Floridians, we need your help to stop a dangerous anti-anonymity bill. This week, the Florida state legislature is considering a bill that would make it illegal to run any website or service anonymously, if the site fits a vague category of “disseminat[ing]” “commercial” recordings or videos—even the site owner’s own work. Outlawing anonymous speech raises a serious First Amendment problem, and laws like this one have been abused by police and the entertainment industry.

We would like to extend our deepest thanks to those who responded to EFF’s call for end-of-year donations in December. Gifts from individuals strengthen our ability to bring a relentless passion for the public interest into everything we do, from challenging the NSA’s mass surveillance, to stopping patent trolls, to finding a path for real net neutrality, and more. Last year’s Power Up Your Donation campaign and the Last Call donation challenge were led by people who wanted to convince others to affirm a dedication to privacy, free expression, and other essential values. After many thousands of individual gifts and stirring gestures of encouragement, the sentiment from our community is clear—let’s keep up the fight and be ambitious.

UPDATE: Late tonight, the government released to EFF the "Raw Take" opinion and the 2008 FAA opinion, described below. Those opinions are available here (pdf) and here (pdf). We are reviewing the documents and will post our analysis, along with other documents released by the government, shortly.

Later today, the government is scheduled to release two landmark opinions on NSA spying issued by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The documents are being released as a result of FOIA lawsuit filed by EFF last year, seeking disclosure of many of the surveillance court's still-secret, yet significant, opinions.

"Reform" refers to making changes in something in order to improve it. The STRONG Patents Act, introduced yesterday by Sens. Coons, Durbin, and Hirono, claims to be a "reform" bill—in reality, it would achieve the exact opposite.

As we note in our recent whitepaper, Defend Innovation, we should primarily tackle the root problem of most patent issues: the abundance of poor quality patents. Important tools exist already to challenge bad patents, and these should be strengthened and made less expensive. The STRONG Patents Act's major "reform," however, cripples these means of limiting or scrapping patents that are poor quality.

Today, the Paraguayan House of Representatives postponed for eight days the discussion of a mandatory data retention proposal. The bill, if passed, will require Paraguayan telecom providers to store highly personal information about their customers Internet use, for one year, for possible future access by law enforcement agencies.

CISPA-like zombie bills continue to rattle around Congress. After the Obama Administration released its own computer security information sharing bill a few weeks ago, Democratic Senator Tom Carper followed through with The Cyber Threat Sharing Act of 2015. The bill mirrors the Obama Administration's information sharing proposal.

Sen. Ron Wyden and Sen. Orrin Hatch are now in a stand-off over a bill that would put secretive trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement on the Fast Track to passage through Congress. The White House meanwhile, has intensified their propaganda campaign, going so far as to mislead the public about how trade deals—like the TPP and its counterpart, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)—will affect the Internet and users' rights. They are creating videos, writing several blog posts, and then this week, even sent out a letter from an "online small business owner" to everyone on the White House's massive email list, to further misinform the public about Fast Track.

This Thursday, the Paraguayan Chamber of Deputies will vote on a data retention mandate—one of the worst freedom-killing bills we've seen so far in Paraguay. The bill, dubbed Pyrawebs, is a big deal: data retention mandates are a disproportionate measure that should be sorely rejected. It is now that time to mobilize your networks.

Here's how you can participate:

The United States Trade Representative (USTR) has built an arsenal of tools to pressure other nations to enact enforcement measures that benefit major entertainment companies such as the members of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Since a few years ago, it began releasing a stand-alone Notorious Markets List. It's an annual publication where the USTR lists “notorious” intellectual property infringing markets that supposedly enable "substantial copyright piracy and trademark counterfeiting" that harms U.S. businesses.

Apple, that’s who. Or Microsoft, or any of the other vendors whose products US government contractors have successfully exploited according to a recent report in the Intercept. While we’re not surprised that the Intelligence Community is actively attempting to develop new spycraft tools and capabilities—that’s their job—we expect them to follow the administration’s rules of engagement. Those rules require an evaluation under what’s known as the “Vulnerabilities Equities Process.” In the White House’s own words, the process should usually result in disclosing software vulnerabilities to vendors, because “in the majority of cases, responsibly disclosing a newly discovered vulnerability is clearly in the national interest.”

The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 in favor of net neutrality rules last month, and we expect the final version of rules to be released shortly. From all reports, it sounds like the rules generally track what we (and four million Americans!) have been urging over the past year. But the incumbent ISPs are working hard to seed fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what the FCC's up to. Let's cut through some of the nonsense.

EFF is encouraging Canadians to join together tomorrow for a day of action against a dangerous bill that’s navigating through the Canadian legislature and threatening to strip its citizens of their rights to privacy and freedom of expression.

Bill C-51, the Anti-Terrorism Act, 2015, introduces a wide range of sweeping changes to how the Canadian government handles its national security and anti-terrorism efforts. The bill just passed its second reading in the conservative-led House of Commons in late February and the government is now hastily rushing to pass it with less than two weeks of debate.

