7. The Electronic Frontier Foundation

In 1990 Secret Service agents raided the offices of Steve Jackson Games, which designed and sold role-playing titles. The raid was carried out with an unsigned search warrant and the offices were trashed, all in pursuit of a hacker accused of stealing a technical document later valued at US$13.

The raid, documented in Bruce Stirling's excellent The Hacker Crackdown, was the spur that led to the formation of the EFF. Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, was so enraged by the raid that he, John Gilmore (employee number five at Sun) and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow set up the EFF, with funding from Apple's Steve Wozniak, among others.

Digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation is asking an appellate court to uphold a groundbreaking order authorizing the Webcast of a file-sharing case.

"In general, we're big fans of the Internet and if the Internet can be used to give us more access to our government, that's a good thing," said Cindy Cohen, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

One of Ireland's largest ISPs, Eircom, has capitulated to the major music labels and agreed to implement a full "graduated response" program—complete with disconnections...

But Eircom has agreed to the plan on a voluntary basis, without any government pressure. The move lead the Electronic Frontier Foundation to blast the ISP over its claim that it will consider the evidence presented by the music industry before shutting anyone off.

Last summer, a district court ruled that selling promo CDs is perfectly legal. This was an important ruling, because it reinforced the right of first sale -- which has been a part of copyright law for ages -- and it made it clear that companies couldn't wipe out the limits of copyright law simply by declaring them void...

The EFF has now filed its own brief, noting the ridiculous consequences of any ruling where Universal wins.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has withheld more than 1,300 pages on an anticounterfeiting trade agreement being quietly negotiated after two digital rights groups filed a request for information, the groups said.

The USTR has released only 159 pages for public viewing after the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Public Knowledge filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seven months ago. In September, the two groups filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after USTR didn't immediately respond to the FOIA request, which asked for information on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) being negotiated between the U.S. and more than a dozen other countries.

News arrived this week via the Electronic Frontier Foundation that Michigan State University had dropped disciplinary action against a student who had been accused of spamming and network abuse because she sent e-mail about a controversial campus matter to 391 faculty members.

President Barack Obama's use of YouTube has drawn fire from the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is questioning whether it poses a threat to people's online privacy.

"Overall, we believe visitors to government Web sites should be able to view official information securely, without fear of being tracked either by the government itself or by third parties such as YouTube," EFF director Cindy Cohn wrote Tuesday in a letter to White House counsel Gregory Craig. "If the government uses the services of private companies, it should make sure that those companies employ the same privacy-protective standards that the government sets for itself."

Watch an advertisement on a video screen in a mall, health club or grocery store and there's a slim — but growing — chance the ad is watching you too...

The idea still worries Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-liberties group in San Francisco. Tien said it's not enough to say some system is "not as bad as some other technology," and argues that cameras that study people contribute to an erosion of privacy.

Back when he was campaigning for president, Barack Obama's skillful use of Web 2.0 technologies such as Facebook and YouTube enabled him to get his message out to new audiences of voters in an unprecedented fashion. But using the same technologies in his new role as president is already proving to be more controversial...

n a letter mailed Tuesday to White House Counsel Gregory Craig, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) questioned a waiver that was issued by Craig's office concerning the use of cookies on the WhiteHouse.gov site. The waiver, which is now part of the site's modified privacy policy allows the use of persistent cookies by "some third-party providers to help maintain the integrity of video statistics."

It's nice to see that someone at the White House is reading the work of privacy maven Chris Soghoian. Less than a day after Chris drew attention to a special YouTube exemption in the privacy policy for WhiteHouse.gov—permitting YouTube to plant tracking cookies on visitors' machines—the president's virtual home made some rapid changes.

First, they implemented what amounts to a homegrown version of EFF's MyTube tool, so that only those who actually click on the video, rather than all who visit the page, get cookified. Soon thereafter, they amended the posted privacy policy to refer to "third party providers" generically, rather than signaling a special status for YouTube. Still, the fuss prompted the Electronic Frontier Foundation to write to White House lawyers seeking more information about how an administration fond of touting the transformative power of tech would work to protect the privacy of visitors to government sites.

