(4 comments) SHARE        Saturday, November 30, 2013
Demolishing Eight Common Excuses People Make for NSA Mass Surveillance We've heard from lots of folks who are passionately concerned about the NSA's mass spying, but are struggling to get their friends and family to understand the problem and join the over a half-million people who have demanded change through stopwatching.us and elsewhere.

(1 comments) SHARE        Monday, September 29, 2014
Petition to Obama Administration: End the Harassment and Targeting of Reporters Imagine the United States without independent reporters. Where would the news come from? Press releases and corporate statements? Government-run media? And more importantly, what would we have missed over the last century? Watergate, COINTELPRO, the CIA's manipulation of politics in Vietnam--none of these things would be common knowledge without courageous reporters. Repressive govts do not allow a free press

(8 comments) SHARE        Thursday, November 14, 2013
TPP Leak Confirms the Worst: US Negotiators Still Trying to Trade Away Internet Freedoms | After years of secret trade negotiations over the future of intellectual property rights (and limits on those rights), the public gets a chance to looks at the results. For those of us who care about free speech and a balanced intellectual property system that encourages innovation, creativity, and access to knowledge, it's not a pretty picture.

(1 comments) SHARE        Saturday, November 30, 2013
How NSA Mass Surveillance is Hurting the US Economy Privacy may not be the only casualty of the National Security Agency's massive surveillance program. Major sectors of the US economy are reporting financial damage as the recent revelations shake consumer confidence and US trade partners distance themselves from companies that may have been compromised by the NSA or, worse, are secretly collaborating with the spy agency.

(3 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, December 11, 2013
TPP Won't Wrap Up This Year, But Fast Track Remains a Threat Despite the U.S. Trade Representative's concerted efforts to push through a deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) will not be completed by the self-imposed deadline of the end of this year. That announcement, made in Singapore today at a closed press conference, is welcome: the U.S. Trade Representative's accelerated timeline has served as yet another means of restricting transparency,

(2 comments) SHARE        Friday, February 13, 2015
Hundreds of South Carolina Inmates Sent to Solitary Confinement Over Facebook In the South Carolina prison system, accessing Facebook is an offense on par with murder, rape, rioting, escape and hostage-taking.

(1 comments) SHARE        Thursday, November 14, 2013
The House Intelligence Committee's Misinformation Campaign About the NSA Rep. Mike Rogers, Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), is a busy man. Since June, he (and HPSCI) have been all over the media with press statements, TV appearances, and tweets, relentlessly trying to persuade the public that the National Security Agency (NSA) is merely doing its job when it collects innocent users' calling records, phone calls, and emails.

(5 comments) SHARE        Thursday, December 12, 2013
NSA Turns Cookies (And More) Into Surveillance Beacons ...we've learned that the NSA is using Google cookies--the same cookies used for advertisements and search preferences--to track users for surveillance purposes.

SHARE        Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Gems Mined from the NSA Documents and FISA Court Opinions Released Today, in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released hundreds of pages of documents about the NSA telephone call record program. The documents primarily concern events in 2009, when the FISA court first learned that the NSA had been misusing its phone records surveillance program for years.

(1 comments) SHARE        Saturday, June 7, 2014
On 6/5, 65 Things We Know About NSA Surveillance That We Didn't Know a Year Ago 65 Things We Know About NSA Surveillance That We Didn't Know a Year Ago before Ed Snowden freed the information.

(1 comments) SHARE        Saturday, August 15, 2015
San Diego's Facial Recognition Program Shows Why We Need Records on Police Use of Mobile Biometric Technology The New York Times has a story out on how San Diego police use mobile facial recognition devices in the field, including potentially on non-consenting residents who aren't suspected of a crime. One account from a retired firefighter is especially alarming:

SHARE        Sunday, May 18, 2014
Looking Back One Year After The Edward Snowden Disclosures - An International Perspective "The US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide" Glenn Greenwald, No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

SHARE        Monday, February 24, 2014
Legal Community Disturbed About Recent Allegations of Spying on Privileged Communications The NSA appears to have been involved in the surveillance of privileged attorney-client communications, and the legal community is not happy about it. The New York Times reports that communications between an American law firm and its foreign client may have been among the information one of the NSA’s "five eyes" intelligence partners, the Australian Signals Directorate, shared with the NSA.

(1 comments) SHARE        Friday, November 15, 2013
Court Upholds Legality of Google Books: Tremendous Victory for Fair Use and the Public Interest It's a good day for fair use and sane copyright law. After years of litigation, Judge Denny Chin has ruled that the Google Books project does not infringe copyright. Readers, authors, librarians and future fair users can rejoice.

(1 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Vietnam's Internet Censorship Bill Goes Into Effect Internet freedom has gone from bad to worse in Vietnam as an online censorship law known as Decree 72 went into effect this month. It bans bloggers and users of social media from quoting, gathering, or summarizing information from press organizations or government websites.

SHARE        Monday, February 3, 2014
Senators Deal Major Blows to Obama's Fast Track Plan, But the Fight Isn't Over The chorus of voices denouncing the White House's plan to “fast track” the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is growing louder by the day. Over 550 public interest groups and digital rights organizations sent letters this week to Senate leaders opposing the bill which would severely limit Congress' role over trade pacts.

(4 comments) SHARE        Friday, January 10, 2014
Three Hearings, Nine Hours, and One Accurate Statement: Why Congress Must Begin a Full Investigation into NSA Spying Last week, press reports revealed more about the National Security Agency's (NSA) elite hacking unit, the Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO).

