Top Features
We have just days until the European Parliament debates and votes on the new Copyright Directive, with its dangerous censorship machine and link tax measures.
Under the censorship machine proposal, Article 13, websites with user-generated content would have to automatically filter out anything that rightsholders designate – giving rise to the wrongful blocking, false assertions of copyright, and disregard for free speech that we’ve seen with censorship machines elsewhere.
The link tax, Article 11, would stop you from from linking to news articles on sites that generate previews unless you're on a site that's negotiated a license with the publisher you're linking to. The proposal aims to shrink protections for quotation that help readers decide whether to visit the linked site.
Together, these extreme, unworkable proposals represent a grave danger to the Internet, and they won't just affect Europeans.
If you’re in the EU, get in touch with your MEP by visiting Save Your Internet, and help us stop Article 11 and Article 13 from wrecking the Internet for everyone.
Everyone else: Share this with your European friends and family and let them know that this is a red alert. We have just days until the vote.
Together, we stopped the MEPs from fast-tracking the link tax and censorship machine proposals over the summer. Now, it's time to convince them to reject these measures entirely.
The California legislature 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 state of California would be made available to the public no later than one year after publication. There’s a similar law on the books in California right now, but it only applies to research funded by the Department of Public Health, and it’s set to expire in 2020. A.B. 2192 would extend it indefinitely and expand it to cover research funded by any state agency.
While we’re delighted to see A.B. 2192 pass, it’s only one step in the right direction. Science moves quickly, and a one-year embargo period is simply too long. Lawmakers should work to ensure that more grantees publish their papers in open access journals, available free of cost to the public on the date of publication. Lawmakers in California and elsewhere should also consider requiring open licenses in future laws. Requiring that grantees publish research under a license that allows others to republish, remix, and add value ensures that the public can get the maximum benefit of state-funded science. Finally, it’s time for Congress to pass a federal open access bill.
The California legislature 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 state of California would be made available to the public no later than one year after publication. There’s a similar law on the books in California right now, but it only applies to research funded by the Department of Public Health, and it’s set to expire in 2020. A.B. 2192 would extend it indefinitely and expand it to cover research funded by any state agency.
While we’re delighted to see A.B. 2192 pass, it’s only one step in the right direction. Science moves quickly, and a one-year embargo period is simply too long. Lawmakers should work to ensure that more grantees publish their papers in open access journals, available free of cost to the public on the date of publication. Lawmakers in California and elsewhere should also consider requiring open licenses in future laws. Requiring that grantees publish research under a license that allows others to republish, remix, and add value ensures that the public can get the maximum benefit of state-funded science.
EFF Updates
Reuters reported that Facebook is being asked to “break the encryption” in its Messenger application to assist the Justice Department in wiretapping a suspect's voice calls, and that Facebook is refusing to cooperate. The report alarmed us in light of the government’s ongoing calls for backdoors to encrypted communications, but on reflection we think it’s unlikely that Facebook is being ordered to break encryption in Messenger and that the reality is more complicated.
Eight years after Google initially took a stand against Internet censorship by exiting the Chinese search market, we are disappointed to learn the company has been secretly re-considering an extended collaboration with the massive censorship and surveillance-wielding state.
The public, Google’s users, and Google’s employees have been kept increasingly in the dark about compromises on the company’s own values that could massively affect the lives of not only citizens within China or the U.S., but also Internet users around the world. Google has already committed to processes that consider human rights when entering new markets in the Global Network Initiative. Is it following them here?
Google is trying to patent the use of a known data compression algorithm - called asymmetric numeral systems (ANS) – for video compression. In one sense, this patent application is fairly typical. The system seems designed to encourage tech giants to flood the Patent Office with applications for every little thing they do. Google’s application stands out, however, because the real inventor of ANS did everything he could to dedicate his work to the public domain.
The Patent Office issued a non-final rejection of all claims in Google’s application. Even if it could overcome the examiner’s rejection, that would only reflect the failings of a patent system hands out patents for tiny variations on existing methods. It is time for them to abandon its attempt to patent the use of ANS for video compression.
Researchers of cell-site simulator (CSS) technology have long suspected that using such technologies, even professionally designed and marketed CSSs, would have a detrimental effect on emergency services. Now—for the first time—we have confirmation. 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 this technology (also known as IMSI catchers or Stingrays).
In the letter, Sen. Wyden states that “Senior officials from the Harris Corporation—the manufacturer of the cell-site simulators used most frequently by U.S. law enforcement agencies—have confirmed to my office that Harris’ cell-site simulators completely disrupt the communications of targeted phones for as long as the surveillance is ongoing.“
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.
The current bill moving ahead in the Senate, S. 2593, falls far short. The bill once included both of these measures, but following amendments, now has neither. It isn’t a mystery how to get this done. A competing bill introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden would mandate both risk-limiting audits and a verifiable paper trail, and has gained three more cosponsors since S. 2593 has been watered down. Secure and verifiable voting isn’t optional. Tell the Senate to either pass a strong bill or oppose the Secure Elections Act.
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 devices with microphones and cameras in our homes and offices, to voting machines, to critical infrastructure. The insecurity of much of that technology, and increasingly discomforting motives of the tech giants that control it from afar, has rightly shaken many of us.
But the latest challenge to our collective security comes not from Facebook or Google or Russian hackers or Cambridge Analytica: it comes from the Australian government. Their new proposed “Access and Assistance” bill would require the operators of all of that technology to comply with broad and secret government orders, free from liability, and hidden from independent oversight.
The Seventh Circuit handed down a ruling 3-0 that the Fourth Amendment protects energy-consumption data collected by smart meters. The court recognized that data from these devices reveals intimate details about what’s going on inside the home that would otherwise be unavailable to the government without a physical search. The court held that residents have a reasonable expectation of privacy in this data and that the government’s access of it constitutes a “search.” We applaud the Seventh Circuit for recognizing that smart meters pose serious risks to the privacy of all of our homes, and that rotely applying analog-era case law to the digital age simply doesn’t work.
Announcements
Eva Galperin, EFF's Director of Cybersecurity, will be speaking at CyberStarts Boston on September 20, 2018. CyberStarts Boston is free one-day event hosted by Kaspersky Lab that empowers the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.
Join Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Modern Media Studies at the University of Virginia, along with Danny O'Brien, International Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for a conversation about the state of online privacy and the challenges to democracy presented by social media and the global net, on September 19.
Join us! We're excited to announce the renaming of the Pioneer Award in honor of our co-founder John Perry Barlow!
On September 27, we will celebrate the work of our 2018 honorees: Stephanie Lenz, Joe McNamee, and Sarah T. Roberts. The celebration will include drinks, bytes, and excellent company.
MiniLinks
Tech companies hope to introduce a federal privacy law that will “neuter” California’s law before it is even implemented (New York Times)
Video game history is relatively short, yet some of it is already in danger of being lost because of copyright law. (Kotaku)
Spyfone, a company that makes smartphone "monitoring" software, "appears to be a magical combination of shady, irresponsible, and incompetent” (MotherBoard)
Verizon throttling hampered firefighting in California. Those firefighters say they aren't just worried about the firehouse — your personal bandwidth could be a matter of life and death (KQED)
“ISPs are happy to use words like ‘unlimited’ and ‘no throttling’ in their public statements, but then give themselves the right to throttle certain traffic by burying some esoteric language in the fine print," says EFF’s Jeremy Gillula (Bloomberg)
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