Deeplinks
YouTube is celebrating its 10-year anniversary. We’re glad YouTube has managed to survive the copyright wars, when so many other services did not. We hope we even helped. So, congratulations YouTube, well done. Wouldn't fixing ContentID be a great way to celebrate it?
The New Orleans Advocate recently published a shocking story that details the very real threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by law enforcement access to private genetic databases and familial DNA searching.
In 1996, a young woman named Angie Dodge was murdered in her apartment in a small town in Idaho. Although the police collected DNA from semen left at the crime scene, they haven’t been able to match the DNA to existing profiles in any criminal database, and the murder has never been solved.
Two men are going to fight this weekend, and HBO and Showtime have already thrown the first punch in the legal fight over online streaming of the match. Taking advantage of an increasingly abused loophole in copyright law, they have just won a court order requiring a host of third parties to block access to sites that may stream the fight. In other words, if you run a Wi-Fi network (for example, you’re a coffee shop) and someone may use your network to watch the Pacquiao/Mayweather fight via unauthorized sources, HBO and Showtime think they can force you to block your customers’ access.
The 2015 version of the USA Freedom Act, HR 2048/S.1123 passed out of the House Judiciary Committee this week, with a vote of 25 ayes and 2 noes. The Committee did not pass any amendments to the legislation. But the markup discussion revealed a lot about where the House Judiciary Committee stands when it comes to reforming Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act—one of the key authorities that the government claims as justification for mass surveillance.
Last week the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (IACC) held their spring conference in San Diego, to share intelligence about the latest strategies for combatting “counterfeiting” (by which they mean trademark infringement) and “piracy” (by which they mean copyright infringement). EFF's Jeremy Malcolm attended as an invited panelist, giving us the opportunity to assert our views that anti-piracy campaigns should not infringe users' rights or damage the fabric of the global Internet. But perhaps more importantly, it also also afforded us a window into the mindset of the content and brand owners, law enforcement officials and lawyers behind these campaigns.
Tras el rechazo unánime en la Cámara de Diputados al proyecto de ley que pretende que compañías de telefonía e internet almacenen durante 12 meses los metadatos de todos los usuarios, la iniciativa volvió a los Senadores, quienes están de acuerdo con la desproporcional e innecesaria figura legal por lo que aceleran su aprobación.
This article appeared in EFFector, EFF's almost-weekly newsletter about cutting-edge tech policy issues. Subscribe by entering your email address in the box on the right-hand column of this page.
In 1993, EFF founder John Gilmore approached me with an unusual proposition: he asked if I would serve as lead outside attorney working with a fairly new organization—the Electronic Frontier Foundation—on a case challenging the U.S. export restrictions against cryptography. Bernstein v. Department of Justice took over seven years to work its way through the courts, but eventually became the landmark case that first established that computer code is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment. It was a watershed moment for Internet law, and for my life.
Update May 8, 2015: JPay has changed its terms of service and will no longer claim intellectual property rights over correspondence.
JPay, a company that provides digital communications systems to corrections facilities in at least 19 states, is charging inmates and their families an unusual fee to stay in touch: the intellectual property rights to everything sent through its network.
Will this be the year we pass patent reform? With both houses of Congress finally introducing strong bills to target patent trolls, we sure hope so.
EFF supported the House’s Innovation Act through its passage in 2013. Unfortunately, the Senate did not respond with a bill worth fighting for. This year, though, not only is the Innovation Act (H.R. 9) back, but the Senate has responded with its own comprehensive legislation—the PATENT Act (S. 1137).
Ending the scourge of DRM has long been an important goal for EFF, and the need has only increased in recent years. As the evidence mounts that we're already deep into what EFF Special Consultant Cory Doctorow has dubbed the War On General Purpose Computing, efforts like the Free Software Foundation's International Day Against DRM take on a new meaning.
It's not just about what we can do with the books, music, movies, and games that we buy, though that remains an important fight. It's a matter of basic consumer rights and security.
More than 50 groups sent a letter to Congressional leadership today demanding that they shelve Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr's attempt to renew Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Despite nearly two years of revelations about the full extent of NSA spying—including how the government has interpreted this section of the Patriot Act to mean it can vacuum up the call records of millions of innocent people—these Senators want to extend Section 215, unchanged, until 2020.
