Deeplinks
A storm is brewing over use of the 5.8 GHz unlicensed band of the radio spectrum as telecommunications companies plan to expand their LTE networks outside their traditional, licensed ranges and into the same unlicensed bands used by Wi-Fi, cordless headsets, and plenty of other consumer technology.
This report was co-written by MuckRock Editor JPat Brown. MuckRock Co-founder Michael Morisy, MuckRock Intern Lukas Knight, and EFF Activism Intern Annelyse Gelman also contributed to this report. Another version appears at MuckRock.com.
Law enforcement agencies around the country are increasingly embracing biometric technology, which uses intrinsic physical or behavioral characteristics—such as fingerprints, facial features, irises, tattoos, or DNA—to identify people, sometimes even instantly. Just as the technology that powers your cell phone has shrunk both in size and cost, mobile biometric technologies are now being deployed more widely and cheaply than ever before—and with less oversight.
Good news for Firefox users sick of online trackers shadowing their every click: Mozilla just released Tracking Protection for use with their private browsing mode.
As we wrote previously, we think it's important for users to be able to protect themselves from non-consensual online tracking. That's why we created Privacy Badger, which enforces Do Not Track around the Web. But it's also important for browser vendors to join in the fight to protect user privacy. Mozilla has done just that with today's announcement.
Businesses should not be able to restrict customers’ speech
Are there limits to what a company can put in a standard form contract, like a click-through agreement? Can a company take away its customers’ freedom of speech?
The Consumer Review Freedom Act, now pending in Congress (S.2044, H.R.2110), would limit several ways that companies attempt to keep their customers from criticizing them on the Internet.
It’s been a rough few weeks for legal challenges to NSA surveillance. First, a federal district court in Maryland dismissed a lawsuit brought by the ACLU challenging the NSA’s Upstream surveillance of the Internet backbone. Then, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals refused to grant the ACLU a preliminary injunction against the NSA’s bulk telephone records program, despite having previously found that the program was illegal. Essentially washing its hands of the case, the court refused to even consider the ACLU’s arguments that the phone records program is unconstitutional because the program will stop in its current form at the end of November.
Over the last year, law enforcement officials around the world have been pressing hard on the notion that without a magical "backdoor" to access the content of any and all encrypted communications by ordinary people, they’ll be totally incapable of fulfilling their duties to investigate crime and protect the public. EFF and many others have pushed back—including launching a petition with our friends to SaveCrypto, which this week reached 100,000 signatures, forcing a response from President Obama.
A day in the life of the surveillance state
Often, the discussion on government surveillance in the US is all about the NSA or the FBI. But the feds aren’t the only ones spying on you. Local law enforcement has been getting in on the action, and it’s not good.
We’ve long been concerned about “patent trolls”—companies that don’t produce anything themselves but buy patents, then make their money by threatening and even suing companies that are producing products. But today we’re going to discuss a different kind of trolling: running fishing lures through the water. That’s because this October’s Stupid Patent of the Month, US Patent No. 7,113,449, involves putting data about trolling—the fishing kind—on a computer.
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