From telecommunications infrastructure to TV and radio airwaves, the Ethiopian government’s controls over communications infrastructure in the country means that even the most private and personal conversations may be exposed to unwarranted surveillance. In some cases, where communications have escaped the government’s strict monitoring system, human informers have been planted, creating an extreme sense of fear among Ethiopians. There’s an implicit understanding in the country that when discussing politics publicly, one should do so in a low voice so that only those whom they trust can hear. In Addis Ababa, the capital city, it’s not uncommon to see people glancing over their shoulders or covering their mouths when having political conversations in coffee shops or taxis. Because of this fear-provoking atmosphere, many Ethiopians stay silent as a means of protecting themselves against surveillance.

EFF is pleased to welcome Shahid Buttar to the activism team, where he will direct EFF's work supporting grassroots and student advocacy. Shahid is a constitutional lawyer focused on the intersection of community organizing and policy reform as a lever to shift legal norms. He comes to EFF with deep roots in communities across the country organizing in various ways to combat mass surveillance.

Shahid’s skills and experience will enhance EFF’s outreach efforts, helping us inspire supporters in local communities across the country. He’ll also serve as a resource for grassroots organizations and student groups looking for ways to defend and assert their rights.

As we've noted before, online harassment is a pressing problem—and a problem that, thankfully and finally, many are currently working on together to mitigate and resolve. Part of the long road to creating effective tools and policies to help users combat harassment is drawing attention to just how bad it can be, and using that spotlight to propose fixes that might work for everyone affected.

But not all of the solutions now being considered will work. In fact, some of them will not only fail to fix harassment, but they will actually place drastic limitations on the abilities of ordinary users to work together, using the Net, to build and agitate real, collective solutions.

Facebook claims its practice of forcing users to go by their "real names" (or "authentic identities" as Facebook spins it) makes the social network a safer place. In fact, the company has often claimed that the policy protects women who use the social media platform, even when faced with community advocates pointing out that the policy facilitates harassment, silencing, and even physical violence towards its most vulnerable users.

Trade negotiators from the U.S. and its 11 Pacific Rim partners announced their agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) today, concluding the final round of closed negotiations in Atlanta and marking the culmination of seven years of secrecy. Throughout all that time, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has acted as a de facto representative of the Hollywood big media lobbies in pushing other countries to adopt the most punitive aspects of U.S. copyright policies—such as our over-the-top civil and criminal penalties—while at best giving lip service to pro-user aspects such as fair use.

While some police departments and sheriff's offices are left to oversee themselves, many cities and counties around the country have adopted civilian oversight bodies. Often composed of everyday citizens, these boards and commissions are charged with investigating misconduct complaints against law enforcement, from intense police brutality to minor violations of departmental policies.

Agradecimientos a Luis Gil Abinader, investigador de FLACSO Argentina, por la traducción al español. Artículo original en inglés.

Los funcionarios cercanos a las negociaciones anunciaron ayer que alcanzaron un entendimiento final sobre el Acuerdo Transpacífico de Cooperación Económica (TPP, por sus siglas en inglés). Ese anuncio se produjo después de una prolongada ronda de negociación en Atlanta, Georgia, que giró principalmente alrededor de desacuerdos sobre normas relativas a patentes farmacéuticas y aranceles sobre vehículos y productos lácteos.

EFF has joined with organizations around the world in calling for Syria to reveal the whereabouts of detained technologist Bassel Khartabil. Khartabil's arbitrary detention and treatment by the Syrian authorities have been cause for concern since his initial arrest three and a half years ago. Fears have grown for his safety after he was taken from civil prison to an unknown destination on Saturday. He is one of the five current cases that EFF tracks in our Offline campaign to protect unjustly imprisoned technologists and bloggers.