We have Valentines Day and Mothers Day and even Inauguration Day. And now that cyber crooks have turned the Internet into their playground, we've got Data Privacy Day...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that advocates for the rights of Internet users, has its own suggestion for Obama's administration. In a statement published on its Web site on Tuesday, the EFF said the new Whitehouse.gov site uses embedded YouTube movies that place a cookie on the visitor's computer, which enables tracking of the computer as it visits different Web sites. The White House should work with YouTube to end the retention of cookie data for any video on a government site, the EFF said.

Corey Vidal is no pirate, but he's been branded one as a result of the licensing spat between Warner Music Group and YouTube...

YouTube users should not assume copyright holders are always correct when they accuse someone of a violation, according to Fred von Lohmann, senior attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a watchdog group that advocates for the rights of Internet users. In the Viacom case, for instance, the company acknowledged erring in a small number of cases.

In a scenario that sounds like the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist, former NSA analyst and now-whistleblower Russell Tice unveiled a massive NSA spying and wiretap program, which he claims vacuumed up an astonishing amount of communications and financial data on journalists and innocent Americans...

Tice could not say whether the program was still in operation, as his access to all such information was shut off after being fired in 2005. Shortly after voicing his initial allegations, as well as serving as a source for the New York Times article that launched the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s warrantless wiretapping investigation, Tice was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury in what The Raw Story called “an apparent attempt at intimidation.”

Just 12 hours after this blog highlighted the privacy problems associated with the White House's use of embedded YouTube videos, the Obama team rushed to deploy a technical fix that significantly protects the privacy of many (but not all) of the site's visitors...

This is clearly a step in the right direction--and it is particularly interesting to see that the White House has essentially rolled their own version of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's MyTube privacy tool.

Searching for data about the Obama administration should get easier as the Whitehouse.gov website gets overhauled...

The moves were welcomed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which said the memoranda stood in stark contrast to a memo issued by John Ashcroft soon after 9/11. This called on government bodies to only release information after exhausting all strategies, including legal action, to withhold it.

While Mr Obama's memoranda do not explicitly overturn this policy, the EFF said: "This is a big step in the right direction."

In his first full day in office, President Barack Obama issued several broad directives that are being widely hailed by consumer-advocacy groups as important first steps toward making government more transparent. Even though implementation plans have yet to be drafted, some observers believe that the Web will begin to play a much larger role in disseminating information from government agencies...

In a telephone interview with The Standard, Marcia Hofmann, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the new directives would make it easier for people to gain access to information.

"On the whole, it's an incredibly positive development and in line with the guidelines we asked for," she said.

The new website for Obama's White House is already drawing attention from privacy activists and tech bloggers. While the initial focus has been on site's policies relating to search engine robots, a far more interesting tidbid has so far escaped the public eye: the White House has quietly exempted YouTube from strict rules regulating to the use of cookies on federal agency websites...

The Obama White House website is only two days old, and so it is certainly possible that the team simply hasn't gotten around to deploying a more privacy preserving system for YouTube video embeds. Protecting users who do not click play from automatically receiving a cookie is certainly possible -- the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2008 released a wrapper script for YouTube videos that provided this very feature. Let us hope that the Obama team deploys such a technology in due course.

he Kentucky Court of Appeals has overturned a Circuit Court ruling that had authorized the state to seize the Internet domain names of 141 online gambling sites in an effort to block access to them from inside the state...

Matthew Zimmerman, senior staff attorney at the EFF, today said that the appellate court's decision was based on an interpretation of state statutes and was the "right one." Though the lower court decision was appealed on constitutional issues as well, the appellate court did not have to examine those issues in deciding the case.

The Child Online Protection Act, now a decade old, appears to be permanently, completely, and otherwise absolutely dead now that the Supreme Court has rejected Bush Administration pleas to consider reviving the law one more time. According to the Associated Press, the rejection was made without comment by the justices...

In 2007, a federal court issued a permanent injunction against enforcing the law, saying that it violated the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution. That ruling came after a four-week trial featuring an array of plaintiffs that included the American Civil Liberties Union, Salon.com, Condomania (described in the opinion as the "nation's first condom store"), the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other organizations and individuals. The government continued to appeal.

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to resurrect a law requiring Web sites containing "material harmful to minors" to restrict access based on age, presumably ending a 10-year fight over whether the law violated free speech rights...

