, argues that she holds a copyright in her five-second performance in the video (a performance she says was tricked into giving), and is trying to use that claim to get the video pulled off the internet. To the shock of many, last February two Ninth Circuit judges agreed she might have a claim and ordered Google to remove the…
Microsoft has been battling with the federal government over the Department of Justice’s high profile attempt to get access to emails stored abroad in ireland for the better part of 2014. The US government has claimed a US warrant is sufficient to get emails even when stored in another country, while Microsoft has resisted, arguing the US warrant power does not reach that far. The case has made business rivals into temporary allies and forced Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Data Protection to ask the European Commission to formally support Microsoft. Today we joined the Brennan Center for Justice, the…
A panel of eleven Ninth Circuit federal judges will hear oral arguments Monday in a rehearing of Garcia v. Google, a copyright case arising from the notorious “Innocence of Muslims” video that was associated with violent protests around the world. The appellant, Cindy Lee Garcia, argues that she holds a copyright in her five-second performance in the video, and because she was tricked into participating, that the video uses that performance without permission. EFF and many other public interest groups have filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the case, noting (among other concerns) that it is a matter of firmly established law…
Por Katitza Rodriguez y David Bogado En una audiencia pública en el Congreso Paraguayo el mes pasado, desde la Electronic Frontier Foundation junto con nuestros aliados paraguayos, la ONG TEDIC, dejamos claro nuestro rechazo a la la propuesta legislativa de retener los datos de tráfico de usuarios de Internet por 12 meses en Paraguay. A pesar de ello, hay elementos que ya generan vigilancia masiva a la población. Durante la audiencia, convocada por la Comisión de Derechos Humanos de la Cámara de Diputados del Paraguay, propusimos un sistema de preservación de datos, también conocido como «congelación rápida», el cual es…
Groups Demand That Negotiators Release Text of Secret Trade DealWashington, D.C. – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has joined dozens of civil society groups from around the world in calling for the release of the secret text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a massive proposed trade agreement that could quash digital rights for Internet users everywhere in the name of intellectual property protection. A representative from OpenMedia International is presenting a letter from the coalition to several TPP delegates on Thursday and Friday at the TPP negotiations in Washington, D.C. The letter demands open debate and oversight of the trade deal,…
Today, Google has announced that it will be permanently shutting down the Spanish version of Google News, effective from December 15, 2014. The shutdown comes in direct response to amendments to the Spanish intellectual property law (Ley De Propiedad Intelectual) imposing a compulsory fee for the use of snippets of text to link to news articles, by online news aggregators that provide a search service. A similar fee was first introduced in German law in 2013, where it was described as an “ancillary copyright” (or Leistungsschutzrecht). But the fee actually has no heritage in copyright law, which preserves the right…