Deeplinks
Last week, EFF filed a brief in support of Apple’s fight against the FBI, in which we argued that forcing Apple to write—and sign—a custom version of iOS would violate the First Amendment rights of Apple and its programmers. That’s because the right to free speech sharply limits the government’s ability to compel unwilling speakers to speak, and writing and signing computer code are forms of protected speech. So by forcing Apple to write and sign an update to undermine the security of iOS, the court is also compelling Apple to speak in violation of the First Amendment. Along with our brief, we published a “deep dive” into our legal arguments, which you should check out before reading further.
At 9:04am GMT today, the Let's Encrypt Certificate Authority issued its millionth certificate. This is an amazing success, coming only 3 months and 5 days since a beta version of the service became publicly available. We're very excited to be building a more secure and fully encrypted future for the World Wide Web.
Senator Mark Warner and Representative Mike McCaul are calling on Congress to create an "Encryption Commission" composed of business, tech, and law enforcement and intelligence agency leaders that will investigate and report on encryption issues. The commission is set to ask questions already answered in the 1990s like whether or not the government should mandate backdoors or otherwise change current law. The answer is no. At the end of the day, the commission shows Congress still hasn't learned that math is not something you can convince to compromise.
Today, Verizon reached an agreement with the FCC to acquire affirmative consent before injecting their UIDH tracking header into their customers' web activity on non-Verizon owned sites. This is exactly what we asked them to do in November 2014, and is a huge win for Internet privacy. ISPs are trusted carriers of our communications. They should be supporting individuals' privacy rights, not undermining them.
Following our previous articles about increasing political censorship of the Internet in Malaysia, things have quickly gone from bad to worse. In fact since July 2015, the Malaysian government has blocked at least ten websites, including online news portals and private blogs, for reporting about the scandal surrounding Malaysian Prime Minister Najib tun Razak over his mysterious private dealings with $700 million in funds.
The Kazakhstan government had a third major setback in its attempt to use the U.S. legal system to attack one of its fiercest critics, the independent newspaper Respublika. A federal judge in California rejected Kazakhstan's demand that Facebook turn over information about users associated with Respublika’s account on the social media site. The judge found that Kazakhstan lacked the appropriate judicial authorization to pursue such discovery, rejecting Kazakhstan’s claims that its ongoing Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) lawsuit essentially gave it free rein to obtain information about its critics.
Facebook Rightfully Questions Claims That California Inmates Are Banned from Having a Social Media Presence
Up until last spring, Facebook had maintained a semi-secret channel for corrections facilities to file "Inmate Takedown" requests. A prison official could fill out a simple online form, hit submit, and Facebook would begin the account suspension process without ever creating a public record. Since Facebook wouldn’t publish the number of inmate takedown requests it received (and still hasn’t), the entire censorship regime was essentially invisible.
EFF filed an amicus brief today in support of Apple's fight against a court order compelling the company to create specific software to enable the government to break into an iPhone. The brief is written on behalf of 46 prominent technologists, security researchers, and cryptographers who develop and rely on secure technologies and services that are central to modern life. It explains that the court’s unprecedented order would violate Apple’s First Amendment rights. That’s because the right to free speech prohibits the government from compelling unwilling speakers to speak, and the act of writing and, importantly, signing computer code is a form of protected speech.
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