Offline: Ahmed Mansoor
Technologist and activist, UAE
Arrested: March 19, 2017
Currently serving a 10 year sentence
Ahmed Mansoor has been a key figure for over a decade in protesting Internet censorship, surveillance and oppression in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A telecommunications engineer by training, he studied law in the UAE, and is a published poet.
Google’s Leadership Still Needs To Give Details About Project Dragonfly: Googlers Can Still Help
Earlier this week, we joined with Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Article 19, and 10 other international human rights groups in a letter to Google’s senior leadership, calling on the company to come clean on its intentions in China – both to the public, and within the company.A little...
California Bill Is a Win for Access to Scientific Research
In Passing A.B. 2192, California Leads the Country in Open AccessThe California legislature just scored a huge win in the fight for open access to scientific research. Now it’s up to Governor Jerry Brown to sign it.Under A.B. 2192—which passed both houses unanimously—all peer-reviewed, scientific research funded by the...
Stupid Patent of the Month: A Newspaper on a Screen
One of the oldest challenges in journalism is deciding what goes on the front page. How big should the headline be? What articles merit front-page placement? When addressing these questions, publishers deal with a physical limit in the size of the page. Digital publishing faces a similar constraint: the storage...
Appeals Court Asks the Right Questions in NSA Surveillance Case
On Monday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York held argument in United States v. Hasbajrami, an important case involving surveillance under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. It is only the second time a federal appeals court has been asked to rule on whether...
When ISPs Tell Seniors Net Neutrality Laws Will Increase Their Bills, They’re Lying and Losing
The fight to secure net neutrality protections for Californians keeps showing how far ISPs and their surrogates will go to make a buck off of ending the free and open Internet. The latest maneuver is a flood of deceptive robocalls targeting seniors and stating that net neutrality will raise...
Back to School Essentials for Security
Going back to school? This is a perfect time for a digital security refresh to ensure the privacy of you and your friends is protected! It’s a good time to change your passwords. The best practice is to have passwords that are unique, long, and random. In order to keep...
Trust Us, We’re Secretly Working for a Foreign Government: How Australia’s Proposed Surveillance Laws Will Break The Trust Tech Depends On
In the last few years, we’ve discovered just how much trust — whether we like it or not — we have all been obliged to place in modern technology. Third-party software, of unknown composition and security, runs on everything around us: from the phones we carry around, to the smart...
Sen. Wyden Confirms Cell-Site Simulators Disrupt Emergency Calls
Sen. Ron Wyden has sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice concerning disruptions to 911 emergency services caused by law enforcement’s use of cell-site simulators (CSS, also known as IMSI catchers or Stingrays). In the letter, Sen. Wyden states that:Senior officials from the Harris Corporation—the manufacturer...
If It Doesn't Have Paper Backups and Automatic Audits, It's Not an Election Security Bill
Right now, the U.S. Senate is debating an issue that’s critical to our democratic future: secure elections. Hacking attacks were used to try to undermine the 2016 U.S. election, and in recent years, elections in Latin America and Ukraine were also subject to cyber attacks.It only makes sense to harden...
