The following is a guest post from Eric Crampton, Head of Research at the New Zealand Initiative, who previously served as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Department of Economics & Finance at the University of Canterbury.

Australia National University’s Dr. George Barker suggested that New Zealand could do well by strengthening its copyright legislation. He warned against the fair dealing exceptions that have crept into the law and asked, “Why not have copyright law like property law—i.e. it lasts forever?” 

This Labor Day weekend, EFF joins tens of thousands of sci-fi and fantasy fans at Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia. Our goal: educate and energize the fandoms about privacy, surveillance, and free speech. 

In addition to an epic cosplay activism campaign, our team is sitting on almost a dozen panels covering issues such as domestic surveillance and government transparency. At our table at the Hilton, we’ll be able to give you with practical tips for protecting your privacy using EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense Project, and help you understand what types of technology police are using in your community, with some help from the Street Level Surveillance Project .

At long last, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced a slew of much-needed policy changes regarding the use of cell-site simulators. Most importantly, starting today all federal law enforcement agencies—and all state and local agencies working with the federal government—will be required to obtain a search warrant supported by probable cause before they are allowed to use cell-site simulators. EFF welcomes these policy changes as long overdue.

As we say goodbye to another summer of computer security conferences, we would like to take a moment to extend our thanks to the countless people who helped bolster civil liberties defense this year in Las Vegas. Organizers and attendees at Security BSides Las Vegas, Black Hat USA, DEF CON, and the kid-focused r00tz Asylum are all part of the ever-growing movement to defend digital freedom. As "hacking" loses some of its stigma, it serves us well to remember that at its core, hacking is about curiosity, problem-solving, and innovation. These key principles help ensure that technology can work in our favor and remains in our control.

Trade negotiators have a saying—that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. What that means is that despite all of the deals that has been struck in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations so far, they remain tentative until each country signs off on the final agreement. A consequence of this is that no matter how far advanced the parties are towards agreeing on repressive copyright rules, it is still not too late for them to turn back.

Earlier this summer, when FBI Director James Comey made his case for backdooring strong encryption, he told us that he wanted to hash out the policy considerations surrounding encryption, law enforcement, and security in public: “Democracies resolve such tensions through robust debate.” This week, we learned that Comey apparently actually meant that he wanted the debate resolved in secret, before a judge known only to the government, by way of a sealed wiretap order.

The working group at Internet Corporation for Assignment of Names and Number (ICANN) that has been tasked with designing a new domain registration database can’t seem to wrap its head around why privacy matters when it comes to domain registration services. ICANN’s Expert Working Group on gTLD Registration Directory Services (EWG) issued a Preliminary Issue Report on Next-Generation gTLD Registration Directory Services to Replace WHOIS in July, and EFF has submitted comments. Our bottom line is this:

EFF welcomes our newest staff member Aaron Mackey to the team. Aaron joins us as a Frank Stanton Legal Fellow (along with current Stanton Fellow Jamie Williams), for a two-year fellowship sponsored by the Stanton Foundation. He and his family spent the last three years in Washington, D.C., where Aaron worked on speech, privacy, and freedom of information issues at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown Law. Aaron graduated from Boalt Hall in 2012, where he worked for EFF while a student in the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. Prior to law school, Aaron was a journalist at the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, Arizona.

Disturbing displays of military and surveillance equipment being used by state and local police have become commonplace. So it’s not hard to imagine why Urban Shield, a four-day long “preparedness” exercise and equipment exhibition coordinated by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department, was asked not to return to Oakland last year after community opposition.

But the Stop Urban Shield coalition wants more. They want the event cancelled entirely.

Over the past month, trade officials have been frantically working to resolve outstanding disagreements over provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in the midst of speculation that the deal is in deep trouble. At this late stage of negotiations, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has pretty much abandoned all remaining pretense of transparency in its consideration of these remaining policy issues. Since the failure to conclude the deal at the meeting in Hawaii over the summer, the USTR has held several closed-door meetings between high-level officials to finalize the agreement and it is under intensifying pressure to finish it off as soon as possible.

This week EFF presented evidence in two of its NSA cases confirming the participation of Verizon Wireless, Sprint and AT&T in the NSA's mass telephone records collection under the Patriot Act.  This is important because, despite broad public acknowledgement, the government is still claiming that it can dismiss our cases because it has never confirmed that anyone other than Verizon Business participated and that disclosing which providers assist the agency is a state secret.  This argument was successful recently in convincing the D.C. Circuit to reverse and remand the case of Klayman v. Obama.

On Wednesday, September 16, nine months into the 114th Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the federal law that regulates government access to private communications records stored by third parties.