Opponents of the law, including the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Nerve.com, Salon.com, the Urban Dictionary and the Sexual Health Network, argued the law amounted to government censorship and was so broad that it would affect many Web sites, including those that included information on sexually transmitted diseases.

Kentucky officials must return 141 gambling domain names they seized last year in a bid to block internet betting within state borders, an appeals court panel ordered on Tuesday...

The reversal is a victory for civil-liberties advocates who argued that the laws of an individual state shouldn't trump the rights of others to access sites that are perfectly legal elsewhere. In friend-of-the-court briefs filed in November, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky argued the decision would pave the way for Kentucky to take control of any domain name if it pointed to sites that were deemed illegal in that state.

Technology firms are often hampered by patent disputes, but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office called into question last week a patent that had the potential to disrupt the habits of millions of Internet users.

The PTO rejected all 20 patent claims over Internet subdomains held by a company called Hoshiko, which were used to bully sites like LiveJournal and Freehomepage.com and pursue litigation against larger companies like Google. The idea behind how to manage subdomains--domains hosted within larger domains, such as news.cnet.com--is too obvious to patent, the PTO ruled after the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation requested the patent be re-examined.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has rejected 20 patent claims on an Internet subdomain patent, ruling that the concepts were obvious and therefore not patentable. The patent owner must now decide whether to amend the claims and make them more narrow, or to give up altogether...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation took aim at the patent via its Patent Busting Project, calling it a "bogus software patent" that stifles creativity and innovation. The Ideaflood patent made the EFF's Top Ten Most Wanted list, and the EFF joined forces with attorney Rick Mc Leod to request a USPTO reexamination of the patent's claims.

When Barack Obama takes the oath of office, many of the estimated 2 million people in the crowd will hold up their cell phones to capture a photo of the moment...

In 2006, the Army’s Web Risk Assessment Cell, or AWRAC, which didn’t exist when Bush took office, scanned 1,200 military Web sites and blogs, or milblogs, for potential security leaks. Immediately, bloggers flagged it as a Soviet-style purge against digital freedom.

The audit’s results, obtained a year later by the Electronic Frontier Foundation via a Freedom of Information Act request, showed nearly 2,000 cases of operational security breaches on the military’s own Web sites, but "at most, 28," breaches on nearly 600 personal blogs reviewed.

President-elect Barack Obama dismayed civil liberties groups last summer when he voted to authorize President Bush's clandestine wiretapping program after publicly denouncing it...

A lawyer for the customers, Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said their case differs from Al-Haramain's but comes down to the same argument: that the president can't unilaterally authorize spying on Americans.

If the new administration wants to take a different course, she said, "we certainly hope that they'll come talk to us" about a settlement.

Worried that your broadband provider is slowing down your Web traffic?

If so, you might want to download the aptly named “Switzerland” — a tool that tests whether your Internet provider is violating the principles of so-called “network neutrality"...

“Congress may or may not decide to pass legislation on this,” said Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist with the EFF who designed Switzerland. “But we are going to need tools to know what’s going on and spot causes for concern on the network.”

The blogosphere is humming Friday with reports a federal judge is refusing to require the nation's first peer-to-peer admin convicted by a jury of criminal copyright infringement to pay tens of thousands of dollars in restitution to the Recording Industry Association of America...

"The factors that go into the calculation of restitution are different than the ones that go into the calculation of statutory damages in civil cases," said Fred von Lohmann, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has begun a new campaign to get the public to complain to lawmakers about the limitations of locked mobile phones. The new site, FreeYourPhone.org, encourages citizens to sign a petition going to the US Copyright Office in support of the EFF's recent push for an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which it hopes will offer legal protection to phone users who have jailbroken or unlocked their devices.

Attorneys for two civil rights group filed a federal court lawsuit Wednesday charging numerous violations by local law enforcement and the FBI in an Aug. 27 raid of Berkeley’s Long Haul Infoshop...

“The Slingshot and EBPS computers were clearly marked and kept behind locked doors,” said EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick. “Yet the raid officers broke into the offices to take information these organizations collected and relied on to publish information to their readership.

