A bipartisan group of congressional leaders has reintroduced the USA Freedom Act. The bill is an attempt to rein in the intelligence community's "Collect It All" strategy, and passing USA Freedom is a first, small step in the right direction. However, it has serious faults that...
Imagine you’re on your way to deliver a case of beer to a party. Before you get there, your boss sends you a text: They want 2 cases now. You read the text while driving (don’t do that), so you deliver an extra case when you arrive. Having successfully completed...
Deeplinks Blog by Jeremy Malcolm, Maira Sutton | April 30, 2015
The United States Trade Representative (USTR) has released its Special 301 Report for 2015 today, and true to form, it is another one-sided and harmful missive to the rest of the world that names and shames countries for not mirroring, or even exceeding, the United States’ restrictive copyright rules.
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San Francisco – Overly broad intellectual property (IP) laws in Russia, Colombia, and Pakistan—which U.S. trade regulators say aren’t tough enough—stifle access to innovation and threaten artists, students, and creators around the globe with prison, censorship, and state prosecution, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in a new report released...
São Paulo, Brazil's largest city and cultural center, hosted the second annual CryptoRave—a 24-hour long event where activists, organizations, and an eager audience collaborated to teach and learn about cyptography.
Every year, the United States publishes a report on countries that, in the opinion of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), fail to give “adequate and effective” protection to U.S. holders of intellectual property rights. This Special 301 Report names and shames nations that do not meet a vague and impossibly...
Wikimedia's Crypto-thon will provide valuable information about security, as well as practical skills to improve privacy and communicate more securely. Guests will include:
Srdja Popovic, a founder and leader of Otpor!, the movement credited with bringing down Serbian President Slobodan Milosovic in non-violent revolution. Nico Sell, an organizer...
A bipartisan group of senators introduced the PATENT Act today—the latest reform bill to take on patent trolls. Authored by Sens. Grassley, Leahy, Cornyn, Schumer, Lee, Hatch, and Klobuchar, the "Protecting American Talent and Entrepreneurship Act of 2015" is an important step toward stopping abusive patent litigation.
The...
For years, with seemingly little to no oversight, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) has been monitoring vast amounts of non-military U.S. Internet traffic and communications, looking for evidence of criminal activity. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit correctly held this “extraordinary” and illegal surveillance...
Rogue archivist, EFF client, and 2009 Pioneer Award winner Carl Malamud is hosting Law Day at the Internet Archive, where he's asking people to come by and write a brief postcard to explain to judges why PACER—and the public's access to it—is so important. EFF staffers will drop by throughout...
There may be nobody more committed to ensuring that the people have access to the law than rogue archivist, EFF client, and 2009 Pioneer Award winner Carl Malamud. This Friday, his latest campaign to free PACER culminates in a "polling place" at the Internet Archive in San Francisco,...
When we re-launched Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) last year to tackle the growing threat of online spying, we knew our greatest challenge was reaching everyone who urgently needed its advice. Technical knowledge about what to do, and what not to do, to protect your privacy online, is only truly useful...
The steamroller that is the copyright enforcement machine continues to trundle along around the world, flattening obstacles such as fair use, privacy and freedom of expression in its path. One of its latest stops has been in Australia, where that country’s copyright site-blocking laws, first seriously mooted last year,...
Military investigators with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service ("NCIS") launched an investigation into online criminal activity by anyone in the state of Washington without limiting their search to military personnel or computers. Through this online surveillance, NCIS officials connected Dreyer, a civilian, to criminal activity and turned him over to...
Aaron’s law, the proposed law named in honor of Internet hero Aaron Swartz was reintroduced last week by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Senator Wyden (D-Ore.), with new co-sponsor Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.). This bill is the same as the one introduced in 2013 and we call upon...