Right now, the statute allows the government to obtain private messages that are older than 180 days—including web-based emails, social media messages, text messages, and voicemails—as well as private documents stored by “cloud” service providers like Dropbox, with an administrative subpoena. ECPA was first passed in 1986 before Congress could imagine the wealth of personal information that would be stored on third-party servers rather than private hard drives.

Are you a computer scientist? A network engineer? Have you developed a new web-based protocol? If so, we want you to sign on to a statement [PDF] explaining to the DC Circuit Court that openness and neutrality are fundamental to how the Internet was designed and how it operates today.

Back in March the FCC released an Order that would prevent broadband ISPs from blocking, throttling, or interfering with their retail customers’ traffic based on the content or type of the traffic—in other words, to make sure ISPs adhere to net neutrality principles.

EFF has been selected to receive a portion of CREDO's revenue in September and you can boost the amount that we receive by voting for us!

Until September 30, CREDO customers and action members can visit CREDO's ballot website and vote for EFF using their member email address. If you're not a CREDO member, you can still vote by signing up and taking one of CREDO's progressive action petitions. (CREDO Privacy Policy)

Join us at the 24th annual Pioneer Awards to celebrate those who fight to clear the way for online freedom!

Next Thursday, we'll gather in San Francisco to proudly honor this year's winners: late international privacy expert Caspar Bowden, global human rights and security researchers The Citizen Lab, international internet access champions Anriette Esterhuysen and the Association for Progressive Communications, and digital community advocate Kathy Sierra. Learn more about the exciting accomplishments of the 2015 honorees at eff.org/pioneer.

Today, the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit issued an opinion blocking the use of copyright to censor unwanted online criticism. The decision, Katz v. Chevaldina, is important because although copyright law is frequently misused as a tool to censor speech, it rarely makes it into court to be challenged. And here, the court stopped the plaintiff in his tracks.

Today, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued its opinion in SCA Hygiene v. First Quality Baby Products, a case about adult diapers that had the potential to harm myriad small business owners and innovators.

EFF has long believed that the First Amendment is as important to thinking about the NSA's spying as the Fourth Amendment. When the government can track to whom you talk, when and for how long, like it did with the telephone records collection under section 215 of the Patriot Act, it knows with whom you associate. When it tracks who talks to politically active organizations, it scares people out of participating in the political and social issues of the day. 

So what's the status of our flagship case raising those First Amendment concerns, First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA? How does the passage of the USA Freedom Act change what could happen to that case?  We thought it was time for a short update. 

Refresher on the First Unitarian Church Case

In the last few years, the FBI has been dramatically expanding its biometrics programs, whether by adding face recognition to its vast Next Generation Identification (NGI) database or pushing out mobile biometrics capabilities for  “time-critical situations” through its Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC). But two new developments—both introduced with next to no media attention—will impact far more ordinary Americans than anything the FBI has done on biometrics in the past. Read about the second development below and the first here.

FBI Plans to Populate its Massive Face Recognition Database with Photographs Taken in the Field

Academic researchers by necessity spend a lot of their time thinking about how to minimize harm in the conduct of their research. Prompted by the dark history of abuses in human subjects research, research ethics have become a deeply ingrained part of methods training and institutional review.

But what it means to minimize harm may be evolving in the digital age, as researchers encounter threats from an increasing number of sources. There is no easy solution to conducting research ethically in an environment of mass surveillance—but there are practices that researchers can adopt to ensure they are doing the best they can to protect their data and keep participants well informed of the evolving landscape of risks.

Courts have long recognized that the First Amendment protects parodies, and last Friday, EFF filed a “friend of the court” brief urging a state court of appeals in Michigan to apply the same protections to parodies posted on Twitter as to parodies everywhere else. The plaintiff in this case, Levitt v. Felton, argued that Twitter should be treated differently. But as we explained in our amicus brief, there's simply no reason to treat Twitter differently.

Last month South Africa released its draft Cybercrimes and Cybersecurity Bill for public comment; the latest in a wave of such laws that has been sweeping the continent and beyond. EFF is currently reviewing the Bill with a view to sending a submission by the deadline of November 30, and we'll have more to say about it before then. But there is one provision that deserves immediate comment: a clause that would criminalize essentially any infringement of copyright. This provision is oddly timed, given that South Africa is also separately considering amendments to its Copyright Act. But it's more than just the timing that's odd.

Update: Gov. Brown signed S.B. 178 on October 8, 2015. This open letter was crossposted to Medium. 

Dear Gov. Brown,

Electronics, computers, satellites, biotechnology, robotics – these are no longer dreams. They are the driving imperative that is restructuring the world economy. These new technologies are fundamentally changing our communications, agriculture, environment, schooling, financial institutions, family life and our national security.

California is now the leader in these technologies, but we will not remain so unless we mobilize the political will and individual responsibility to act.