When was the last time you can remember your city government asking for feedback on privacy? What about the last time you could comment on privacy online, rather than attending a meeting? If you are a resident of Oakland, CA, you can comment right now on how you’d like to see the city handle the recommendations of the Domain Awareness Center Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on Privacy and Data Retention (aka the DAC Privacy Policy Committee).  These recommendations will be considered by the Oakland City Council’s Public Safety Committee (PSC) on April 14, and the PSC will pass its recommendations to the full City Council.

A few years back, we challenged a patent belonging to ArrivalStar, the notorious patent troll that was sending demand letters to municipal authorities across the country for offering real-time updates on bus and train arrival times. We got many of ArrivalStar’s claims invalidated (or at least significantly narrowed) by the Patent Office—but that was just for one patent.

Attention California: the privacy and security of your driver licenses are under threat from a new scheme to massively expand how photo IDs are shared and analyzed by law enforcement agencies.

Over the last few months, an obscure panel within the California Department of Justice (DOJ) has been taking steps to connect the statewide law-enforcement system for accessing driver license photos and mugshots, Cal-Photo, with a national network of other states’ photo systems. The plan also calls for combining facial recognition with Cal-Photo for investigators to use in the field. The so-called “advisory committee”—made up of representatives from police advocacy groups—has advanced these issues to “priority status,” undeterred by numerous warnings these efforts would violate state laws.

Last year, the current President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Junker, declared that his number one priority was to “create a digital single market for consumers and businesses,” in which “consumers can access music, movies and sports events on their electronic devices wherever they are in Europe and regardless of borders”.

This is a dream that many Europeans share, and is reflected in the draft report for the European Parliament put together by Julia Reda, which EFF commented on last month. Reda's proposals to the Commission provide a road-map for how to get from here to there—from a convoluted system of 28 different markets, each with different copyright rules, towards a system where licensing rules and users' rights are harmonized, much as they are between the 50 United States.

Government agencies sure love their black markers.

For transparency activists, receiving overly redacted documents is a guilty pleasure. Sure, we'd all prefer to have the records unmarred by secrecy (except for narrow occasions, such as when the black-outs legitimately protect people's privacy), but sometimes those redactions are the first indication that we've hit pay dirt. Other times, these redactions provide comic relief. 

In anticipation of Sunshine Week, EFF called for the public to submit the most absurd redactions they've seen for for The Foilies, our new “awards” for shenanigans in the Freedom of Information process. The big takeaway from the nominations we received: redactions can be unintentional conceptual art. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee advanced a terrible cybersecurity bill called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA) to the Senate floor last week. The new chair (and huge fan of transparency) Senator Richard Burr may have set a record as he kept the bill secret until Tuesday night. Unfortunately, the newest Senate Intelligence bill is one of the worst yet.

Open government advocates file requests for public records because it’s not only our right, but our duty as citizens to find out what the government is doing in our name, how officials are spending our tax dollars, what kinds of mistakes they’re making, what problems our communities face, and how we can improve society through policy changes. 

Unfortunately, some public officials interpret transparency as a threat, best answered not with documents, but intimidation, insults, and other forms of retaliation. 

In this fourth and final round of The Foilies—EFF’s Sunshine Week “awards” for outrageous experiences in pursuing public records—we’re focusing on how government agencies (and one rock star) lashed out at citizens and journalists for attempting to unearth unflattering truths. We’ll also cover a few cases where that behavior had consequences.

Facebook recently updated its community standards. As the company noted in the announcement accompanying the change, their “policies and standards themselves are not changing,” but that they wanted to provide more clarity to a set of existing rules that have often been misunderstood by users.

While some of the changes provide significantly more detail as to the reasoning behind certain content restrictions, others fall short. And unfortunately, the updated standards do very little to solve the continuing problem of account suspensions for “real names” violations. 

“Real Names”

This week, on the edges of RightsCon Southeast Asia in Manila, Philippines, digital rights groups from around the world came together for two days of intensive work to finalize a new, ambitious standard to safeguard freedom of expression and innovation online. The approach the document takes to further these objectives is by focusing on the liability of Internet intermediaries—such as search engines, web hosts, social networks, domain hosts and ISPs—for online content of their users. Hence the document, officially launched today to applause from delegates of every continent, is named the Manila Principles on Intermediary Liability.

The six simple principles that the document advances, in summary form, are:

Promising public access legislation FASTR (Fair Access to Science & Technology Research Act) has been re-introduced by a bipartisan coalition in Congress. Lawmakers now have an important opportunity to strengthen and expand rules that allow taxpayers to freely read articles resulting from research their tax dollars support. EFF continues to encourage legislators to pass this bill as an important step forward—though there are still some measures to improve.

Take action to support FASTR right now.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is pleased with the United Nations Human Rights Council's (UNHRC) decision to adopt a resolution appointing a special rapporteur on the right to privacy.

This decision is a key step forward for the UNHRC; it elevates the right to privacy to the priority level that the Human Rights Council ascribes to most other human rights. Most importantly, it gives the right to privacy the international recognition and protection it deserves.

Special rapporteurs are independent experts appointed by the Human Rights Council who serve in a personal capacity and are mandated to report on human rights. They are not UN staff members and do not receive financial remuneration. The independent status of the mandate-holders is essential for the UN to impartially fulfill its functions.