Here is the joint press release from our coalition:

Release Bassel Khartabil, held unfairly since 2012

إطلاق سراح باسل خرطبيل المعتقل جزافاً منذ 2015 إلى مكان سرّي

(7 تشرين الأول 2015) ناشدت31 منظمة اليوم، السلطات السورية مطالبة بالكشف فوراً عن مكان باسل خرطبيل، أحد أبرز النشطاء في سبيل حرية التعبير في. تشرين الأول / أوكتوبر، عملت الأجهزة إلى نقل خرطبيل المعتقل منذ 2012 وذلك من سجن عدرا المركزي إلى مكان مجهول.

مع ذلك، تمكن خرطبيل في اليوم ذاته، أي في 3 تشرين الأول / أوكتوبر 2015، من إبلاغ عائلته أن ضباطاً قد أمروه بحزم أمتعته ولكنهم امتنعوا عن كشف الموقع الذي سيساق إليه. هذا ولم تتلق عائلته أي معلومات أو إشعار رسمي ولكن على الأغلب وبحسب مصادر غير رسمية، فقد جرى إحالة باسل إلى محكمة ميدانية عسكرية في قاعدة الشرطة العسكرية في القابون.

هذا وأعرب متحدث باسم المجموعة عن قلق المنظمات الشديد وعن "مخاوف حقيقية إزاء الاحتمال الكبير أن يكون خرطبيل قد نقل الى سجون تنتهج التعذيب تابعة لقوى الأمن السورية". وقد نددت المجموعات "يجب إخلاء سبيل خرطبيل وإعادة الحرية إليه، عوضاً عن إخفائه قسراً مجدداً".

Much has changed in the nearly ten years since we launched our first lawsuit challenging the NSA’s illegal surveillance of millions of Americans’ Internet communications. Over time, the defendants in the cases have changed; the legal “authority” the government has invoked to justify the program has changed; and the public’s knowledge and understanding of the programs has increased remarkably.

But, nearly a decade in, one thing has stayed remarkably constant: the relevant facts. The NSA, with the help of the nation’s largest telecommunications firms, like AT&T, has tapped the nation’s Internet backbone, searching and sifting through vast amounts of innocent Americans’ Internet communications.

Californians can rest assured that law enforcement can’t poke around in their digital records without first obtaining a warrant. Today, Gov. Jerry Brown has signed S.B. 178, the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA).

After months of pressure from public interest groups, media organizations, privacy advocates, tech companies, and thousands of members of the public, California’s elected leaders have updated the state’s privacy laws so that they are in line with how people actually use technology today. 

CalECPA protects Californians by requiring a warrant for digital records, including emails and texts, as well as a user's geographical location. These protections apply not only to your devices, but to online services that store your data. Only two other states have so far offered these protections: Maine and Utah. 

Here’s what the bill’s authors had to say about the victory:

Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco)

Obama’s position on encryption is now public, as reported by the Washington Post. According to Ellen Nakashima and Andrea Peterson of the Post, Obama “will not —for now—call for legislation requiring companies to decode messages for law enforcement.”

Instead, the Post reports, the “administration will continue trying to persuade companies that have moved to encrypt their customers’ data to create a way for the government to still peer into people’s data when needed for criminal or terrorism investigations.”

Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a significant decision rejecting an absurd copyright claim in yoga poses. The decision is pretty entertaining, but its implications are important for technologists as well as yogis.

A federal magistrate judge in Brooklyn took an admirable stand last week when he questioned the government’s authority to compel Apple to unlock a seized mobile device using the All Writs Act. That’s a general-purpose law passed in 1789 that allows a court to require third parties’ assistance to execute a prior order of the court. Apple cannot be automatically conscripted in government investigations, wrote Magistrate Judge James Orenstein of the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, because it is “a private-sector company that is free to choose to promote its customers' interest in privacy over the competing interest of law enforcement.” Orenstein’s order isn’t the end of the story, but it’s encouraging to see a court recognize the limits of government power, even in the face of the not-so-absolute All Writs Act.

As of this month, 567 relays from our 2014 Tor Challenge are still up and running—more than were established during the entire inaugural Tor Challenge back in 2011. To put that number in perspective, these nodes represent more than 8.5% of the roughly 6,500 public relays currently active on the entire Tor network, a system that supports more than 2-million directly connecting clients worldwide.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! Please join us in commemorating the life of Ada Lovelace by celebrating the achievements – past and present – of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Meet Barak Weinstein, EFF’s new executive assistant. Barak will be assisting EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn and EFF Deputy Executive Director and General Counsel Kurt Opsahl. This is Barak's second tour at EFF—he was EFF's first legal secretary a decade ago, and he's excited to be back with the organization.

Barak spent the last eight years as an audio engineer, most recently for theater and opera in Los Angeles. He's in the unique position of having worked within the music industry—he assisted with the recording of Grammy-nominated songs—and, while at EFF, for causes that opposed its practices.

In light of this year's 40^th anniversary of the Church Committee—legendary for exposing illegal mass domestic government surveillance during the 1960s and 1970s—the Wayne State University School of Law brought former Church Committee members together in Washington, D.C. to discuss how Congress can effectively oversee classified programs. The all-day event saw numerous experts and two key former Church Committee staffers—Fritz Swartz and Loch Johnson—unanimously call on Congress to reassert its oversight authority over intelligence programs. 

A shorter version of this post ran as an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News on October 6, 2015.

There’s an adage that goes: “As goes California, so goes the nation.” In all fairness, that’s said about a lot of states, but we believe it is especially true for California, since not only is the Golden State bigger in population and GDP than most sovereign nations, but because so many technological companies are headquartered here. A new law in California can have nation-wide, and potentially global, ramifications.

This year, EFF beefed up its in advocacy in Sacramento with the aim of moving the needle forward on digital freedom in the California legislature.  We assembled a team of internal activists and lawyers and hired an excellent lobbying duo—Samantha Corbin and Danielle Kando-Kaiser of Corbin and Kaiser. Now that we’re at the end of the legislative session, we can say with zero uncertainty that our mission was a success.

Being Muslim can’t be the basis for law enforcement surveillance. That was the message from the Third Circuit on Tuesday when it told the plaintiffs in Hassan v. The City of New York that their lawsuit could go forward. The plaintiffs are suing over the New York Police Department’s suspicionless mass surveillance operation revealed by the Associated Press in 2011.

In a post on Wednesday, researchers Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger presented compelling research suggesting that the NSA has developed the capability to decrypt a large number of HTTPS, SSH, and VPN connections using an attack on common implementations of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm with 1024-bit primes. Earlier in the year, they were part of a research group that published a study of the Logjam attack, which leveraged overlooked and outdated code to enforce "export-grade" (downgraded, 512-bit) parameters for Diffie-Hellman.

Today is the first day of Open Access Week. All week, we’ll be joining SPARC and numerous other organizations to celebrate the importance of open access.

Put simply, open access is the practice of making research and other materials freely available online, ideally under licenses that permit widespread dissemination. Open access publishing plays a huge role in the dissemination of knowledge, culture, and ideas.

Check back all week for new #OAWeek content from EFF. We'll be updating this blog post with links:

When You Work in the Open, Everyone Can Be a Collaborator
Open access opens the door to a type of collaboration that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

Far too often Congress proposes tech legislation that is either poorly researched or poorly drafted (or both). Fortunately, most of the bills don't advance. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to dissuade Congress from constantly writing these types of bills. The House Energy and Commerce Committee released such a bill last week. It's only a discussion draft and hasn't been introduced as a formal bill yet, but its provisions would not only effectively put the brakes on car security research, but also immunize auto manufactures from FTC privacy enforcement when (not if) they fail to secure our cars. It's a classic one-two punch from Congress: not understanding something and then deciding to draft a bill about it anyway.