For those seeking to censor information online, the weakest link is often precisely that—the humble hyperlink. Censoring or imposing costs or conditions on linking to information can be just as effective, and often easier, than controlling the information at its source. But without the freedom to link, the World Wide Web falls apart into a mass of disconnected threads.
Librarians have long understood that to provide access to knowledge it is crucial to protect their patrons' privacy. Books can provide information that is deeply unpopular. As a result, local communities and governments sometimes try to ban the most objectionable ones. Librarians rightly see it as their duty to preserve access to books, especially banned ones. In the US this defense of expression is an integral part of our First Amendment rights.
It’s International Day Against DRM, which means folks around the world bring attention to the dangers of the so-called “technical protection measures” embedded in their stuff. But DRM (which stands for Digital Rights Management) isn’t the whole problem; equally pernicious are the laws that prevent folks from circumventing the DRM in order to do otherwise perfectly legal things.
For example: perhaps you want to get your car in shape for that summer road trip. Maybe you’re looking forward to a summer project where you make a fan video. Or perhaps you are organizing a reunion with friends that will include a gaming night, and you’d like to dig up some of the old games you used to play in high school.
With broad and near-unanimous bipartisan support, the Virginia General Assembly passed a series of bills this year to defend the public’s right to privacy from new mass surveillance technologies.
To his credit, Gov. Terry McAuliffe almost immediately signed a bill to require law enforcement to obtain a warrant before tracking people’s mobile phones with cell tower emulators, often called “stingrays.” But he initially balked at two other bills: one that would have also required police to get a warrant before using drones and another that would’ve placed strict limitations on other mass surveillance technologies, including a seven-day limit on the retention of locational data collected through automatic license plate readers (ALPR).
Prominent experts at the United Nations have now indicated that secretive trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) undermine human rights around the world, both because of the secretive, corporate-dominated process, and due to the substantive content of the provisions that arise out of these opaque negotiations.
Copyright law is frequently misused as a tool to censor unwanted online criticism. And often, this misuse does not make it into court. But one such case has recently made its way up to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. And yesterday, EFF filed a “friend of the court” brief, urging the court to consider the First Amendment interests at play when copyright is used to silence public criticism.
Did you just buy a shiny new smartphone loaded with the newest and greatest features to have conversations throughout the day, wherever you are? While your phone’s capabilities are distinctly modern, a new decision in United States v. Davis allowing police to get without a warrant records of which cell tower your phone connects to ensures that a key privacy protection you should have when using your phone is stuck in 1979.
Davis: The Facts and Ruling
This week, together with Public Knowledge and Engine, EFF submitted written comments to the Patent Office regarding its Patent Quality Initiative. We urge the Patent Office to ensure that this program actually reduces the number of invalid patents being issued. Its quality efforts should serve the public interest, not the special interests of patent applicants.
Inmates and their families won't have to give up the intellectual property rights to their communications when they use JPay's email and video visitation services, the company announced in an email to EFF today.
EFF had written about an unfair clause in JPay's terms of service that declared that all content, whether it be text, images, or video, belonged to the company exclusively. That language has now been deleted. As JPay Head of Marketing Jade Trombetta wrote via email:
When is a government rule not a rule? Making that question difficult, when it should be simple, seems to be the government’s leading strategy in a hearing this week in Twitter Inc.’s lawsuit challenging the government’s squelching of its transparency report. Twitter wants to provide a closer look at how often federal agents are demanding private user data for surveillance, and part of its suit fights back against the government's rules on what it can and cannot publish. But the Justice Department has asked a federal judge in Oakland to dismiss portions of Twitter’s lawsuit because, it says, the rules the government cited in denying Twitter the ability to be more transparent aren’t really rules. They’re more like guidelines, the agency says. If you’re having flashbacks about ''Pirates of the Caribbean'' and a certain Captain Barbossa, you’re not alone. More on that later.
We now have the first decision from a court of appeals on the NSA’s mass surveillance program involving bulk collection of telephone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and it’s a doozy. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an opinion in ACLU v. Clapper holding that the NSA’s telephone records program went far beyond what Congress authorized when it passed Section 215 of the Patriot Act in 2001. The court completely rejected the government’s secret reinterpretation of Section 215 that has served as the basis for the telephone records collection program.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in ACLU v. Clapper has determined that the NSA’s telephone records program went far beyond what Congress authorized when it passed Section 215 of the Patriot Act in 2001. The court unequivocally rejected the government’s secret reinterpretation of Section 215.
