Yesterday, Diego Dzodan, Facebook's Vice President for Latin America, was arrested at his Sao Paolo home by federal police, escorted to a forensic institute and then held at Pinheiros Provisional Detention Center in the city. His arrest was ordered by Judge Marcel Montalvão, who was been demanding personal data from WhatsApp as part of a drug-related investigation in Brazil's northeastern state of Sergipe. The arrest comes after the judge had begun serving WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, a series of fines for withholding information from the court.

Threats to free expression are again on the rise all over the world. As a recent TechCrunch piece outlines, these threats are being felt acutely in Southeast Asia, an ethnically, politically, and linguistically diverse region which includes, Brunei, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam. Taken as a whole, the region has nearly twice the population of US, with over 600 million inhabitants. Recent statistics estimate there are currently more than 160 million Internet users, and with the rise of affordable cellular data plans, tech infrastructure investment and competition amongst carriers, this number is sure to rise dramatically by 2020.

With a presidential election looming this fall, mass media and social media will be more focused on policy issues over the next several months than likely at any other point until 2020. We’ve put together a questionnaire for the candidates to invite them to explain their own policy platforms. We’ll let you know what they say, and in the meantime encourage others to ask these questions themselves at campaign events, fundraisers, town halls, or informal appearances.

As a tax-exempt non-profit organization, we are forbidden from endorsing or opposing any candidate for office, so to be clear: we think voters can and should make their own choices. But we also think it's important for voters to know where the candidates stand on a variety of issues implicating digital rights, from the TPP to mass surveillance. These might not be the only issues that matter in choosing a candidate, but they are important to consider.

Here are a few questions that EFF is asking:

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the United States government's priorities in Internet policy is encapsulated by a term that's recently been making the rounds; the "free flow of information." It appears almost every time U.S. officials describe how they intend to protect the free and open Internet, especially when it comes to international law. The general idea is that bits of online data should not be discriminated against, hindered, or regulated across national boundaries. As a general principle, this sounds positive. It could be a helpful antidote against arbitrary data localization rules that threaten to break up the global Internet, or attempts by governments' to block and censor foreign websites using nationwide filters. At least, that is the claim that officials such as the U.S.

If you are a company that collects customer data, it’s your job to protect it. Your customers expect it. You can’t dodge that responsibility by altering your terms and conditions, especially when finding them is equivalent to playing “Where’s Waldo?” on your website.

This is not only outrageous, but in EFF’s view, also not legally enforceable.

VTech, Hong Kong-based maker of many children’s digital toys, apparently doesn’t see things this way.

Update 2015-05-12: The Let's Encrypt client has now been renamed to Certbot. And Let's Encrypt has now issued over three million certificates!

Yesterday, the Let's Encrypt CA issued its millionth certificate. This is a perfect occasion for us to talk about some plans for the CA and client software through the rest of 2016.

Update (April 8, 2016): The encryption bill has been amended. The changes are discussed in a new post.

Last spring, Shoshana Walter with the Center for Investigative Reporting filed a routine public records request with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department for a story on a rogue firearms instructor. The request was unceremoniously denied, so Walter did exactly what reporters do in that situation: she pushed back. Moments later she received an email that she was never meant to see.

"Okay, now what? She is being a pain. Do we ask Peter what to do with her?" wrote the public servant handling the request.

Please join us in welcoming legislative counsel Ernesto Omar Falcon to EFF!

Ernesto will be working with us to analyze bills in Congress and make sure that digital rights have a voice on the floor in Congress, particularly in copyright, patent, and net neutrality issues. Before coming to EFF, Ernesto spent six years as a staffer for two members of Congress. After that, he served as Vice President of Government Affairs at Public Knowledge, an organization that EFF frequently works with on fair use and open Internet advocacy.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will consider adopting a DRM non-aggression covenant at its Advisory Committee meeting in Boston next week. EFF has attended several of these meetings before as a W3C member, always with the intent to persuade the W3C that supporting DRM is a bad idea for the Web, bad for interoperability, and bad for the organization. By even considering Web standards connected with DRM, the W3C has entered an unusually controversial space. Next week's membership meeting will be accompanied by demonstrations organized in Boston by the Free Software Foundation, and other cities where the W3C has a presence.

