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Lessig interviews Snowden
In an hour-long interview with Lawrence Lessig, Edward Snowden — currently charged with theft of government property and two counts of espionage by the US government — makes his whistleblower case,...
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Spyware apps apparently booming business
Kate Knibbs writing for Gizmodo, has an eye-opening piece on spyware companies like mSpy and flexiSPY who sell the ability for anyone to anonymously monitor the smartphone or computer activity of...
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US District Court reject’s EFF argument against NSA internet surveillance
In Jewell v. NSA, a case against mass NSA surveillance that predates the Edward Snowden revelations, the US District Court for the Northern District of California has ruled against the Electronic...
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11th Circuit overturns its phone location tracking decision
In 2012, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled in United States v. Jones that police attaching a global positioning system (GPS) tracking device to a suspect’s vehicle constitutes a search requiring a...
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Second Circuit finds NSA’s bulk phone data collection illegal
The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ruled that the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk phone data collection program is illegal. Without speaking to the constitutionality of the NSA...
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Look, up in the sky
For some time, reports have surfaced about mysterious small aircraft flying in oddly precise circular patterns over US cities. Matt McKinney and John Reinan writing for the StarTribune, for example,...
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AT&T’s highly collaborative relationship with the NSA
On 15 December 2005, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau writing for the New York Times broke the story that then-President George W. Bush had secretly authorized the US National Security Agency (NSA) to...
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Senate passes CISA
Demonstrating yet one more time that it hasn’t a clue, the US Senate voted in favor of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) in a vote that wasn’t even close: 74–21. The proposed...
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Academic freedom falls victim to surveillance at Berkeley
Shortly after the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) computer network was breached last June and July, Janet Napolitano — president of the University of California system and former...
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Obama announces Cybersecurity National Action Plan, Federal Privacy Council
In response to recent data breaches, President Barack Obama has announced the Cybersecurity National Action Plan (CNAP) and issued an executive order creating the Commission on Enhancing National...
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EFF to conduct discovery against the NSA in Jewel v. NSA
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced yesterday that Judge Jeffrey White for the US District Court for the Northern District of California has authorized the civil liberty defense...
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US Department of Defense funded Carnegie Mellon University researchers to...
Judge Richard Jones, in a ruling for the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, has confirmed that researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) were funded by the US Department of...
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FISC approves changes to how FBI can use NSA data
New rules for how the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) can use data it obtains from the US National Security Agency (NSA) were recently approved by the secret US Foreign Intelligence...
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Dominant culture ideology wins again: Knowledge of surveillance stifles dissent
When Edward Snowden disclosed classified information in 2013 about the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance activities, common speculation was that knowledge of the surveillance alone was...
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Microsoft challenges secrecy order provisions of ECPA
While readily acknowledging that there are times when government warrants must be executed secretly, Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith insists that the government is demanding...
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EFF sues for access to FISC documents declassified by USA FREEDOM Act
One of the things that was supposed to happen when President Barack Obama signed the USA FREEDOM Act into law in June 2015 was that “significant” decisions from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance...
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FISC rules FBI can use intelligence databases for crime information not...
In November 2015, Thomas F. Hogan, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) ruled that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was legally permitted to search...
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US District Court reverses self, finds NSLs constitutional
In March 2013, US District Court Judge Susan Illston ruled that the US government’s use of national security letters (NSL) was unconstitutional, ordering the government to cease issuing them and stop...
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Supreme Court approves procedural rule change to allow governmental hacking
The US Supreme Court recently passed a proposed change (.pdf; 34KB) to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, making it significantly easier for law enforcement agencies to remotely hack...
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FBI wants biometric database exempted from Privacy Act
For the last eight years, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been quietly building a sprawling biometric database it calls the Next Generation Identification System (NGIS). The NGIS...
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