EFF is a nonprofit group of passionate people — lawyers, technologists, volunteers, and visionaries — working to protect your digital rights.
HOT TOPICS
- » Trusted Computing
- » Blizzard v. bnetd
- » OPG v. Diebold
- » USA PATRIOT Act
- » E-voting Quick Ref Guides
- » US v. Councilman
- » Chamberlain v. Skylink
- » MGM v. Grokster
- » E-voting
- » JibJab v. Ludlow
- » Broadcast Flag
- » Patent Busting
- » Anonymity
- » CALEA
- » Censorship
- » Copyright Law
- » Digital Rights Management
- » DMCA
- » File-sharing
- » FTAA
- » RFID
Server hosting and bandwidth services donated by the good folks at craigslist and UnitedLayer Inc.
EFF would also like to thank these companies and individuals that have made significant generous donations to help make our work possible.
Sometimes activism can be fun. Come join EFF at the 111 Minna Gallery in downtown San Francisco to talk about e-voting and the upcoming election, as well as share food and drink and listen to live music by talented local artist Samantha. This event is free and open to the public, so be sure to invite your friends and colleagues! » more
Court to Rehear Email Privacy Case
Boston, MA - The First Circuit Court of Appeals decided today to rehear argument in a case that could have a profound effect on email privacy. Last month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, US v. Councilman, urging such a rehearing. In the earlier decision, a panel of First Circuit judges ruled that an email service provider did not violate criminal provisions of the Wiretap Act by monitoring the content of users' incoming messages without their consent. However, the Wiretap Act is the same law that requires the government to get a wiretap order before intercepting emails, and the panel decision could be read to eliminate this requirement. As the panel itself admitted, "it may well be that the protections of the Wiretap Act have been eviscerated as technology advances..."
EFF, Public Interest Groups Challenge Legality of the Broadcast Flag
Washington, DC - When the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) broadcast flag mandate goes into effect next year, it will be unlawful to sell devices that can tune in digital television without imposing copy protection on the signal. Many groups have argued that the mandate will hobble people's ability to make fair use of their media. And late yesterday, nine public interest organizations -- including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Public Knowledge (PK), and the American Library Association (ALA) -- told the US Appeals Court, DC Circuit, that the FCC exceeded its authority by imposing the broadcast flag regime. The "flag" is a small amount of data included in a digital TV signal that gives instructions on how the programming may be used by devices other than the ones that directly receive the signal. This has the potential to severely limit the lawful distribution, use, and backup of digital programs...
WIPO Announces Plans to Support Public Domain, Open Source
Geneva - The United Nation's (UN's) World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has adopted a "development agenda" that acknowledges the need for balance in worldwide policy on trademark, copyright, and patents. In the past, WIPO has been roundly resistant to attempts to balance the interests of copyright holders, who make up the majority of WIPO participants, and the public, which had never been represented at the meetings. Previous efforts to get WIPO to hold one-day information sessions on alternatives to copyright -- such as the public-domain human genome database, the GPL software license that underpins GNU/Linux, and the Creative Commons project's millions of "some rights reserved" books, movies, songs, and images -- has been firmly rebuffed, with major WIPO nations applying enormous pressure to see to it that the issue was never brought to the table. Now, in the wake of the "Geneva Declaration" -- a document calling on WIPO to work in the interest of all of its stakeholders, including the public -- WIPO's General Assembly has adopted a "development agenda," a kind of lens of public-interest considerations through which the treaty-body will view all future activities.
California Ruling Makes Accurate Recount on E-voting Machines Impossible
Riverside, California - A superior court in a Riverside County, California ruled last week that the local registrar of voters does not have to hand over backup data from e-voting machines to verify the results of a recount. Linda Soubirous, a Republican board of supervisors candidate, requested the data after she was granted the right to a recount in a close race which she lost. The county registrar refused to give her access to a wide range of audit and backup data from from the Sequoia touchscreen e-voting machines used in the election. Soubirous challenged the registrar in court, arguing that without this data the recount simply amounted to a reprint of the same potentially erroneous information. Judge James S. Hawkins ruled the county was able to decide for itself what data was relevant for recount purposes...
Dangerous Ruling Menaces Rights of Free Software Programmers
St. Louis - Fair use was dealt a harsh blow today in a Federal Court decision which held that programmers are not allowed to create free software designed to work with commercial products. At issue in the case was whether three software programmers who created the BnetD game server -- which interoperates with Blizzard video games online -- were in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Blizzard Games' end user license agreement (EULA). BnetD is an open source program that lets gamers play popular Blizzard titles like Warcraft with other gamers on servers that don't belong to Blizzard's Battle.net service. Blizzard argued that the programmers who wrote BnetD violated the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions and that the programmers also violated several parts of Blizzard's EULA, including a section on reverse-engineering...
EFF Wins in Diebold Copyright Abuse Case
San Jose - In a landmark case, a California district court has determined that Diebold, Inc., a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, knowingly misrepresented that online commentators, including IndyMedia and two Swarthmore college students, had infringed the company's copyrights. This makes the company the first to be held liable for violating section 512(f) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it unlawful to use DMCA takedown threats when the copyright holder knows that infringement has not actually occured. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Internet and Society Cyberlaw Clinic at Stanford Law School sued on behalf of nonprofit Internet Service Provider (ISP) Online Policy Group (OPG) and the two students to prevent Diebold's abusive copyright claims from silencing public debate about voting...
