"Warrant canary" is a colloquial term for a regularly published statement that an internet service provider (ISP) has not received legal process that it would be prohibited from saying it had received, such as a national security letter. The term "warrant canary" is a reference to the canaries used to provide warnings in coalmines, which would become sick from carbon monoxide poisoning before the miners would—warning of the otherwise-invisible danger. Just like canaries in a coalmine, the canaries on web pages “die” when they are exposed to something toxic—like a secret FISA court order.

Between all the Super Bowl football action yesterday, one commercial seemed to have caught a lot of people's attention: to promote its smallest SUV, Jeep showed images of it all over the country, then the world, to the tune of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land."

One reason people are discussing it is because appearing in a commercial would seem to run against the late Guthrie's values. Would Guthrie have ever allowed the song to be licensed to Jeep, and for a Super Bowl commercial?

Once again, bad facts are making bad law – but it’s not too late to change that. EFF, together with the Organization for Transformative Works, has filed an amicus brief in Davis v. Electronic Arts. This case is the latest in a series of rulings where courts have opened the door to censorship by persons depicted in creative works. We are asking the Ninth Circuit to reverse a dangerous decision that allows the so-called right of publicity to trump free speech.

Security shouldn’t be a synonym for giving up civil liberties. But bills like HR 399 show that lawmakers think it is. The Secure Our Borders First Act is an ugly piece of legislation that’s clearly intended to strongarm the Department of Homeland Security into dealing with the border in a very particular way—with drones and other surveillance technology.

Well done, Team Internet.  After a year of intense activism, we may have finally convinced the Federal Communications Commission to change course and craft clear, bright-line rules to protect the open internet, based on legal authority that will actually survive the inevitable legal challenge.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) exists to ensure that national security does not trump privacy and civil liberties, and it has been especially busy since the publication of the first Snowden leak. Congress and the President asked the Board to review the use of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, as well as the operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In 2014, PCLOB published two reports addressing these issues. And last week, the Board published a “Recommendations Assessment Report [pdf].”

Section 215 Recommendations

Following EFF’s victory in a four-year Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the government released an opinion (pdf), written by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2010, that concluded that Section 215—the provision of the Patriot Act the NSA relies on to collect millions of Americans’ phone records—does have a limit: census data.

France’s misguided efforts to grapple with hate speech—which is already prohibited by French law—have been making headlines for years. In 2012, after an horrific attack on a Jewish school, then-president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed criminal penalties for anyone visiting websites that contain hate speech. An anti-terror law passed in December imposes greater penalties on those that “glorify terrorism” online (as opposed to offline), and allows websites engaging in the promotion of terrorism to be blocked with little oversight.

With more than 38-million people and some of the largest technology companies in the world calling California home, the Golden State should be a leader in safeguarding electronic privacy. For years the state’s constitution has provided greater privacy protection than the Fourth Amendment. But when it comes to electronic privacy, the state has lagged behind, even as other states, such as Texas and Maine, have passed legislation to protect everything from the contents of email to the detailed location information generated by our phones.

Not anymore.

When you buy a video game, you expect to be able to play it for as long as you want. You expect be able to play it with your kids many years from now if you want (well, maybe not Grand Theft Auto). And you would hope that museums and media historians could preserve the games that were so important to your childhood. But unfortunately, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions (17 U.S.C. § 1201, or Section 1201) creates legal risks for players who want to keep playing after game servers shut down, and curators who want to preserve games for posterity. That’s why I’m spearheading an effort to win legal protection for game enthusiasts and preservationists who want to keep abandoned games alive by running multiplayer servers or eliminating authentication mechanisms.

President Obama recently announced slight changes to NSA data collection practices. The recent tweaks mean two new privacy protections for those that U.S. law considers foreigners (in this case, people who are outside of the United States borders who are neither U.S. citizens nor legal U.S. residents). 

Perhaps you’re thinking Obama is using his executive authority to stop the mass surveillance of all Internet traffic of people worldwide? Nope, not quite. The new protections are:

What do Japan's Blue Sky Library, Malaysia's answer to John Wayne, and the first recorded composer from New Zealand, all have in common? They could all disappear from their countries' public domain for the next 20 years, if the current agreement on copyright term extension in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) holds.

Yesterday marked a frustrating juncture in EFF’s long-running lawsuit against mass surveillance, Jewel v. NSA, filed on behalf of AT&T customers whose communications and telephone records are being vacuumed by the National Security Agency. 

A federal court in San Francisco sided with the U.S. Department of Justice, ruling that the plaintiffs could not win a significant portion of the case—a Fourth Amendment challenge to the NSA’s tapping of the Internet backbone—without disclosure of classified information that would harm national security. In other words, Judge Jeffrey White found that “state secrets” can trump the judicial process and held that EFF’s clients could not prove they have standing.

En junio del 2015, el watchdog de la libertad de expresión de las Naciones Unidas, David Kaye, presentará un nuevo informe sobre el anonimato y el cifrado ante los 47 Estados miembros del Consejo de Derechos Humanos con sede en Ginebra. Ayer, EFF presentó un informe instando al Sr. Kaye a reafirmar la libertad de usar la tecnología de cifrado y proteger el derecho a expresarse, acceder y leer la información de forma anónima. El informe del Sr. Kaye podría ser una de las oportunidades más importantes para fortalecer nuestras libertades fundamentales en la era digital a nivel internacional.

This week the Obama administration is releasing its second Executive Order in as many years on computer ("cyber") security, which reports are saying will create a new department in the intelligence community to handle computer security threat information sharing. Officials are hailing the center as "new" and unprecedented.

Twitter has released a new transparency report. The company—which scored five stars in our latest “Who Has Your Back?” report—blogged about the release, wrote that “[p]roviding this insight is simply the right thing to do, especially in an age of increasing concerns about government surveillance.”  More than thirty Internet companies now publish transparency reports.

Last week, we received some welcome news: the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) publicly confirmed that it is finally going to put its open internet rules on the right legal footing by reclassifying broadband providers as common carriers.  That said, the goal was never just reclassification; that’s just an essential step for open internet rules to survive the inevitable court challenge.  The real goal, though, has always been for the FCC to adopt targeted rules of the road for broadband. Will it?

That’s still hard to know, because the FCC has been pretty quiet, at least publicly, on the details of the final rules that will be put to a vote on February 26.  Here are some thoughts on what we know so far – and what we’d like to know. 

What do drag queens, burlesque performers, human rights activists in Vietnam and Syria, and Native Americans have in common? They have all been the targets of "real names" enforcement on Facebook. And despite reports from the media last year that seemed to indicate that Facebook has "fixed" the issue, they’re still being targeted.

The account suspension of Lakota woman Dana Lone Hill got some media attention earlier this week. Lone Hill has had a very similar experience to other users who’ve been booted of the site for name policy violations—with one important difference.

Fighting against the sanctions regime for the right to information and innovation can sometimes feel like a cat and mouse game, but today, citizens of Sudan are like the cats that got the cream. After years of campaigning from Sudanese and international activists alike, a success: The Office of Foreign Assets Controls (OFAC) at the US Department of Treasury has issued a general license for the export of hardware and software “incident to personal communications” to Sudan.

News broke last night that Lenovo has been shipping laptops with a horrifically dangerous piece of software called Superfish, which tampers with Windows' cryptographic security to perform man-in-the-middle attacks against the user's browsing. This is done in order to inject advertising into secure HTTPS pages, a feature most users don't want implemented in the most insecure possible way.

Anyone interested in privacy and security should think twice about their cell phone dependence right now. That’s because today, The Intercept revealed that British spy agency GCHQ led successful efforts to hack into the internal networks of Gemalto, “the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications” made on the world’s largest telecommunications carriers, including “AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world.”

In other words, for millions or even billions of users around the world, global cellular communications are about as secure from GCHQ and NSA as an FM radio broadcast. 

Here’s how it works. As The Intercept explains:

Want to know if GCHQ spied on you? Now you can find out. Privacy International (PI) has just launched a website that lets anyone find out if their communications were intercepted by the NSA and then shared with GCHQ.

The website is the result of a February 6 ruling by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). Similar to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the US, the IPT is a special court in the UK established by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) that deals with issues of surveillance and human rights.

CITIZENFOUR, Laura Poitras' riveting documentary about Edward Snowden's efforts to shed light on gross surveillance abuses by the United States government and its partners, just won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Tonight's Oscar win recognizes not only the incredible cinematography of Poitras, but also her daring work with a high-stakes whistleblower and the journalism that kick-started a worldwide debate about surveillance and government transparency. We suspect this award was also, as the New York Times pointed out, "a way for Academy members to make something of a political statement, without having to put their own reputations on the line."   

We didn't know how much copyright maximalists longed for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement—until we saw this creepy "open love letter" to the TPP from one of the biggest, most powerful copyright lobby groups, the Global Intellectual Property Center. We couldn't have made this up if we tried. Here's one part of it:

You know, dear TPP, that I will drop to one knee and say “I do” for gold—no, diamond—standards for intellectual property. My creative and innovative talents need your protection. Without trade agreements like you, it would be a long, hard journey to jumpstart our economies.