Peruvians understand the dangers of pervasive surveillance. Peru's ex-spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos is serving a long jail sentence for corruption and human rights abuses. In 2000, Peruvian authorities seized about 2,400 videotapes made by Montesinos, which he used to manipulate political opponents and journalists whom he caught on film, a scandal also known as the “Vladivideos”. That’s why so many in the country recognise the dangers of a pervasive surveillance state.

Los ciudadanos y ciudadanas del Perú entienden los peligros de la vigilancia omnipresente. El ex jefe de espionaje Vladimiro Montesinos, está cumpliendo una larga condena por corrupción y violaciones a los derechos humanos, ya que en el año 2000, autoridades locales incautaron unas 2.400 cintas hechas por Montesinos, con las que manipulaba a los oponentes políticos y a periodistas que grabó en vídeo, un escándalo conocido como los “Vladivideos”. Es por ello que muchos en aquel país entienden los peligros de un Estado con vigilancia generalizada.

Each summer the Electronic Frontier Foundation joins tens of thousands of computer security professionals, academic researchers, tech tinkerers, and curious onlookers at a series of bleeding-edge hacker conferences in Las Vegas. EFF has been a proud supporter of these communities since our founding twenty-five years ago, and we make a concerted effort to ensure that con-goers know that there is an active movement to protect digital freedom around the world. We renewed this commitment during the 2008 summer hacker events by launching the Coders' Rights Project to help programmers and developers navigate the murky laws* surrounding security research.

Major movie studios are again trying to make a website they don’t like disappear without a trial. This time, the studios are asking for one court order to bind every domain name registrar, registry, hosting provider, payment processor, caching service, advertising network, social network, and bulletin board—in short, the entire Internet—to block and filter a site called Movietube. If they succeed, the studios could set a dangerous precedent for quick website blocking with little or no court supervision, and with Internet service and infrastructure companies conscripted as enforcers.

The government of Kazakhstan has pursued one of its fiercest critics, the newspaper Respublika, with lawsuits and threats for fifteen years. By 2012, it seemed it had finally achieved its aim: after repeated prosecutions for "inciting social discord" and "spreading extremism," the paper's founder was in exile, and its staff forced to cease printing and distributing its print edition within the country. But despite blocks, bans, and overwhelming distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, Respublika's reporting lives on through its websites, which continue to critically report on the country's affairs and provide a forum for discussion from the relative safety of servers hosted in the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the lead agency tasked with protecting civilian government computer systems, agrees that the Senate's Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) is fundamentally flawed. DHS's letter to Senator Al Franken, which voiced many concerns about the bill, joins the chorus of criticisms raised by computer scientists, privacy advocates, and civil society organizations. It's the clearest sign yet that the Senate should kill this bill.

When we wrote about the intermediary liability provisions in a reported May 2015 leak of the Intellectual Property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) last month, we hadn't actually seen the text. But thanks to the publication of that leak by Knowledge Ecology International yesterday and today, we now have a far better understanding of the current state of play—including some of the reasons why the most recent round of negotiations in Maui fell apart.

Do you have a minute to help us map how police are using handheld devices to collect biometric data, like your facial features or iris patterns? OK, how about 30 seconds? If you type fast enough, we bet you can get it down to 10 seconds. 

Just tell us (EFF and MuckRock, that is) where you want us to look—say the Truth or Consequences Police Department or the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety—and we’ll file a Freedom of Information request for you. You don’t even need to give us your name. 

If you’re ready, click here. If you still need a little more convincing, read on.

The following is a guest post from Brett Gaylor, Canadian filmmaker and creator of RiP!: A Remix Manifesto.

Most people's experience with copyright begins and ends with the FBI warnings that play before movies on a DVD. But for those who make a living from creative work, copyright is an everyday reality. It's both a mechanism to help a creator get paid, and a framework that allows them to include the creativity of others within their own work.

In the digital age, being creative is increasingly an act of copying—whether that is sampling music, quoting an article in an online publication, or including a photo or moving image in a YouTube video.

With assistance from Joseph Bonneau, Lee Tien, and Jamie Williams

Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto would never have qualified for a license under California’s proposed virtual currency regulation

A.B. 1326 (Dababneh) is a bill that would require “virtual currency businesses” to apply for and obtain a license in order to offer services in California, and it includes significant fees and administrative hurdles. Unfortunately, the bill’s language is so vague that it’s unclear what companies are, in fact, “virtual currency businesses.” So in spite of carve-outs for smaller companies and for software developers who don’t exercise control over the currency, the proposal threatens the future of virtual currency experimentation and innovation in the state.

In 1991, computer scientists at the University of Cambridge pointed a camera at a coffee machine and programmed it to broadcast images of the pot levels to anyone in their building with a need for caffeine. With that, webcams and live-streaming were born, and now we live in an age of webcasting in college classrooms, teleconferencing and telepresences in the work place, and social lives and media experiences enhanced by services like Google Hangouts and Twitter Periscope. 