Attorneys for two civil rights group filed a federal court lawsuit Wednesday charging numerous violations by local law enforcement and the FBI in an Aug. 27 raid of Berkeley’s Long Haul Infoshop...

“The Slingshot and EBPS computers were clearly marked and kept behind locked doors,” said EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick. “Yet the raid officers broke into the offices to take information these organizations collected and relied on to publish information to their readership.

The FBI, Alameda County, and the Regents of the University of California are named in a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of two activist groups near Berkeley who were recently the targets of a law enforcement raid. The organizations—the East Bay Prisoner Support Group (EBPS) and an independent bookstore and library called Long Haul—claim that their computers and records were wrongfully seized. They are asking the court for injunctive and declaratory relief...

"The Slingshot and EBPS computers were clearly marked and kept behind locked doors," said EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick in a statement. "Yet the raid officers broke into the offices to take information these organizations collected and relied on to publish information to their readership. This is a blatant violation of federal law and the First and Fourth Amendments, interfering with the freedom of the press."

The U.S. Supreme Court has asked President-elect Barack Obama's administration to weigh in on a copyright case that could affect a broad swath of online media and technology companies...

Michael Kwun, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, added that the case could provide support to companies like MP3Tunes.com, which offers a digital music locker that allows people to access their songs from any Web-enabled computer. MP3Tunes.com is currently defending a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by EMI. "It's relevant to any remote storage system," he said.

Is there a way for the IWF and other filtering organizations to be transparent about the sites they block, without somehow promoting that information online? Already, the site Wikileaks has obtained and posted the site blacklist of the Thai government, which strangely enough includes Hillary Clinton campaign videos and Charlie Chaplin clips on YouTube.

The EFF's O'Brien says that the IWF has been more public than other groups and governments that filter, but that its system is flawed from the start.

With one legal step, President Obama could undo the retroactive legal immunity for telecommunications companies allegedly involved in warrantless wiretapping that he opposed as Sen. Obama...

“We think the only thing for the Obama administration to do, if Sen. Obama actually meant what he said about his opposition, is, well, he’s now in a position to stop it immediately,” said Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney with the foundation.

Attorneys for two civil rights group filed a federal court lawsuit Wednesday charging numerous violations by local law enforcement and the FBI in an Aug. 27 raid of Berkeley’s Long Haul Infoshop...

"The Slingshot and EBPS computers were clearly marked and kept behind locked doors," said EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick. “Yet the raid officers broke into the offices to take information these organizations collected and relied on to publish information to their readership.

The Kentucky Court of Appeals is expected to issue a ruling soon on whether a state court can order the seizure of Internet domain names that are registered in another state or country...

In a friend-of-the-court brief, Matthew Zimmerman, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the ruling is "unconstitutional and [was] made without jurisdictional authority."

Zimmerman said he expects that the appeals court will issue a ruling later this month.

A number of iPhone owners out there have chosen to jailbreak their devices, and although Apple hasn't done much to stop the practice, it's unclear what the legal situation related to jailbreaking looks like. In an effort to protect jailbreakers from DMCA claims, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked the Copyright Office for a DMCA exemption for jailbreaking, and the organization would like developers (and presumably iPhone users as well) to chime in on the proposed exemption.

In a case that could chill free speech online, a San Francisco chiropractor has sued a local artist over negative reviews published on Yelp, the popular Web site that rates businesses...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a local nonprofit that supports free speech online, is considering helping with Norberg's defense. Matt Zimmerman, an attorney with the group, said Biegel will get far more negative publicity from filing the lawsuit than from a bad review on Yelp. He said the foundation is seeing more and more cases of people trying to use the courts because they're unhappy with postings on the Internet.

"When people try to pull down unflattering material, it has the absolute opposite effect" of what they intend, he said. "It's very difficult to silence speakers on the Internet - it's a culture of people who don't like those kinds of attempts."

The DMCA has plenty of problems, but one of the more ridiculous is the whole concept of the "notice and takedown" procedure that service providers need to follow...

Take for example, the latest example, presented by the EFF, who notes that Fox News has used the DMCA takedown process to pull down three clips from Fox News that were being used by a group called Progress Illinois who was using the videos as part of commentary on current events -- a common and valid fair use of content.