Before 9/11, there was an individual by the name of Khalid al-Mihdhar, who came to be one of the principal hijackers. He was being tracked by the intelligence agencies in the Far East. They lost track of him. At the same time, the intelligence agencies had identified an al-Qaeda safehouse in Yemen. They understood that that al-Qaeda safehouse had a telephone number, but they could not know who was calling into that particular safehouse.
We came to find out afterwards that the person who had called into that safehouse was al-Mihdhar, who was in the United States in San Diego. If we had had this program in place at the time, we would have been able to identify that particular telephone number in San Diego….[T]he opportunity was not there. If we had had this program that opportunity would have been there.
UPDATE (5/17/15): Last week, NSA defenders introduced a new bill to try to extend mass surveillance under the Patriot Act. We've created a new embeddable banner to stop this bill. Please insert this new code onto the homepage of your website after the <body> tag and before the </body> tag, to automatically display a banner that links to EFF's action opposing a temporary reauthorization of the Patriot Act:
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.fight215.org/count/scripts/act.js" defer="defer"></script>
Thanks for your help!
Opponents of sprawling and secretive international agreements won a significant victory today when U.S. Senators voted to block the advancement of its Fast Track trade bill.
The House Rules Committee isn’t interested in any amendments, privacy-protective or otherwise, to the NSA reform package.
After years of wrangling over bill text and amendments, the USA Freedom Act passed out of the Rules Committee with a lengthy hearing today. Next the bill will move to the House Floor for a vote in the next few days.
There are two important things to know about today’s hearing:
Is this the year Congress passes a bill to limit NSA spying? The House of Representatives certainly hopes so. But just how strong that reform will be remains to be seen.
Minutes ago, the House of Representatives passed the USA Freedom Act overwhelmingly with 338 yes votes and 88 no votes. EFF is neutral on the bill. We believe the House missed an opportunity to strengthen the bill in light of the recent Second Circuit decision. We’re urging the Senate to take steps to strengthen the bill.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: violating a computer use restriction is not a crime. That’s why today EFF filed an amicus brief urging the Oregon Supreme Court to review a troubling opinion by the Oregon Court of Appeals in State v.
As we’ve noted, our support for the current version of USA Freedom that is moving through the Senate and the House is conditional on amendments that improve the bill. While we hope to see such amendments, we also know that they may not be possible, since Judiciary Committee leaders noted during the USA Freedom markup that it is the product of “painstaking and careful negotiations,” that would be killed by any changes. And yesterday, the hearing on HR.
For many years, major U.S. entertainment companies have been trying to gain the power to make websites disappear from the Internet at their say-so. The Internet blacklist bills SOPA and PIPA were part of that strategy, along with the Department of Homeland Security’s project of seizing websites that someone accused of copyright infringement. Hollywood’s quest for more censorship power was on display again today at a House of Representatives committee hearing that was supposed to be discussing reforms at ICANN, the nonprofit organization that oversees the Internet’s domain name system.
EFF will go to bat for users' rights at this month's hearings on exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Section 1201's overreaching restriction on circumventing "access control" or "digital rights management" (DRM) technologies comes in direct conflict with lawful activities like conducting security research, repairing cars, and resuscitating old video games. For that reason, Congress included a provision allowing the public to petition the Copyright Office and Librarian of Congress for exemptions to the 1201 clause. It is a long, complex process that happens every three years with no guarantee that previous exemptions will stand, so EFF is back on the ground to advocate for several important issues.
In past years, EFF successfully petitioned for the right to jailbreak your phone and use DVD video for fair use remixes. In the 2015 petitions, we are working to uphold these uses and more. Here is what we are focusing on:
The U.S. Senate advanced the Fast Track bill today in a rushed vote following a slew of concessions made to swing Democrats who had voted to block it earlier this week. The setback on Tuesday could have forced proponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and other secretive, anti-user trade agreements to go back to the drawing board to come up with a new bill. Unfortunately, Senate leaders were able to get around this impasse within 48 hours by agreeing to let Democrats vote on some other trade-enforcement measures first before holding the vote on Fast Track.