SHARE        Sunday, August 17, 2014
What You Need to Know About the FISA Court--and How it Needs to Change Should interpretation of the laws and Constitution of the United States take place in one-sided secretive courts, away from the public eye?

SHARE        Thursday, November 14, 2013
Brazil and Germany Proposed UN Resolution Against Mass Surveillance-- treat privacy as a human right On November 7th, Brazil and Germany jointly proposed a preliminary version of a resolution on online privacy at the UN General Assembly. At a time when public outrage over the reach and scope of U.K. and U.S. mass surveillance is at an all time high, the draft resolution is the first official recognition by the UN of the threat that mass surveillance poses to human rights.

SHARE        Saturday, August 22, 2015
Obama Administration Supports Privacy-Invasive "Cybersecurity" Bill Right before Congress left for its annual summer vacation the Obama Administration endorsed the Senate Intelligence Committee's Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA). EFF opposes the bill because its vague definitions, broad legal immunity, and new spying powers allow for a tremendous amount of unnecessary damage to users' privacy.

SHARE        Thursday, December 12, 2013
The FAA Creates Thin Privacy Guidelines For The Nation's First Domestic Drone "Test Sites" Commercial unmanned aerial systems are set to start flying over US airspace in 2015. In November the Federal Aviation Administration released its final privacy rules for the six drone "test sites" that the agency will use to evaluate how drones will be integrated into domestic air traffic.

SHARE        Monday, May 5, 2014
The White House Big Data Report: The Good, The Bad, and The Missing Last week, the White House released its report on big data and its privacy implications, the result of a 90-day study commissioned by President Obama during his January 17 speech on NSA surveillance reforms. Now that we've had a chance to read the report we'd like to share our thoughts on what we liked, what we didn't, and what we thought was missing.

(1 comments) SHARE        Friday, January 10, 2014
February 11th: The Day We Fight Back Against NSA Surveillance we aren't going to let the NSA ruin the Internet. Inspired by the memory of Aaron, fueled by our victory against SOPA, EFF is joining forces with a coalition of liberty-defending organizations to fight back against NSA spying.

(1 comments) SHARE        Monday, January 20, 2014
Rating Obama’s NSA Reform Plan: EFF Scorecard Explained Last Friday President Obama announced a series of reforms to address abuses by the National Security Agency. We've put together a scorecard showing how Obama's announcements stack up against 12 common sense fixes that should be a minimum for reforming NSA surveillance.

(2 comments) SHARE        Friday, November 15, 2013
November 15: The Day of the Imprisoned Writer | Censorship affects writers, journalists, and bloggers around the world, in various ways. In some cases, censorship is state-sanctioned: on books, websites, and other forms of media. Elsewhere (including in the United States), it's self-imposed.

SHARE        Saturday, August 1, 2015
Unrealistic Pleading Standards: Another Injustice for Human Rights Victims The Second Circuit Court of Appeals dealt a blow to human rights victims when it dismissed Balintulo v. Ford Motor Co. this week. The appellate court distorted Supreme Court precedent, applying an unrealistically and unfairly high pleading standard to a case brought by black South Africans against IBM Corp. and Ford Motor Co. for their roles in facilitating apartheid.

(2 comments) SHARE        Saturday, January 4, 2014
New Decision Shows How Businesses Can Challenge Warrantless Records Collection, Even if You Can't Much of the debate over modern surveillance—including the NSA mass spying controversy—has centered around whether people can reasonably expect that records about their telephone and Internet activity can remain private when those records belong to someone else: the service providers. Courts have disagreed on whether the 1979 Supreme Court

SHARE        Sunday, December 15, 2013
UN Tribunal Condemns the Vietnamese Government for Its Arbitrary Detention of Journalist and Lawyer Le Quoc Quan Last week, a United Nations Rights Tribunal condemned the Vietnamese government for the arbitrary detention of Le Quoc Quan, a prominent lawyer, blogger, and human rights activist who has been imprisoned since December 27, 2012.

SHARE        Thursday, June 12, 2014
Global Response to Snowden Disclosures Revealed in New Report It has been one year since the first Snowden disclosure and in lieu of this first anniversary, world privacy expert and publisher of The Privacy Surgeon, Simon Davies, conceived and published a report titled "A Crisis of Accountability: A global analysis of the impact of the Snowden revelations." The report includes

SHARE        Monday, February 24, 2014
U.S. Trade Rep on the Charm Offensive—Slight Tweaks to Secret TPP Process is Far From Enough The U.S. Trade Rep announced last week that it will create a new “Public Interest Trade Advisory Committee,” in an attempt to allow public interest groups to provide more input into U.S. proposals in trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

SHARE        Sunday, November 24, 2013
Free Expression, Surveillance, and the Fight Against Impunity Journalists, bloggers and others who speak out against the powerful risk terrible repercussions for their work. Around the world, they face physical intimidation, violent attacks, and even murder for speaking out. When such crimes are committed against those who exercise their right to free speech, the perpetrators all too often go unpunished. Those who are meant to enforce the law turn a blind eye. The oppressors get away..

SHARE        Tuesday, November 26, 2013
The UN General Assembly Should Pass Strong Privacy Resolution on the Right to Privacy in the Digital Age After heated negotiations, the draft resolution on digital privacy initiated by Brazil and Germany emerged on November 20 relatively undamaged, despite efforts by the United States and other members of the "Five Eyes" group to weaken its language.