The government recently declassified a secret letter, written in 2002 laying out the executive branch’s initial legal justifications for the vast expansion of electronic surveillance after September 11, 2001. Like many others, it was written by former DOJ Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo, and it was directed to the then-presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.  

The letter wasn’t a filing with the FISC: instead, in Yoo’s view, it was more of a “heads up”—in the words of the letter, a gesture of goodwill in the interest of “comity” between co-equal branches of government.

The heads up he was giving? The fact that, for over a year prior to this letter, the executive branch had been flagrantly violating federal surveillance laws.  

A Joint Statement from Access Now, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Apple is engaged in a high-profile battle against a court order demanding it write, sign, and deploy custom computer code to defeat the security on an iPhone. As civil liberties groups committed to the freedom of thought that underpins a democratic society, this fight is our fight. It is the fight of every person who believes in a future where technology does not come at the cost of privacy or individual security and where there are reasonable safeguards on government power.

Bassel Khartabil, open source developer, Wikipedian, and free culture advocate, was taken from his friends and family he loves four years ago this week. On March 15, 2012, Bassel was kidnapped from the streets of Damascus by Syrian military intelligence. Since then, we know that he has suffered torture, solitary confinement, arbitrary detention, dangerously overcrowded prison conditions, and even the bombing of his prison’s neighbourhood by Syrian opposition forces.

The Venue Reform Bill Won’t Stop Patent Trolls, but It Will Slow Them Down

There’s a new bill in Congress that would finally address the egregious forum shopping that dominates patent litigation. The Venue Equity and Non-Uniformity Elimination Act of 2016 (VENUE Act, S. 2733) would bring a modicum of fairness to a broken patent system.

A crowd upset about the possibility of DRM in Web standards gathered to protest outside the World Wide Web Consortium's Advisory Committee meeting in Cambridge, MA last night. EFF is participating in these W3C meetings as a member, encouraging the group to adopt a non-aggression covenant to protect security researchers, standards implementors and others from the effects of including DRM-related technology in open standards.

Last night's protests, shown below, were organized by the Free Software Foundation and included comments from EFF's International Director Danny O'Brien.

As with other original material on EFF's site, these photos are released under the permissive Creative Commons Attribution license.

Update April 13, 2016: The U.S. Army has confirmed in writing to Chelsea Manning that the packets were withheld due to being too many pages, rather than copyright concerns. 

EFF is pleased to announce that the U.S. Army has allowed Chelsea Manning to receive a packet of news articles, EFF blog posts, and a regulatory filing related to prisoner free speech rights that it had previously withheld. Manning is currently imprisoned at the U.S Disciplinary Barracks (USDB) at Ft. Leavenworth for her role in the release of military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks.

EFF, ACLU, and Access Now released a statement in support of Apple and its stance on encryption last week. We called on the President to reject any attempt to force backdoors like the one the FBI was seeking to Apple’s operating system. We asked our communities to help by tweeting at the President.

Over three thousand people have joined us, sending a stream of tweets to the President.

July 21, 1990: Neil Patrick Harris and Alyssa Milano were on the cover of TV Guide, Pink Floyd performed near the ruins of the Berlin Wall, and First Lady Barbara Bush christened the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier the USS George Washington. But perhaps the most significant touchstone, at least to those of us in the digital civil liberties movement, is that EFF founder John Perry Barlow sent the first-ever EFF email blast to our supporters. 

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is taking a beating in the ongoing U.S. presidential election cycle, leaving some observers to wonder if it can survive such a political backlash against trade agreements. But as the leading candidates seem to compete for who can bash U.S. trade policies the hardest, other countries have been pressing forward to ratify the TPP since the deal's signature in February.

In early 2012, after a massive public outcry, Congress abandoned the proposed SOPA bill that would have authorized broad, ex parte site-blocking orders. One of SOPA’s most worrying features was that it would have created new, easy-to-obtain court orders against third parties, such as domain name registrars, ad networks, payment providers, and search engines. Unfortunately, some rightsholders have been trying to convince courts that existing law already allows them to get the same sort of site-blocking orders. They are wrong.