All Nations Lose with TPP's Expansion of Copyright Terms
EFF has previously written about various troubling provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) that is being negotiated under wraps. One other major concern is that TPP seeks to propagate the excessive copyright terms currently found in American copyright legislation, and will become yet another...
Blogging ITU: Internet Users Will Be Ignored Again if Flawed ITU Proposals Gain Traction
When the European Parliament rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement after hundreds of thousands of Europeans took to the streets in protest, it signaled disappointment in some of the extreme IP policies encouraged by ACTA that threatened the functioning of the Internet. But at the same time, the protests...
Peru’s Online Crime Bill Harms Innovation and Privacy
The Peruvian National Anthem proudly proclaims: “We are free! May we always be so!” Yet the Peruvian Congress is considering a sweeping new computer crime bill that threatens the privacy and online free expression of law-abiding Peruvians. Peruvians should stand against this ill-conceived bill that will place limits on...
Biometric National IDs and Passports: A False Sense of Security
People tend to think that digital copies of our biological features, stored in a government-run database, are problems of a dystopian future. But governments around the world are already using such technologies. Several countries are collecting massive amounts of biometric data for their national identity and passport...
Hey ITU Member States: No More Secrecy, Release the Treaty Proposals
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) will hold the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) in December in Dubai, an all-important treaty-writing event where ITU Member States will discuss the proposed revisions to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR). The ITU is a United Nations agency responsible for international...
Security for the 99%
The House of Representatives kicked off their “cybersecurity week” yesterday with a hearing titled "America Is Under Cyber Attack: Why Urgent Action is Needed." Needless to say, the rhetoric of fear was in full force. A lot of topics were raised by members of Congress and panelists, but...
How The Expansive Immunity Clauses in CISPA Will Facilitate Abuse of User Privacy
Rep. Rogers is adamant that the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is an information “sharing” bill. But despite the bill’s title and Rep. Rogers' assurances, the bill is also a surveillance bill. Its broad definitions allow private companies to monitor network traffic and...
The Impending Cybersecurity Power Grab – It’s not just for the United States
EFF, OpenMedia.ca, CIPPIC and a number of civil society organizations have declared this to be ‘Stop Cyber Spying Week’ in protest of several controversial U.S. cybersecurity legislative proposals, including the bill currently before Congress and the Senate called CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing...
Will Industry Agree to a Meaningful Do Not Track?
The fifth W3C meeting on Do Not Track was held in Washington DC last week. While progress has been made on many aspects of the standard for Do Not Track, several deep disagreements remain between privacy advocates and representatives of the online tracking industry.
Most seriously, ad industry...
French Constitutional Court Bans Law Enforcement Use of National Biometric ID Database
Last week, the Conseil Constitutionnel, the highest authority on the French Constitution, declared the provisions of a law permitting judicial and police use of a centralized national ID database to be unconstitutional. 200 members of the French Parliament referred the law to the Conseil following the law's adoption...