Court Strikes Down Key USA PATRIOT Power
New York - The American Civil Liberties Union won a tremendous victory for Internet privacy today in the case of ACLU & Doe v. Ashcroft, challenging the constitutionality of "National Security Letters" (NSLs) under the USA PATRIOT Act. The letters, issued directly by the Department of Justice without any court oversight, can be used to demand sensitive financial and communications information about citizens even if they are not suspected of any crime. When Internet Service Providers receive such demands they are forbidden from revealing their existence to anyone. A federal court issued a decision in the case finding that the statute authorizing NSLs is unconstitutional and barring the DOJ from issuing further NSLs. U.S. District Court Judge Victor Marreo also found the gag provision an unconstitutional prior restraint on protected speech...
Court of Appeals Revives Florida E-voting Lawsuit
Florida - The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals today overturned a lower court's ruling in a case that challenges the legality of Florida's paperless electronic voting machines. The federal suit, brought by Florida Congressman Robert Wexler, argues that the use of the machines violates the United States Constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process. The Court of Appeals ruled that the existence of a related lawsuit in Florida state court does not prevent the federal district court from hearing the challenge. The decision returns the case to the district court for further proceedings. "This important challenge will now be decided on the merits," said EFF attorney Matt Zimmerman, who also noted the difficult task ahead of the district court. "Floridians will go to the polls in only thirty-six days, but a great deal of good can be done to improve voting procedures in that time. In the short term and in the long term, we hope that the court requires a voter verified paper ballot for all Floridians."
Draft 9/11 Legislation Goes Too Far, Revives "PATRIOT II"
San Francisco - Last week, it was widely reported that House Republicans are circulating draft legislation that contains provisions from the never-introduced "Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003," otherwise known as "PATRIOT II." The draft legislation is meant to implement intelligence reforms recommended by the 9/11 Commission's final report. But its reach goes far beyond those recommendations — including provisions that would allow federal agents to use secret foreign intelligence warrants and wiretap orders against suspects unconnected to any terrorist group or foreign nation. "The 9/11 Commission's recommendations should not be used as a Trojan horse to introduce broad new police powers," says Kevin Bankston, EFF attorney and Equal Justice Works/Bruce J. Ennis Fellow. "Trying to slip controversial 'PATRIOT II' provisions into the intelligence reform bill needlessly politicizes what has so far been a bipartisan effort to improve the performance of our nation's intelligence-gathering agencies."
Government to Demand Airline Records to Test "Secure Flight"
Washington, DC - The federal government on Tuesday announced plans to order all airlines to turn over the personal records of every air passenger who traveled domestically in June 2004, for use in testing the Transportation Security Administration's latest passenger-profiling scheme, "Secure Flight." The TSA's previous plans for a profiling system called CAPPS II were scuttled over concerns about its cost, effectiveness, and impact on civil liberties. Unfortunately, the new program poses many of the same problems. Secure Flight will require airlines to forward passenger records to the government, which will then check them for a match with secret terrorist watch lists. The watch lists currently in use have already been shown to be inaccurate: in a recent example, Senator Ted Kennedy was repeatedly misidentified as a suspected terrorist. Moreover, the records now being demanded from the airlines will be used to test another controversial component of CAPPS II, which TSA is considering building into Secure Flight — using vast commercial databases of personal information to verify passengers' identities...
EFF Releases Voting Machine Quick Reference Guides
San Francisco - Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation released the results of their research into the strengths and weaknesses of the most popular models of e-voting machines. Organized into one-page quick reference guides, this research gives users critical information about widely-deployed machines such as the Diebold Accuvote TS and the ESS iVotronic. In the guides, EFF takes users through a step-by-step process for using each model properly, and lists problems people have had with the machines in past elections. The voting machine quick reference guides represent one of the nation's first Consumer Reports-style analyses of several different types of e-voting machines. "It's extremely important that people vote, despite any concerns that they have about new voting machines," said EFF staff attorney Matt Zimmerman. "The more people know about the voting machines they'll be using, the better prepared they'll be on election day." It's estimated that one-third of the country will be using e-voting machines in the upcoming Presidential Election.
A New Hope for Patent Reform
Washington, DC - Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, and two public interest organizations, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Public Knowledge, filed a friend-of-the-court brief today with the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington DC arguing that ambiguous patent claims should be invalidated and that claim terms should be interpreted as narrowly as possible by the courts to protect the public. Currently, courts uphold patent claims unless they are deemed too ambiguous, and the courts interpret vague claim terms as broadly as possible. These rules often result in improper patents of uncertain scope and lead to overzealous threat letters and lawsuits brought by patentees that chill innovation and deter beneficial competition. "Aggressive patent holders are using vague patent language to cause havoc in the software and Internet fields," said Jason Schultz, EFF staff attorney and organizer of EFF's Patent Busting Project. "We're asking the court to rein in these claims by limiting their scope to only those things clearly laid out in the patent itself."
SEARCH
DeepLinks
DeepLinks, a group weblog featuring pointers to news articles and weblog
posts that spark the interest of EFF staff members
MiniLinks
MiniLinks, a byte-sized companion to DeepLinks
EFFector
The web version of our (usually) weekly newsletter
RSS Feeds
Like your content aggregated? This is where to look
Oct 5: Jason Schultz at Sun DMU Conf., Los Angeles, CA
Oct 9: Lawrence Lessig at Writers With Drinks, San Francisco, CA
WHAT'S NEW AT EFF
Take action!
Visit the EFF Action Center, with alerts on technology and civil liberties issues and
pending legislation where your action can make a difference.
MP3 Caper
Check out EFF's new movie on the RIAA's attack on filesharers.