Three MIT students who were sued by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority over their research into subway card vulnerabilities are now working with the transit authority to improve the fare collection system...

"This is a great opportunity for both the MBTA and the MIT students. As we continue to research ways to improve the fare system for our customers, we appreciate the cooperative spirit demonstrated by the MIT students," MBTA General Manager Daniel Grabauskas said in a statement published on the Electronic Frontier Foundation Web site on Monday. EFF attorneys represented the students in their legal defense.

When you think of Wikileaks, things like government secrets and Sarah Palin's private e-mail come to mind. However, there's a decent amount of technology-related information on the site as well...

The project received a DMCA anticircumvention notice in the middle of November, and operator of BluWiki removed the content that Apple didn't like until the legal notice could be scrutinized. Since then, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has agreed to represent iPodhash, and the project's owner has come forward with a few comments, but the original project information is still unavailable, as the various legal machinations continue.

A trio of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who found a way to hack into the Boston subway system's payment cards have agreed to partner with transit officials there to make the system more secure.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced the agreement Monday, two months after the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority dropped a lawsuit against the students, who were represented for free by the EFF, a civil-liberties group that frequently takes up cases involving security researchers and computer hackers.

Three Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who were sued earlier this year by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) said Monday that they are now working to make the Boston transit system more secure...

The settlement ends the matter in an amicable way. "For professional reasons and for public interest reasons, the students wanted to help the MBTA," said Jennifer Granick, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who represents the students.

The Recording Industry Association of America's new enforcement strategy is based on a questionable interpretation of what constitutes copyright infringement. And its copyright-detection services remain under a cloud at the center of a class action legal challenge...

"Quitting their lawsuits is one thing. They're actually not renouncing any of the legal arguments they were making," said Fred von Lohmann, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney. "Apparently, they are also not stopping the investigation techniques that have been so controversial in a number of states."

It didn't take long for anonymity on the Internet to become a contentious issue, and for good reason. Anonymity is problematic.

It is usually possible, even easy, for users on the Internet to hide their true identities to a degree. Most Internet protocols have weak or no authentication in them and it's usually not too hard to keep your real name from other services, like social networking sites or blog comments.

There are all manner of good and bad reasons for doing this. The good reasons, expounded well in the EFF's (Electronic Freedom Foundation) brief on anonymity include protecting the identity of those engaging in controversial political speech.

On Friday, major news broke: the RIAA would (largely) abandon its widespread lawsuit campaign against individuals in favor of a "graduated response" partnership with ISPs...

We checked in with EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann, one of the leading non-industry voices on these issues; he suggested five potential "gotchas" that need to be scrutinized as the plan goes forward...

Mohamed Shommo, an engineer for Cisco Systems Inc., travels overseas several times a year for work, so he is accustomed to opening his bags for border inspections upon returning to the U.S. But in recent years, these inspections have gone much deeper than his luggage...

After civil liberty groups brought it up, in July, Homeland Security released a formal policy stating that federal agents can search documents and electronic devices at the border without suspicion. The procedures also allow border agents to detain documents and devices for "a reasonable period of time" to perform a thorough search "on-site or at an off-site location."

The problem with this policy, argues Marcia Hofmann, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is that the contents of a laptop or other digital device are fundamentally different than those of a typical suitcase.

The Recording Industry Association of America said Friday that it will cut back on lawsuits to combat illegal online music sharing because it has enlisted leading Internet service providers to discipline individuals it accuses of pirating copyrighted works...

"In the 21st century, the idea that we're going to ban people from the Internet based on unproven allegations is troubling," said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Such measures could hamstring a person's participation in school, on the job and as a citizen, he said. "Even if you're guilty, is a ban from the Internet really an appropriate punishment?"

At this point, there are still many more questions than answers regarding how those Internet service providers that have agreed to help the music industry thwart illegal file sharing will actually weed out accused pirates...

This has rung alarm bells at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a vocal proponent for the rights of technology companies and Internet users.
"This is a huge civil liberties issue," said Gwen Hinze, EFF's International policy director. "When you cut off Internet access, we're talking about cutting off a person's total ability to communicate."

The music industry's highly controversial strategy of suing customers for file sharing has mostly ended...

Under the plan, which was brokered by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the music industry will not know the customer's identity. What this means is that ISPs have now gone into the enforcement business, and this has always been one of the greatest fears of those who have wanted ISPs to remain neutral.

"This is very troubling," said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that advocates for Internet rights. "Creating lists of people who can't get Internet access based on allegations of breaking a law that hasn't been evaluated in a court of law. It's good that that the (RIAA) wants to stop suing individuals but they should haven't done it in the first place. I'd be especially concerned if the music labels can get you kicked off one ISP and then arrange to get you kicked off others, or the creation of blacklists. That's certainly what our fears have been about private legal enforcement regimen."