Whenever lawmakers congregate to discuss computer crime, you can reliably predict that the debate will gravitate toward expanding police powers, leaving the realistic concerns of everyday Internet users by the wayside. After all, fearmongering around the film War Games helped fuel the passage of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, one of the most egregious laws the digital world has ever faced.
Imagine you could only play Call of Duty against someone sitting next to you, or were limited to only playing the single-player campaign of Starcraft II or against the AI in Civilization V. Those games wouldn’t be nearly as fun – some of them wouldn’t be the same game! But the Entertainment Software Association doesn’t think it should matter. In a comment to the Copyright Office, the ESA has claimed that “it is inaccurate to suggest that multiplayer gameplay over the Internet is a ‘core’ functionality of [a] video game.”
A federal judge in Massachusetts dismissed a lawsuit brought against the classified ads website Backpage.com over posting ads for the sexual trafficking of minors. While acknowledging that criminals behind this ''abohorrent evil'' exploit the Internet as a marketing tool, the judge correctly concluded that Backpage.com couldn't be sued for running the ads, relying largely on Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230), the law that immunizes websites from liability based on user-generated content. EFF filed an amicus brief in the case on behalf of itself, the Center for Democracy & Technology, and Professor Eric Goldman, urging the court to broadly apply Section 230 as Congress intended.
Update: A recent poll conducted in North Carolina finds that nearly two-thirds of respondents think the Patriot Act should not be reauthorized in its current form.
Fifteen months after it issued an extraordinary order requiring Google to take down a controversial video, based entirely on a specious copyright claim, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has seen the light and rescinded that order.
Quick background: The video in question, called "Innocence of Muslims," is an anti-Islam polemic that sparked outrage around the world. Actress Cindy Lee Garcia—who was tricked into appearing on-screen, overdubbed, for five seconds—sued Google to have the footage removed. The district court refused and Garcia appealed. The Ninth Circuit concluded Garcia's copyright claim was "doubtful" but nonetheless ordered Google to remove the film from YouTube and take steps to prevent future uploads.
Facebook's Internet.org project, which offers people from developing countries free mobile access to selected websites, has been pitched as a philanthropic initiative to connect two thirds of the world who don’t yet have Internet access. We completely agree that the global digital divide should be closed. However, we question whether this is the right way to do it. As we and others have noted, there's a real risk that the few websites that Facebook and its partners select for Internet.org (including, of course, Facebook itself) could end up becoming a ghetto for poor users instead of a stepping stone to the larger Internet.
El proyecto Internet.org de la red social Facebook, que ofrece a personas de países en vías de desarrollo acceso móvil gratuito a un grupo selecto de sitios web, ha sido presentado como una iniciativa filantrópica de conectar a dos terceras partes de la población mundial que no tienen acceso a Internet. Estamos totalmente de acuerdo que la brecha digital a nivel mundial debe cerrarse. Sin embargo, cuestionamos si ésta es la forma correcta de hacerlo. Como nosotros y otras organizaciones hemos notado, hay un riesgo real de que los pocos sitios web que Facebook y sus socios eligieron para Internet.org (incluyendo, por supuesto, al propio Facebook) terminen convirtiéndose en un gueto para usuarios pobres en vez de ser un peldaño hacia el ancho Internet.
In a letter sent today, groups spanning the political spectrum spoke out loudly against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Intelligence Chair Richard Burr's attempt to reauthorize Section 215 of the Patriot Act through July 2015.
The letter strongly urges the Senate to vote against any short-term reauthorization:
We urge you to oppose bringing up this measure for a vote, or to vote against any such measure that extends expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act in their current form.
Email. Online banking. Facebook. Your doctor’s office. These are all places where we rely on encryption to keep the private details of our lives safe. Without encryption, none of these services would be remotely safe to use, and even with encryption breaches are too common. We all want the digital world to be safer, not less secure. That’s why EFF joined the nearly 150 privacy and human rights organizations, technology companies and trade associations, and individual security and policy experts who sent a letter urging President Obama to
Today, in an important First Amendment decision, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked an attempt by the NAACP to use trademark as a tool to censor unwanted online criticism—a result we had urged in an amicus brief filed with the court back in October. The Fourth Circuit overruled a federal district court in Virginia, which had previously ruled that the Radiance Foundation’s use of the moniker “NAACP” infringed on the organization’s trademark.
