Copyright Office Sets Trap for Unwary Website Owners
Making Safe Harbors Expire Is Dangerous and Unnecessary
Under a new rule from the Copyright Office, website owners could be exposed to massive risk of copyright liability simply for neglecting to submit an online form on time. The rule could eliminate the safe harbor status that thousands of websites...
Mass Surveillance at Public Gatherings Is Why We Need Oversight Policies
You probably don’t expect the government to log and track your personally identifying information, despite having broken no laws, just because you attended an event at the fairgrounds. That would be preposterous in the Land of the Free.
But, according to the Wall Street Journal, federal agencies...
Congress Needs More Information Before the Government’s New Hacking Powers Kick in
The federal government is set to get massively expanded hacking powers later this year. Thankfully, members of Congress are starting to ask questions.
In a letter this week to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, 23 members of Congress—including Sens. Ron Wyden and Patrick Leahy and Rep. John Conyers—pressed...
Patent Trolls Undermine Open Access
This Open Access Week, the global open access community has a lot to celebrate. Hundreds of universities around the world have adopted open access policies asking faculty to publish their research in open access journals or archive them in open repositories. A few years ago,...
AT&T Requires Police to Hide Hemisphere Phone Spying
AT&T built a powerful phone surveillance tool for police, called Hemisphere. Every day, AT&T adds four billion call records to Hemisphere, making it one of the largest known reservoirs of communications metadata that the government uses to spy on us. Law enforcement officials kept Hemisphere “under the radar”...
Obama’s Silence on Crypto Could Set the Stage For Bad Policies to Come
One year ago today, the 100,000th person added their name to a public petition calling on President Obama to categorically reject any attempt to add backdoors to our devices or otherwise undermine encryption.
Since then, crickets.
Obama has promised to reply to petitions on his We...
What Do Trade Agreements Do for Open Access—And What Don't They Do?
“If you can't beat 'em, join 'em” seems to have become the tech industry's attitude towards the current crop of trade agreements, such as the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Their reasoning is just as these agreements can be...
Empty Promises on Privacy for Foreigners Abroad in PPD-28
The Obama administration promised privacy protections for foreigners abroad, but PPD-28 fails to deliver those protections
In early 2014, still reeling from global outrage over recently uncovered surveillance programs, President Barack Obama pledged to rein in the U.S. government’s spying and boost privacy protections for people in the U.S....
Debunking the Patriot Act as It Turns 15
The Patriot Act turns 15 today, but that’s nothing to celebrate.
Since President George W. Bush signed this bill into law on October 26, 2001, the Patriot Act has been ardently defended by its supporters in the intelligence community and harshly criticized by members of Congress, the tech industry,...
It's Time for Answers on Yahoo's Email Scanning
You should know if the government thinks it can deputize your email provider to scan through your messages.
Like most people, we were shocked at reports earlier this month that Yahoo scanned its hundreds of millions of users’ emails looking for a digital signature on behalf of the...