I sometimes like to think nothing surprises me anymore with regard to censorship on campus, but it seems as though every couple of weeks I see something that proves me wrong...

MSU's arbitrary limit on the number of people students can contact via e-mail about an issue of public concern, even from their own private accounts, is a serious threat to student and citizen activism. Realizing this, the civil liberties community quickly came together to join with my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to condemn the decision in an open letter to MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon.

The US recording association said Friday that it will stop suing people who download music illegally and focus instead on getting Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to take action...

The Internet rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a comment on its blog, welcomed the end to the lawsuit campaign calling it "long overdue" and a "failure."
But EFF commentator Fred von Lohmann wrote that "more troubling is the news that the RIAA is pressuring US ISPs into adopting some sort of '3 strikes' approach, similar to those it's been seeking in Europe."

When U.S. President-elect Barack Obama was merely candidate Obama, he told CNET News in no uncertain terms that he opposed the idea of immunizing any telecommunications company that opened its network to the National Security Agency...

The bill did become law, but the story isn't over yet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is pursuing a privacy lawsuit against AT&T in San Francisco, and a federal judge heard arguments in December about whether Congress' grant of immunity complies with the U.S. Constitution. A decision is expected at any time.

Yahoo's time reduction of users' search engine data storage from 13 to three months caught the eye of privacy advocates, who called for Google to lead the way toward a zero retention policy...

Yet Yahoo's move was received with cautious praise by some privacy advocates who believe Yahoo, Google and Microsoft can do better. Peter Eckersley, staff technologist with consumer rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, told eWEEK:

This looks like an attempt by Yahoo to keep a lot of information that they can use for their own internal research and engineering purposes, while being able to say "it would be extremely hard for us to find your search history file in this huge stack of search history files that we keep". That's a big step in the right direction.

With U.S. and European regulators and watchdogs worried that Internet companies are compromising users' privacy by keeping data about online behavior for long periods, Yahoo Inc. said Wednesday that it would shorten that time from 13 months to 90 days...

Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, "It's always good when search companies start competing to provide more privacy for their users."

Defending individual rights in the digital age is a serious undertaking for the Electronic Frontier Foundation given the high stakes...

But the organization has a light hearted side. Really. In its latest holiday fundraising video, the EFF sings a Christmas carol, albeit transformed into a digital call to action.

Worried your daughter's new boyfriend might have a nefarious past? Want to know whether the job applicant in front of you has a rap sheet?...

"It's unfortunate in that it threatens what I see as the uniquely American ideal of being able to start over, after you've paid your penance, to go to a new community without the blemish of your crime and starting a new life," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group focused on civil liberties online.

The plan to provide US students with compulsory flat-fee music finally has a name, it emerged this week. Choruss LLC will provide participating universities with a replacement for their current subscription services such as Rhapsody, and has the backing of the the EFF and the tacit support of the RIAA. That alone indicates the magnitude of the initiative. When have those two lobbying groups ever agreed on music policy?

A new digital music service is getting lots of attention for proposing to help consumers sell their used MP3s in much the same way people once unloaded second-hand albums...

Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that supports Internet-user rights, says to the best of his knowledge, the issue has never been addressed in court.

The Internet Watch Foundation should be congratulated for lifting its ban on a Wikipedia entry that it deemed to contain child pornography. However, questions will remain about the IWF’s behaviour and the efficacy of censoring the internet...

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, the specific method of banning this Wikipedia page had the unintended consequence of preventing many British web users from editing Wikipedia at all. Clearly this is something the IWF and the ISPs who work with it had no business doing.

Mohamed Shommo, an engineer for Cisco Systems Inc., travels overseas several times a year for work, so he is accustomed to opening his bags for border inspections upon returning to the U.S. But in recent years, these inspections have gone much deeper than his luggage...

These objections led the Asian Law Caucus and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to file a Freedom of Information request to obtain the federal policy on border searches of electronic devices. When the government failed to respond, the groups filed a lawsuit this year. And lawmakers began demanding answers.

A response by Tiffany & Co’s. in its lawsuit against eBay, has caused Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Public Citizen and Public Knowledge, to file a brief, requesting a U.S. Court of Appeals to reject the retailer’s "attempt to rewrite trademark law and create new barriers for online commerce and communication."

It takes a special knee-jerk churliness to jackboot the music industry in the proverbial groin every time it comes up with a new idea...

"I think it's fantastic that WMG is willing to explore these options, and I think that universities offer a unique place to experiment with these ideas," said the EFF's Fred von Lohmann in an e-mail to Ars Technica.

Von Lohmann knows whereof he speaks; the man has been a gadfly on the music business for years and is the author of the EFF's "A Better Way Forward" plan for... voluntary collective licensing that would pool money and distribute it to labels and artists.

