Showing posts with label
Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Show all posts
Showing posts with label
Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Show all posts
April Glaser
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Watch for it. This year student protest and resistance to mass surveillance might be bursting at the seams. The Internet, which students across the world have grown up with, is under threat. And now more than ever, student leaders are contacting EFF, wanting to know how to get involved to protect our rights online.
Now is the time to organize. We’re calling on all concerned students, whether new organizers or seasoned campus leaders, to join the growing movement to fight for our right communicate and innovate, unhampered by oppressive government surveillance and creativity-stifling copyright law.
Surveillance chills speech. When we know that researching politically controversial topics might make us targets for increased government scrutiny, we are less likely to research. Digital privacy is an intellectual freedom issue. And that’s why we’re thrilled to bring this movement to college campuses.
Katitza Rodriguez
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Canadian government's surveillance of innocent Canadians is secretive, expensive, and out-of-control—that’s the message of a new video launched this morning by Canadian digital rights organization, OpenMedia.ca. The group is leading a large, non-partisan, Canadian coalition of organizations calling for effective legal measures to safeguard Canadians from government spying.
The video reveals how information collected by government spy agency, CSEC (Communications Security Establishment Canada), can expose intimate details about Canadians’ private lives, including their financial status, medical conditions, political and religious beliefs, and even sexual orientation. CSEC was caught as they spied on thousands of innocent Canadian air travelers earlier this year.
Jillian York
Electronic Frontier Foundation
A proposed anti-terrorism law in France has freedom of expression advocates concerned. The bill, as our friends at La Quadrature du Net frame it, “institutes a permanent state of emergency on the Internet,” providing for harsher penalties for incitement or “glorification” of terrorism conducted online. Furthermore, the bill (in Article 9) allows for “the possibility for the administrative authority to require Internet service providers to block access to sites inciting or apologizing for terrorism” without distinguishing criteria or an authority to conduct the blocking.
Apart from specific concerns that the bill treats online speech as distinct from other speech, other provisions are just as problematic. For example, while Article 4 refers to “provocation aux actes de terrorisme” or “incitement to terrorism”—a clearly defined legal concept—it also refers to “apologie du terrorisme” or “apologizing” or “glorifying” terrorism, implying a condemnation of opinions alone rather than any overt acts, as Reporters Without Borders points out. La Quadrature du Net’s mini-site on the bill addresses further concerns (in French).
Nadia Kayyali
Electronic Frontier Foundation
While all eyes are on the disturbing evidence of police militarization in Ferguson, are you paying attention to what’s happening with law enforcement in your own back yard?
In the San Francisco Bay Area, the answer is yes. A coalition of community groups has come together to call attention to Urban Shield, a four-day long “preparedness” exercise for law enforcement and other agencies that will take place from September 4-8. They’ve organized a week of education, including a march and demonstration outside of the event on Friday, September 5. To these community groups, Urban Shield represents state violence and political repression, not public safety.
The reasons for protesting Urban Shield are clear. It is one of the ways that local law enforcement gets access to, and romanced by, military and surveillance technologies like the ones we've seen turned against protesters in Ferguson, as well as low-level crimes, across the country.
Nadia Kayyali
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Turns out, the DEA and FBI may know what medical conditions you have, whether you are having an affair, where you were last night, and more—all without any knowing that you have ever broken a law.
That’s because the DEA and FBI, as part of over 1000 analysts at 23 U.S. intelligence agencies, have the ability to peer over the NSA’s shoulder and see much of the NSA’s metadata with ICREACH.
Metadata is transactional data about communications, such as numbers dialed, email addresses sent to, and duration of phone calls, and it can be incredibly revealing. ICREACH, exposed by a release of Snowden documents in The Intercept, is a system that enables sharing of metadata by “provid[ing] analysts with the ability to perform a one-stop search of information from a wide variety of separate databases.” It’s the latest in a string of documents that demonstrate how little the intelligence community distinguishes between counter-terrorism and ordinary crime—and just how close to home surveillance may really be.
Americans Deserve Full Protection of the Fourth Amendment for their Telephone Records, Groups Argue
Activist Post
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today filed an amicus brief in Klayman v. Obama, a high-profile lawsuit that challenges mass surveillance, arguing that Americans' telephone metadata deserves the highest protection of the Fourth Amendment.
Larry Klayman, conservative activist and founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, was among the first plaintiffs to sue the National Security Agency (NSA) over the collection of telephone metadata from Verizon customers that was detailed in documents released by Edward Snowden. In December 2013, Judge Richard Leon issued a preliminary ruling that the program was likely unconstitutional, and the case is currently on appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
In the new amicus brief in Klayman v. Obama, the EFF and ACLU lawyers repudiate arguments by U.S. officials that the records are "just metadata" and therefore not as sensitive as the contents of phone calls. Using research and new case law, the civil liberties groups argue that metadata (such as who individuals called, when they called, and how long they spoke) can be even more revealing than conversations when collected en masse.
David Greene
Electronic Frontier Foundation
A few weeks ago we fought a battle for transparency in our flagship NSA spying case, Jewel v. NSA. But, ironically, we weren't able to tell you anything about it until now.
On June 6, the court held a long hearing in Jewel in a crowded, open courtroom, widely covered by the press. We were even on the local TV news on two stations. At the end, the Judge ordered both sides to request a transcript since he ordered us to do additional briefing. But when it was over, the government secretly, and surprisingly sought permission to “remove” classified information from the transcript, and even indicated that it wanted to do so secretly, so the public could never even know that they had done so.
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Rainey Reitman
Electronic Frontier Foundation
“What kind of data is the NSA collecting on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?"
That’s the question John Napier Tye, a former State Department section chief for Internet freedom, calls on the government to answer in his powerful op-ed published today by the Washington Post. In it, Tye calls the NSA's surveillance operations abroad, conducted under Executive Order 12333, a threat to American democracy, stating that this power “authorizes collection of the content of communications, not just metadata, even for U.S. persons.”
Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan on December 4, 1981, established rough guidelines for intelligence community activities taken abroad, including the collection of signals intelligence for surveillance purposes.
