USA Freedom Act Passes
Section 215 Expires—For Now
Senate to Vote on USA FREEDOM Act Later in the WeekSection 215 has expired. At least for now.The law that the NSA used to authorize its collection of vast amounts of information about the telephone calls of ordinary Americans is no more. Even though it’s likely temporary, it’s a good...
Don’t Worry, the Government Still Has Plenty of Surveillance Power If Section 215 Sunsets
The story being spun by the defenders of Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the Obama Administration is that if the law sunsets entirely, the government will lose critical surveillance capabilities. The fearmongering includes President Obama, who said: “heaven forbid we’ve got a problem where we could’ve prevented...
Cybersecurity and the Tylenol Murders
When a criminal started lacing Tylenol capsules with cyanide in 1982, Johnson & Johnson quickly sprang into action to ensure consumer safety. It increased its internal production controls, recalled the capsules, offered an exchange for tablets, and within two months started using triple-seal tamper-resistant packaging. The company focused on...
ISSA Information Security Summit
The Los Angeles Chapter of the Information Systems Security Association presents its seventh annual Information Security Summit at the Los Angeles Convention Center. ISSA-LA is offering EFF supporters a 20% registration discount when you use the promotion code Z9H1RM.
About the Summit:
Known for its...
Congress Must Not Authorize More Chilling of the First Amendment with Material Support Laws
We’ve made it clear that, while we’re not opposing it, USA Freedom just doesn’t go far enough for us to continue supporting it. We’ve noted some of our concerns—including the increase in the maximum sentence for material support for terrorism to 20 years. This provision, introduced at the behest...
EFF Battles Abuse of Site-Blocking Court Orders
New York – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged a federal court in an emergency hearing and a written filing this week to block the recording industry’s move to force Internet infrastructure companies into becoming copyright police with far-reaching restraining orders.
EFF represents CloudFlare, a service that speeds up...
Stupid Patent of the Month: All of Patent Class 705
In choosing this month’s Stupid Patent, we realized that we couldn’t choose just one. Instead, we decided to give the award to the entirety of patent class 705.
By way of explanation: every Tuesday, the Patent Office officially publishes new patents in the “Patent Gazette.” (This week’s is...
What Is the U.S. Doing About Wassenaar, and Why Do We Need to Fight It?
On May 20, 2015, the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) published its proposed implementation of the December 2013 changes to the Wassenaar Arrangement. What follows is a long post, as we're quite troubled by the BIS proposal. In short, we're going to be...
The US Senate's Patriot Act Fail
The US Senate did something big last week. In a midnight session, the Senate clearly rejected a clean reauthorization of the NSA’s bulk phone records collection program, voting 45-54 against proceeding with S. 1357, a two-month reauthorization of Section 215 and two other expiring provisions of the Patriot Act.
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