This week's top political tech story was the faceoff between lawyers for the Bush administration and Electronic Frontier Foundation attorneys who want a court to strike down a provision of the FISA Amendment Act granting retroactive immunity to telecoms that participated in the NSA's program of warrantless wiretapping. A judge will now have to decide whether the controversial statute gives the attorney general too much discretion to block claims that implicate the Fourth Amendment.

Heavyweights in the online world are weighing in on a lawsuit that threatens to derail internet retailing. The case is being brought by Tiffany against online auction site, eBay...

The latest vocal entrant into the legal debate is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and Public Citizen. If Tiffany prevails on appeal, online marketplaces would likely come "to a halt," the groups said in a court filing Wednesday. They urged the appellate court "to reject Tiffany's effort to rewrite trademark law to relieve mark-owners of their traditional obligation to police their own marks, online and off."

A provision in the federal Communications Decency Act (CDA) protects domain name registrars and Web hosting providers from being held legally liable in most cases for the content that clients post on their Web sites. But that hasn't stopped some companies from trying to pressure Internet intermediaries into disabling Web sites that contain what they consider to be objectionable material...

In an interview, EFF senior staff attorney Matthew Zimmerman said that U.S. law gives ample protection to Internet intermediaries in situations such as the one involving the nytimes-se.com site. The CDA "provides blanket immunity in a wide range of areas" to companies such as Joker.com, Zimmerman claimed.

A broad coalition of digital advocacy groups and individuals, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, MoveOn.org's Eli Pariser and Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, are applauding Barack Obama's stated commitment to open government and suggesting ways he can show that commitment further.

In a new Web site that went up Tuesday, the groups lay out three principles they hope the incoming administration will follow. Obama's transition team pre-emptively agreed to the first one by announcing Monday that its Web site, change.gov, will implement a new copyright policy -- the Creative Commons License -- that allows for more widespread use of its content.

The days of the Bush administration may be numbered, but government lawyers were still hotly contesting flagship domestic surveillance litigation in Northern District of California federal court on Tuesday, with one lawyer warning that moving forward could disclose intelligence tradecraft and "destroy" government secrecy privileges...

Nichols, the DOJ lawyer, said Walker should discuss his decision making solely with the government if he finds a lack of evidence, while Wiebe and Cindy Cohn, a plaintiffs attorney and legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said there should be an adversarial proceeding.

A federal judge who earlier rejected Bush administration claims that it was exempt from laws governing domestic surveillance was asked Tuesday to strike down an act of Congress that grants retroactive immunity for illegal wiretapping...

In a class action against AT&T, the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked Walker to rule the FISA Amendments Act unconstitutional, saying that it violated individual privacy rights and granted excessive latitude for the attorney general to decide the legal responsibility of carriers that gave data to the NSA.

This week President-Elect Obama rolled out his new national security and foreign policy team. There was much fanfare, even more speculation about the interpersonal dynamics between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton , D-N.Y., (and former President Bill Clinton), but only modest probing of the policy implications of this much-hyped “team of rivals"...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is arguing against the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act (FAA) that gives telecommunications companies retroactive civil immunity for their illegal participation in the National Security Agency’s (NSA) massive warrantless wiretapping and electronic surveillance scheme. The suit alleges that FISA Amendments Act “violates the federal government’s separation of powers as established in the Constitution, and robs innocent telecom customers of their rights without due process of law.”

For copyright activists, Christmas comes but once every three years: a chance to ask Santa for a new exemption to the much-hated Digital Millennium Copyright Act's prohibitions against hacking, reverse engineering, and evasion of digital rights management (DRM) schemes protecting all kinds of digital works and electronic items...

Electronic Frontier Foundation uber-lawyer Fred von Lohmann told Wired News earlier this week that the government "has repeatedly dismissed any consumer-oriented fair uses, such as making backup copies of DVDs or video games, as well as requests for exemptions to enable copying DVDs to laptops and portable devices." He also told them that the DMCA exemption process is "hopelessly broken."

If it were legal, would it still be a jailbreak? The Electronic Frontier Foundation is requesting a Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemption for cell phone users who jailbreak, or hack, their mobile devices to run third-party applications from sources other than those approved by the phone maker.

Every three years, the Library of Congress reconsiders its list of allowed exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on circumventing DRM...

The EFF wants three things out of the current process. First up is protection for remixes, with a proposed exemption that allows amateur remixers to legally rip their clips from DVDs.

Yesterday, the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) - that 18-year digital-freedom superhero - filed a pair of petitions with the United States Copyright Office, seeking to protect mobile-phone jailbreakers, unlockers, and digital-media masher-uppers from the slings and arrows of outrageous lawsuits.

