The vision of a world of shared open wireless is a compelling one—it means that wherever you go in an urban or other covered area, the connected devices that you own now (and new devices that are today only on the drawing board) will enjoy immediate, seamless, private, and free access to the global Internet. But such a world might exclude Europe, depending on the outcome of a pending case there that calls the viability of open wireless networks into question. EFF and its partners have formulated an open letter—which you can read here or below—presenting our views on why a result that threatens open wireless would be a serious loss to innovators, small businesses, travelers, emergency services and users at large.

The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act today by 67-32, marking the first time in over thirty years that both houses of Congress have approved a bill placing real restrictions and oversight on the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers. The weakening amendments to the legislation proposed by NSA defender Senate Majority Mitch McConnell were defeated, and we have every reason to believe that President Obama will sign USA Freedom into law.

Two years ago, Fox News sued a company called TVEyes, which creates a text-searchable database of broadcast content from thousands of television and radio stations in the United States and worldwide. EFF and the Technology Law & Policy Clinic at New York University School of Law last week filed a friend-of-the-court brief explaining that this kind of technology is needed to enable robust and effective media criticism and is protected by the fair use doctrine of copyright law, just like other search engines.

We’re excited to announce that Canarywatch has added its 50th canary: First Look Media, the parent company for The Intercept—the news site created by journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill.

"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.

Supreme Court Reverses Conviction in Elonis v. United States, Avoids Answering First Amendment Question

With the passage of the USA Freedom Act, we’ve gained important reforms of the intelligence community, but there’s still a lot to do, including reining in the NSA’s warrantless mass surveillance of Americans’ Internet communications under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). That’s why EFF yesterday filed an amicus brief along with the ACLU and the ACLU of Oregon in United States v. Mohamud, a criminal case currently on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit involving Section 702 surveillance.

Over the past several years we’ve covered a growing trend among governments in the use of Internet blocking, filtering, and full shutdowns to control free expression within their borders. Many of these “Internet blackouts” have drawn global attention when deployed during times of geopolitical unrest: For example, China frequently shuts down access to Internet services in the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang in response to protests, attracting international disapproval.

Since the Senate passed Fast Track, a bill that would rush secret anti-user trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) to approval by bypassing full debate, the fight now goes to the House of Representatives. The legislation (H.R. 1314) could go to the House floor for debate and a final vote as early as next week.

Two years ago today, Glenn Greenwald published in the Guardian a single document confirming a key piece of the NSA's surveillance program, a document that fundamentally transformed EFF's long-running battle for an end to unchecked government surveillance. To recap briefly, the document was a secret court order issued under Section 215 of the Patriot Act directing Verizon to provide "on an ongoing daily basis" all call records for any call "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls" and any call made "between the United States and abroad." As the days passed, we learned that this document was only one of many crucial disclosures made by Edward Snowden, an NSA whistleblower who has made incredible personal sacrifices in order to disclose information that the American people, and the world, have long deserved to know.

Last Thursday, David Kaye, the U.N's newest free speech watchdog, released a groundbreaking report calling upon states to promote strong encryption and anonymity. Kaye assumed the role of Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression in August 2014, and this, his first report, will be presented at the 29th regular session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva mid-June.

His analysis comes at a key moment.  The ability to communicate anonymously and to use encryption is more important than ever and the Rapporteur rightly notes that privacy is a gateway for freedom of opinion and expression, saying:

Police in two Australian states are considering a radical move to combat terrorism online: identifying “potential jihadists” and subjecting them to stringent measures that include restricting their movements, establishing curfews, and banning them from using the Internet entirely.

In a dangerous ruling yesterday, a Canadian appeals court upheld an order requiring Google to edit the Internet and effectively “disappear” websites selling a product that allegedly infringed trade secret rights. Google had challenged the order as an improper overreach: a Canadian court shouldn't be using its authority to make rules about what users in other countries can and cannot access. EFF filed a supporting brief, explaining that the order would have likely violated the U.S. Constitution—one of many reasons a foreign court shouldn’t presume to issue orders that will affect citizens far beyond its jurisdiction.

Confusion over the Department of Commerce’s proposed implementation of the latest changes to the Wassenaar Arrangement’s export controls continues. For those of you who are new to the debate over Wassenaar and would like to know just what it is and why you might care about it, click here for our earlier analysis.

The good news is that in an FAQ it released earlier this week, the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has directly addressed some of the concerns we brought up in our previous blog post. For example, in response to our concern that the proposed rules don’t incorporate the exemptions for "technology" "in the public domain" for "basic scientific research" and for the minimum necessary information for patent applications laid out in the Wassenaar Arrangement’s “General Technology Note” (GTN), FAQ 9 states:

Hungarian artist Paul Mutant's This Painting is Not Available In Your Country is one of the artworks that adorns the wall of EFF's office in San Francisco. To many Americans, the significance of the piece is somewhat obscure. But almost every European Internet user recognizes it instantly—they encounter a similar message every time they attempt to watch one of the many YouTube videos that rightsholders haven't licensed for streaming in their country. Similar geographical restrictions impede Europeans' access to pay services, such as Netflix, when they travel abroad (assuming they are lucky enough to be able to subscribe to begin with—in over two-thirds of the world, Netflix is unavailable at any price, without the use of a location-fudging VPN).

Twitter is starting to take harassment seriously. And while we haven’t always seen eye to eye with the company on some of their strategies, we think their newest effort deserves praise. We've pointed out that companies like Twitter aren’t very good when it comes to policing content—but users should have control over what they see. Last Wednesday, Twitter announced that it is adding the ability to share their block lists:

EFF, along with eight other consumer-focused privacy advocacy organizations, has backed out of the National Telecommunications Information Administration’s multi-stakeholder process to develop a privacy-protective code of conduct for companies using face recognition. After 16 months of active engagement in the process, we decided this week it was no longer an effective use of our resources to continue in a process where companies wouldn’t even agree to the most modest measures to protect privacy.

EFF was joined by ACLU; Center for Democracy & Technology; Center for Digital Democracy; Consumer Action; Consumer Federation of America; Consumer Watchdog; Common Sense Media; and Alvaro M. Bedoya, the executive director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University Law Center.

Today, in Williamson v. Citrix, the Federal Circuit overruled its ill-advised case law that has been one of the primary drivers of overbroad software patents. The court finally recognized that patent applicants cannot bypass certain limits on patent rights solely by avoiding magic words. EFF filed an amicus brief urging the court to do just that.

Imagine the Wright brothers, after they invented their airplane, filed for a patent claiming “a machine for flying.” Essentially claiming a machine for what it does rather than how it does it. This is known as “functional claiming.”

The first free and automated certificate authority, Let's Encrypt, will launch to the public in September of this year. This is a huge milestone for web security and privacy. Encryption in transit (HTTPS) is vital to protect people and websites from spying and tampering. Someday soon, we hope every site on the web will use HTTPS by default.

The future for online discussion platforms in Europe is looking cloudy following yesterday's ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Delfi AS v. Estonia. In a disappointing decision, the court affirmed that Estonian courts were entitled to hold an online news portal liable in defamation for comments submitted anonymously by readers. The court was unmoved by the fact that the publisher, Delfi, had set up a system for users to flag and automatically remove comments that they found offensive, or by the fact that the comments at issue had been removed prior to the initial lawsuit being filed.

This week has seen great progress in the effort to encrypt the web.

If you're finding it hard to follow the machinations over the Fast Track bill, you're not alone—even Washington insiders are finding it hard to predict the administration's next move, as it changes from day to day. As of this morning, the House of Representatives has passed the Fast Track or Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) bill—but not the associated Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) bill that is a precondition of accepting Fast Track for pro-trade Democrats. This means that it's now up to the Senate to pass both bills if they can, and then to send TAA back to the House, on the strength of the assurance of Republican leaders that they will pass it there too—and that President Obama will wait to see both bills on his desk before he signs either.

Today the High Court of the United Kingdom handed down an excellent decision—excellent because the result is so unreasonable, so out of touch with reality, and so divorced from the needs and expectations of ordinary users, that it provides a textbook illustration of the need for urgent reform of the outdated and unbalanced European Copyright Directive.

In a nutshell, the court struck down the UK government's decision to allow users to lawfully make copies of content that they have purchased for personal use, given the absence of a compulsory levy to compensate copyright owners for the “harm” that they suffer from such copying. The government's choices are now to remove the private copying exception—making personal copying illegal again, or to supply additional evidence that copyright owners suffer no or minimal “harm” from personal copying, or else to begin imposing a new tax on users to compensate the industry for that “harm”.

The Fourth Amendment is one of the most powerful protections against intrusions into individuals' private lives, and the Supreme Court’s decision this week in City of Los Angeles v. Patel is a reassuring sign that citizens’ ability to rebuff overzealous searches using the Fourth Amendment remains alive and well.