As part of the congressional to-and-fro over the pending Fast Track bill, senators with concerns about the process and substance of trade negotiations have been putting forward some proposed amendments. None of these amendments would alter the substance of what Fast Track is—a bill to authorize the President to enter into binding trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) without proper congressional oversight over these secretive, industry-led deals.
Three provisions of the Patriot Act expire on June 1 and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to delay taking action on the issue by calling for a two month or 5-year reauthorization of Section 215—the provision of the Patriot Act the NSA relies on to collect millions of Americans call records.
In a joint letter to Congress released today, more than 250 technology companies and user rights organizations say that the extreme level of secrecy surrounding trade negotiations have led to provisions in agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that threaten digital innovation, free speech, and access to knowledge online, and the letter calls on Congress to come out against the Fast Track, also known as Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), bill for legitimizing this secretive process. Its signatories include AVG Technologies, DreamHost, Namecheap, Mediafire, Imgur, Internet Archive, BoingBoing, Piwik, Private Internet Access, and many others.
Only once in a while does an Internet censorship law or regulation come along that is so audacious in its scope, so misguided in its premises, and so poorly thought out in its execution, that you have to check your calendar to make sure April 1 hasn't come around again. The Draft Online Regulation Policy recently issued by the Film and Publication Board (FPB) of South Africa is such a regulation. It's as if the fabled prude Mrs. Grundy had been brought forward from the 18th century, stumbled across hustler.com on her first excursion online, and promptly cobbled together a law to shut the Internet down. Yes, it's that bad.
Pages
Deeplinks Topics
- Fair Use and Intellectual Property: Defending the Balance
- Free Speech
- Innovation
- International
- Know Your Rights
- Privacy
- Trade Agreements and Digital Rights
- Security
- State-Sponsored Malware
- Abortion Reporting
- Analog Hole
- Anonymity
- Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
- Biometrics
- Bloggers' Rights
- Broadcast Flag
- Broadcasting Treaty
- CALEA
- Cell Tracking
- Coders' Rights Project
- Computer Fraud And Abuse Act Reform
- Content Blocking
- Copyright Trolls
- Council of Europe
- Cyber Security Legislation
- CyberSLAPP
- Defend Your Right to Repair!
- Defending Digital Voices
- Development Agenda
- Digital Books
- Digital Radio
- Digital Video
- DMCA
- DMCA Rulemaking
- Do Not Track
- DRM
- E-Voting Rights
- EFF Europe
- Encrypting the Web
- Export Controls
- FAQs for Lodsys Targets
- File Sharing
- Fixing Copyright? The 2013-2015 Copyright Review Process
- FTAA
- Genetic Information Privacy
- Hollywood v. DVD
- How Patents Hinder Innovation (Graphic)
- ICANN
- International Privacy Standards
- Internet Governance Forum
- Law Enforcement Access
- Legislative Solutions for Patent Reform
- Locational Privacy
- Mandatory Data Retention
- Mandatory National IDs and Biometric Databases
- Mass Surveillance Technologies
- Medical Privacy
- National Security and Medical Information
- National Security Letters
- Net Neutrality
- No Downtime for Free Speech
- NSA Spying
- OECD
- Online Behavioral Tracking
- Open Access
- Open Wireless
- Patent Busting Project
- Patent Trolls
- Patents
- PATRIOT Act
- Pen Trap
- Policy Analysis
- Printers
- Public Health Reporting and Hospital Discharge Data
- Reading Accessibility
- Real ID
- RFID
- Search Engines
- Search Incident to Arrest
- Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
- Social Networks
- SOPA/PIPA: Internet Blacklist Legislation
- Student and Community Organizing
- Stupid Patent of the Month
- Surveillance and Human Rights
- Surveillance Drones
- Terms Of (Ab)Use
- Test Your ISP
- The "Six Strikes" Copyright Surveillance Machine
- The Global Network Initiative
- The Law and Medical Privacy
- TPP's Copyright Trap
- Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement
- Travel Screening
- TRIPS
- Trusted Computing
- Video Games
- Wikileaks
- WIPO
- Transparency
- Uncategorized
eff.org/nsa-spying