Every three years something special happens—and I’m not talking about a new Harry Potter movie. The U.S. Librarian of Congress is required to issue exemptions to the anti-circumvention clause of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the law that makes it a crime to work around encryption or Digital Rights Management protecting copyrighted materials...

The proposal in question was submitted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and argues that end users should be allowed to jailbreak their phones to use legally-acquired third-party applications.

Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation faced off against government attorneys Tuesday, as Judge Vaughn Walker heard arguments in a legal fight over telecoms' role in warrantless wiretapping that began almost three years ago. At issue is the constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act, passed by Congress this summer, which could end the suit against the telecoms by retroactively immunizing them for their participation in the controversial National Security Agency eavesdropping program.

A high-tech watchdog group will head to court Tuesday to challenge the constitutionality of a federal law aimed at granting immunity to telecommunications companies participating in illegal domestic surveillance. At the hearing before U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco, the Electronic Frontier Foundation will argue that amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act improperly take away Americans' claims arising out of the First and Fourth Amendments; violates the government's separation of powers; and robs telecom customers of their rights without due process of law.

A coalition of high-tech stakeholders led by Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, Web browser creator Mozilla, and the Participatory Culture Foundation are urging President-elect Barack Obama's transition team to follow a set of "open transition principles" as they deploy resources to the Internet...

Letter signatories include the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Free Press; Students for Free Culture; the Sunlight Foundation; Sun Microsystems Federal; MoveOn.org; Center for Citizen Media; the Internet Archive; American Solutions; Wikipiedia founder Jimmy Wales and others.

The Bush administration on Tuesday urged a federal judge to dismiss lawsuits against the nation's telecommunications companies accused of complying with the government's once-secret spy program adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks on the United States...

Assuming for the sake of argument the carriers and the government engaged in illegal eavesdropping, Walker wondered aloud what would be wrong with the litigation being solely directed at the government.

"Let's assume that's exactly what happened. Then why shouldn't the government just be on the hook for any harm or damage?" Walker asked.

Cindy Cohn, the EFF's legal director, replied that the 9th Circuit could still throw out the cases against the government under the State Secrets Privilege. In any event, she said, the telecoms should be held responsible. "Carriers have an independent duty to protect their customers."

The constitutionality of retroactive immunity for telecoms that helped Bush spy on Americans got its day in court Tuesday, a little less than a year after senator Christopher Dodd all but shuttered Congress with an ultimately futile one-man stand against the idea...

Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Walker that Congress had no right to give the attorney general a magic wand to make cases against the telecoms go away just by telling the judge a little bit about what happened. The group is suing AT&T for helping the government spy on Americans' internet and phone usage.

"We have a right to an injunction against the telecoms," EFF's legal director Cindy Cohn said. "They are the gatekeepers ... They have an independent duty to protect Americans' privacy."

A federal judge on Tuesday heard arguments in a case that centers on an important constitutional principle: can the Feds immunize any telecommunications company that violated the law by opening its network to government snoops?...

Deputy Assistant Attorney General Carl Nichols told Walker that the proper decision was to toss out the lawsuits and not second guess the Bush administration.

Nonsense, said Cindy Cohn, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that advocates for the rights of Internet users. EFF has brought a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on behalf of customers and accuses AT&T of turning over communication records to the National Security Agency. On Tuesday, Cohn and the EFF asked Walker to throw out the federal statute and to tell Congress to start over.

It's that time again when the Librarian of Congress considers carving out anti-circumvention exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann points out that the government "has repeatedly dismissed any consumer-oriented fair uses, such as making backup copies of DVDs or video games, as well as requests for exemptions to enable copying DVDs to laptops and portable devices."

Von Lohmann declared the DMCA exemption process "hopelessly broken."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for Internet users, is expected to argue in court on Tuesday that it's unconstitutional to prevent Americans from suing the telecom companies that allegedly helped the federal government unlawfully spy on them...

"The flawed (statute) improperly attempts to take away Americans' claims arising out of the First and Fourth Amendments," EFF wrote on its Web site. "(The law) violates the federal government's separation of powers as established in the Constitution, and robs innocent telecom customers of their rights without due process of law."

Surfing the Internet carries all sorts of minor hazards, including pop-up ads, vitriolic bloggers and time-wasting videos. As of last week, it also carries one that is anything but minor: the threat of criminal prosecution...

As a brief filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation put it, this interpretation of the law "would convert the millions of Internet-using Americans who disregard the terms of service associated with online services into federal criminals."

A travel industry group has called on the US government to halt its use of new machinery that remotely reads government issued identification cards at border crossings until the safety of the new system can be better understood...

"We think there's a significant risk down the road of people being tracked by these static unique ID numbers," Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Register. "How hard is it to harvest numbers and associate them with people's names?"

The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation's telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans' private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants...

The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation's telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans' private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.