Despite all those advancements in the commercial, industrial, and academic sectors, our local governments still lag far behind contemporary Internet trends. Sure, many city councils now live-stream their sessions, but the feeds are limited and almost always one-way modes of civic engagement.

Are you a radio listener? A fan of classic rock or jazz? Do you tune in to Sirius XM’s “60s on 6” channel or seed your Pandora stream with the Rolling Stones? A case in federal appeals court in New York (and a similar case in California) could shake up music broadcasting, and not in a good way. A lower court decision expanded the scope of common law copyrights in sound recordings from before 1972, adding a new right to control public performances of those recordings. Unless the appeals court reverses the decision, broadcasters (both digital and analog), along with restaurants and other businesses, are now at risk of being sued for infringing “rights” never before recognized.

Este artículo ha sido co-escrito por Ana María Acosta, voluntaria en EFF.

This article was co-written with EFF volunteer, Ana María Acosta.

Yesterday, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. and law enforcement officials from Paris, London, and Madrid published an anti-encryption op-ed in the New York Times—an op-ed that amounts to nothing more than a blatant attempt to use fear mongering to further their anti-privacy, anti-security, and anti-constitutional agenda. They want a backdoor. We want security, privacy, and respect for the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee that we be “secure” in our papers. After all, the Founding Fathers were big users of encryption. 

This summer EFF unveiled the sixth limited edition member's t-shirt for the 23rd annual DEF CON, the premier world hacker conference in Las Vegas. This year’s design, like the shirts we produced in 2013 and 2014, includes a puzzle that involves the use of encryption.

The front of this year’s shirt features a long cipher text, displayed in a 1940s typeface:

Here's the string for those following along at home:

5c91dd90f2958c976a73a54aac97f2559eab74b3fd72e7695fd77ba0994d0772bd41510e2b1c61a5a8215ba5b88b617c

Readers of these pages will be familiar with the debate going on between government officials and technologists around the world about law enforcement’s perceived need to access the content of any and all encrypted communications.1

Reports today in the New York Times and ProPublica confirm what EFF’s Jewel v. NSA lawsuit has claimed since 2008—that the NSA and AT&T have collaborated to build a domestic surveillance infrastructure, resulting in unconstitutional seizure and search of of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of Americans' Internet communications.  

The following comment was written by Canadian filmmaker, Andrew Hunter, sent to party leaders asking them to come out against the 20-year copyright term extension in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and stand for fair and balanced innovation policy. He emailed this comment as part of our TPP's Copyright Trap campaign.

I am writing to express my serious concern that the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement's intellectual property chapter may extend Canada's current length of copyright.

Last week, an Australian court issued an encouraging ruling pushing back against extreme copyright demands. A company called Dallas Buyers Club LLC (DBC) has been chasing thousands of alleged file sharers around the world. In the United States, these cases often lead to Internet users being shaken down for thousands of dollars each. In contrast, the Australian court is insisting that DBC’s money demands bear some sensible relationship to the harm it has suffered. If this becomes standard practice, it may protect Australian Internet users from the kind of abusive copyright trolling that has become too common in the United States.

El pasado 27 de Julio, el Poder Ejecutivo del Perú aprobó el Decreto Legislativo 1182 que permite al Estado acceder, en casos de flagrancia, a los datos de tu ubicación sin una orden judicial. Además obliga a las empresas operadoras de telefonía e Internet a retener los datos de millones de peruanos que se comunican a través de teléfonos fijos, móviles y/o computadoras por tres años. Los datos estarían disponibles por el Estado previa orden judicial para un posible uso futuro. La norma fue aprobada sin consulta pública y entraría en vigencia a partir de septiembre según declaraciones del viceministro de Justicia.

A federal judge in Los Angeles has given our clients, Human Rights Watch, the go-ahead to take discovery from the government in our ongoing lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the DEA’s bulk surveillance program. Friday's decision is rare, and it's a decisive victory—both for HRW and for the general public. EFF is not aware of any other case where discovery has been allowed into a government mass surveillance program. And the order forces the government to answer questions, under oath, about the steps it took to ensure that all illegally collected records have been fully purged from all government systems.

Right before Congress left for its annual summer vacation the Obama Administration endorsed the Senate Intelligence Committee's Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA). EFF opposes the bill because its vague definitions, broad legal immunity, and new spying powers allow for a tremendous amount of unnecessary damage to users' privacy. Just last week the Department of Homeland Security agreed and criticized CISPA for its lack of privacy protections. More importantly, CISA fails to address the causes of the recent highly publicized data breaches.

Copyright is a poor tool for making embarrassing information disappear from the Internet. It rarely succeeds, and often draws more attention to whatever was embarrassing or harmful. Copyright isn’t designed for keeping secrets (in fact, it was generally meant to do the exact opposite by encouraging disclosure). Yet people keep trying to use copyright law, in part because takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are quick and easy, and because the rhetoric of “theft” and threats of ridiculously large penalties can be quite scary.