Overturning bad patents does not happen at Internet speed, and if you need evidence for that thesis, consider the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Patent Busting Project. The group set out to overturn 10 hugely broad patents back in 2004; four years later, only six of the patent reexamination requests have even been written, much less acted on. But the good news for the EFF is that it is batting 1.000 with its filings, as the US Patent & Trademark Office has just granted the EFF's sixth patent reexam request...

As Michael Kwun explained to me, "The other five are at various stages in the reexam process. Each of those five reexams is a so-called ex parte reexamination. That means, for the most part, that the rest of the reexamination is conducted between the PTO and the patentee. There is another form of reexamination, called an inter partes reexamination, in which the requester [EFF] can continue to participate in the reexamination proceedings on an ongoing basis, but that type of reexamination can only take place with respect to newer patents."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken the opportunity to both applaud and slam Apple on the digital rights management (DRM) front just one day after the company announced that some 10 million iTunes Store tracks would be DRM-free by the end of April. In a blog post on the EFF's website, EFF Activist Richard Esguerra points out that the deal between Apple and the record companies shows "DRM's true colors"—that is, that it's designed to act as a form of control rather than to fight piracy.

A Canadian woman has launched a lawsuit against Google Inc., demanding that the company reveal the identity of the people she says posted offensive statements about her on a blog hosted by the U.S. technology titan...

“Google is not responsible for what people write on its Blogger service,” said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who focuses on civil liberties, free speech and privacy law.

“A suit against Google will not succeed because Google is given immunity by federal law,” he said.

The Kentucky Court of Appeals is expected to issue a ruling soon on whether a state court can order the seizure of Internet domain names that are registered in another state or country. The appeals court is deliberating whether to uphold a lower court's approval of a state plan to seize Internet domain names belonging to 141 online gambling sites...

In an amicus brief filed in the appeals court, Matthew Zimmerman, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) a San Francisco-based advocacy group, called the Franklin County Circuit Court's ruling "unconstitutional and made without jurisdictional authority."

On December 29, video-sharing site Veoh won another legal victory after Universal Music Group sought to keep the company from using a "safe harbor" defense against copyright infringement. A federal judge has rejected such pleas...

Veoh might not qualify for a safe harbor in the end, but the judge's ruling makes clear that automated processing of UGC won't be the reason for any disqualification. This is crucial; as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann notes in his analysis of the case, "If the court had accepted UMG's arguments, every web host would lose the safe harbor as soon as it made web pages available to the public. The ruling should also help YouTube in its ongoing battle with Viacom, which also turns on the continuing strength of the DMCA safe harbors."

A federal judge ruled Monday that "sufficient facts" exist to keep alive a lawsuit brought by two U.S.-based lawyers for a Islamic charity who say they were eavesdropped on without warrants...

Walker is also considering a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation challenging whether Congress unconstitutionally granted immunity to telecommunications companies from those lawsuits accusing them of assisting the Bush administration to secretly spy on Americans without warrants.

Even as cost-conscious Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger looks to trim state spending every way he can, officials at the Department of Motor Vehicles are planning to spend tens of millions of dollars on new driver's license technology...

The ACLU is fighting the proposal with a handful of other groups, including Consumers Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Consumer Federation of California, which says the plan poses "massive threats" to personal privacy.

Two more Uptown community groups have been named in subpoenas filed by the attorney representing Wilson Yard developer, Peter Holsten...

Matt Zimmerman, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, characterized the subpoenas as "overreaching."

"I think there is a temptation of litigators in casting a pretty broad net to find as much information as they can," Zimmerman said. "The First Amendment provides pretty clear limitations on litigants and what information they can obtain about the identities of people exercising their First Amendment rights. This case even more squarely falls into the First Amendment category because these are Web sites that people are commenting on matters of public importance concerning this development."

Web-savvy moms who breast-feed are irate that social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace restrict photos of nursing babies. The disputes reveal how the sites' community policing techniques sometimes struggle to keep up with the booming number and diversity of their members...

While Schnitt said Facebook's policies predate a recent push by law enforcement agencies to better protect children from online predators, the whole field of Web hangouts may be skittish about anything that might expose kids to nudity, said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the free-speech watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation.