The real test of whether you have rights is not what the law says: it's what happens when you try to exercise them. For too many bloggers and technologist around the world, the price of using the Net in innovative, legitimate ways, has been jail. Some of the cases of imprisonment around the world that we've tracked the most closely were freed in 2015, but others continue to languish in need of our support.

Zone 9 bloggers freed in Ethiopia

There's been one undeniably happy ending for this year even if it is for a tale that should never have had to have beeen told.

2015 was a busy year for transparency at EFF. We are currently litigating 10 different public records cases—the highest number of transparency cases EFF has had pending at one time in our 25 year history. The majority of the cases are in federal courts (in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.), although we have two cases pending in California state courts.

Here's a brief, year-end rundown of each case, including what we’re after, who we sued, and the status of the case. 

FEDERAL FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT LAWSUITS

Rapid DNA Case

This year the fight to protect student privacy hit a boiling point with our Spying on Students campaign, an effort to help students, parents, teachers, and school administrators learn more about the privacy issues surrounding school-issued devices and cloud services. We're also working to push vendors like Google to put students and their parents back in control of students’ private information.

Just before the holidays, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) working group released guidance for state and local agencies using drone aircraft. The document, Best Practices for Protecting Privacy, Civil Rights & Civil Liberties In Unmanned Aircraft Systems Programs, addresses concerns over the implications of high-tech tools that, without rigorous controls and oversight embedded in law and embodied in code, can easily be abused.

At Noon Today, Demand Real Answers from John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile

T-Mobile's Binge On service could have been great. Giving customers a choice about how to use their data so that they can stream more video without hitting their data cap is a wonderful idea. Unfortunately, T-Mobile botched the roll out. Without asking, they made it the default for all of their customers. In other words, they decided to throttle all video—not just zero-rated video. And they claimed to be using “video optimization technology throughout [their] network” even though their network doesn’t actually alter video content in any way. EFF uncovered these facts and more through testing earlier this week, and our research ignited a backlash across T-Mobile’s Netflix-loving community.

In a colorful selfie video released today, John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile, got riled up and demanded to know who EFF is.

This came in response to questions that EFF submitted during Legere’s Twitter Q&A session about the new T-Mobile service, Binge On. Earlier this week, EFF published a report showing how the service—which T-Mobile claimed used adaptive video technology to optimize streaming for mobile devices—actually just throttled video and left the optimization to the video providers. Check out our detailed report.

Of course, there are lots of unanswered questions about Binge On, which is why EFF and our followers were happy to engage with Mr. Legere during today’s Twitter conversation.

January 12, 2016 Update: It is important to note that some of the language that was added to the Twitter Rules on December 30, 2015 is not entirely new and was recycled from other Twitter Help pages, such as the Abusive behavior policy page. We consider the direct and explicit inclusion of this language in the Twitter Rules significant for the reasons discussed in the post below.

When courts fail to quickly address serious defects in a patent litigation complaint, it can harm not only the parties to the case, but also the public at large. Yesterday, EFF and Public Knowledge filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in a case where the Eastern District of Texas is allowing expensive litigation to drag on even though the defendant has already fully briefed validity issues that almost surely will dispose of the case, and stop the patent owner from suing on them in the future.

Congressional Representatives grilled the parties responsible for the U.S. implementation of controversial changes to the Wassenaar Arrangement in a joint hearing before subcommittees of the House Oversight and Homeland Security Committees today. Witnesses included officials from the Department of Commerce, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of State, as well as representatives of the tech industry, including Symantec, Microsoft, VMWare, and the Information Technology Industry Council.

The President’s State of the Union address examined a great many pressing issues confronting our nation and the world. One of the most dire, however, somehow escaped his attention: the continuing threat to democracy presented by unaccountable, secret mass surveillance in violation of the Constitution.

The President’s promise to rethink security policies hastily adopted under his predecessor was a significant part of his platform when he ran for the White House. During his first presidential campaign back in 2008, President Obama made a written promise to:

The Foilies are back! 

Last year, EFF launched our inaugural, tongue-in-cheek awards series for government agencies who thwarted, stymied, foot-dragged, and retaliated in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other public records requests. We called out secrecy over cell-site simulators, marveled at the $1.4 million fee estimate for the DEA’s “El Chapo” file, and panned Chicago Public Schools’ refusal to disclose what’s in its mystery meats.

Sadly, the government didn’t learn its lesson.

After we filed our complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about Google's unauthorized collection of personal information from school children using Chromebooks and the company's educational apps, we heard from hundreds of parents around the country concerned about K-12 student privacy. This week, an important voice in Washington joined their growing chorus.

On Wednesday, Senator Al Franken (D-MN) wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking for information about the privacy practices of Google Apps for Education (GAFE). Several of his questions reflect concern over the issues we raised with the FTC. Sen. Franken is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law.

Until just last week, the U.S. government kept up the charade that its use of a stockpile of security vulnerabilities for hacking was a closely held secret.1 In fact, in response to EFF’s FOIA suit to get access to the official U.S. policy on zero days, the government redacted every single reference to “offensive” use of vulnerabilities. To add insult to injury, the government’s claim was that even admitting to offensive use would cause damage to national security.

In a mere 24 months, Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain—right?

Wrong.

Mickey Mouse is synonymous with copyright term extension, and with good reason. Every time the first Mickey cartoons creep towards the public domain, Disney's powerful lobbyists spring into action, lobbying Congress for a retrospective term-extension on copyright, which means that works that have already been created are awarded longer copyright terms. In the USA, copyright law is supposed to serve an incentive to make new works, and there's no sensible way that getting a longer copyright on something you've already made can provide an incentive to do anything except lobby for more copyright, and sue people who want to make something new out of your creation.

Through the lens of someone with little direct experience with prisons and jails, corrections systems in the United States may look like they're improving how prisoners communicate with the outside world through new technologies, such as inmate email, video visitation, and media tablets.

The Proposal Is Unfair to Both Users and Media Platforms

There’s a debate happening right now over copyright bots, programs that social media websites use to scan users’ uploads for potential copyright infringement. A few powerful lobbyists want copyright law to require platforms that host third-party content to employ copyright bots, and require them to be stricter about what they take down. Big content companies call this nebulous proposal “notice-and-stay-down,” but it would really keep all users down, not just alleged infringers. In the process, it could give major content platforms like YouTube and Facebook an unfair advantage over competitors and startups (as if they needed any more advantages). “Notice-and-stay-down” is really “filter-everything.”

Last week, as part of EFF’s annual Copyright Week, we wrote about the need for transparency in creating copyright restrictions in the international arena. As a current legal battle shows, however, it is equally important that copyright restrictions not interfere with transparency and open access to the law itself.

Vigilant Solutions, one of the country’s largest brokers of vehicle surveillance technology, is offering a hell of a deal to law enforcement agencies in Texas: a whole suite of automated license plate reader (ALPR) equipment and access to the company’s massive databases and analytical tools—and it won’t cost the agency a dime.

Even though the technology is marketed as budget neutral, that doesn’t mean no one has to pay. Instead, Texas police fund it by gouging people who have outstanding court fines and handing Vigilant all of the data they gather on drivers for nearly unlimited commercial use.

As Congress considers big changes to the Freedom of Information Act, a court’s decision on Monday underscores how some of the best ways to fix the ailing transparency statute are really small—like adding a comma.

Last fall in Naji Hamdan v. U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit read the lack of a comma in FOIA’s law enforcement exemption to limit public access to investigatory techniques and procedures.

The House Judiciary Committee has plans for a “members only” meeting next week to discuss Section 702 of the FISA Amendment Acts, the law the NSA relies on to operate its notorious PRISM surveillance program and to tap into the backbone of the Internet, also known as “upstream” collection.

While we wish that “members only” meant that Congressional watchdogs would all don vintage jackets from the 1980s while reining in the NSA, the sad truth is that our elected representatives are once again cutting out the public from an important debate over mass surveillance.

Blogging platform Medium is now blocked in Malaysia, apparently in an effort to censor an investigative news outlet critical of the government. The Sarawak Report has mirrored its articles on Medium at least since its own site was blocked in mid-2015, when it published allegations of corruption.