Freedom of the Press Foundation has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Justice Department for all correspondence the agency has had with Congress over proposed FOIA reform bills that died last year in Congress, despite having unanimous support of all its members. — Read the rest

The Freedom of the Press Foundation, an organization of which I am a proud board member, today announced that Edward Snowden has joined its board of directors. The announcement is here. Charlie Savage at the New York Times writes about it here. — Read the rest

Freedom of the Press Foundation, the pro-transparency organization I serve as a proud board member, is holding a year-end donation drive to support encryption tools for reporters:

Protecting the digital communications of journalists is now one of the biggest press freedom challenges in the 21st Century.

One year ago today

Freedom of the Press Foundation launches: crowdsourcing funding for transparency and accountability: Dedicated to helping promote and fund aggressive, public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption, and law-breaking in government.

Five years ago today

Flowchart: How to read flowcharts on XKCD: XKCD swallows its own tail with a great flowchart explaining how to read flowcharts. — Read the rest

Freedom of the
Press Foundation has taken
charge of the DeadDrop project, an open-source whistleblower
submission system originally coded by the late transparency advocate
Aaron Swartz. In the coming months, the Foundation will also
provide on-site installation and technical support to news
organizations that wish to run the system, which has been renamed
"SecureDrop." — Read the rest

Here is a transcript of today's verdict in the Bradley Manning case, provided by Freedom of the Press Foundation court stenographers: PDF link.

FotPF's Trevor Timm writes that the military court's "decision is a terrible blow to both investigative journalists and the sources they rely on to inform the public." — Read the rest

The Freedom of the Press Foundation today published the leaked audio of Bradley Manning's statements to the court during his hearing last week.

On Reddit today: "Hey, it's John Cusack. I'm here talk to about Freedom of the Press Foundation, among other things. Ask me anything."

More from his intro:

The Freedom of the Press Foundation, of which I'm a board member, has reached a fundraising milestone: $200K in 6 weeks to support independent transparency journalism.

From my fellow board member John Cusack, via the Huffington Post, re-posted with permission:

When we launched Freedom of the Press Foundation — a new organization dedicated to supporting the 1st Amendment and journalism that focuses on transparency and accountability in government — a little over six weeks ago, we knew the need was there.

I'm proud to serve as a board member for the newly-launched Freedom of the Press Foundation, dedicated to helping promote and fund aggressive, public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption, and law-breaking in government. The project accepts tax-deductible donations to an array of journalism organizations dedicated to government transparency and accountability. — Read the rest

After police raided a small Kansas newspaper on Friday, its 98-year-old co-owner, Joan Meyer, "collapsed and died."

Meyer had become "stressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by hours of shock and grief" after police stormed through the Marion County Record as well as Meyer's home — raids that were illegal, according to the paper (via CBS News). — Read the rest

Sumana writes, "SecureDrop (previously) (originally coded by Aaron Swartz) is an open source whistleblower submission system that media organizations can install to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. Its parent nonprofit, the Freedom of the Press Foundation (previously), is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join the team and:"

The Signals Network is a nonprofit that supports independent investigative journalism; they're financially supporting a consortium of five international media groups Die Zeit (Germany), Mediapart (France), The Daily Telegraph (UK), The Intercept (US) and WikiTtribune (Global) as they investigate misuse of "big data."

EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow died last month, and though his death had been long coming, it's left a hole in the hearts of the people who loved him and whom he inspired.

Last week, we celebrated Data Privacy day. Everything we do online—whether on a computer or on a mobile device—is being tracked, traced, compiled, crunched, bought and sold by familiar tech-titans like Google, Facebook, Verizon and hundreds of lesser known data brokers who help advertisers build frighteningly detailed digital profiles of users by harvesting data from a variety of sources, including customer databases and online platforms. After I lecture to my students on this topic, rattling off a dozen mechanisms by which corporations and governments can spy and pry on us, threating both anonymity and privacy, their reaction is usually either indifference (because, you know, they think they have nothing to hide) or for those that I’ve convinced they should care, some measure of despair.

In cryptographic and security circles, the "evil maid" problem describes a class of attacks in which a piece of unguarded hardware, is tampered with by someone who gains physical access to it: for example, a hotel chambermaid who can access your laptop while you're out of the room.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation's lawsuit against the DoJ has resulted in the release of documents showing that a bill with that was nearly unanimously supported in Congress and the Senate was killed by behind-the-scene lobbying by the Department of Justice, which feared that they would lose the ability to arbitrarily reject Freedom of Information Act requests if the bill passed.

Secure the News periodically checks in with news-sites to see how many of them implement HTTPS — the secure protocol that stops your ISP and people snooping on it from knowing which pages you're looking at and from tampering with them — and what proportion of them default to HTTPS.

Documentarians and news-gatherers who record sensitive material from confidential sources live in terror of having their cameras seized and their storage-cards plundered by law-enforcement; they struggle to remember to immediately transfer their files to encrypted laptop storage and wipe their cards while dodging bombs in conflict zones, or simply to remember to have robotically perfect operational security while they are trying to get a movie made.

Fosta writes, "Rather than just get angry and do nothing, we made RageDonate.com. We just launched this morning. The site shows statements from Donald Trump and offers a counter action via a donation to an organization working to protect these people. — Read the rest