Below you'll find an unhurried interview with Dr. Adam Gazzaley, who runs one of the West Coast's largest neuroscience labs at UCSF. There, his team carefully crafts video games with the potential to cure a wide range of neurological ailments. — Read the rest
Writing science fiction can get you amazing access to thinkers, founders, and scientists whose work touches on the stories you tell. It's one of the great things about my job. Sure, writing cover stories for Wired would get my calls returned faster! — Read the rest
Malcolm Gladwell has an article in this month's New Yorker that dismisses Edward Snowden's claims to legitimacy and legal protection, while elevating Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers breach to an act of heroism; Gladwell sets out criteria for legitimate whistleblowing that treats Snowden as a "radicalized hacker" and Ellsberg as a "good leaker," and says that Snowden should have gone through official channels, rather than disclosing to journalists.
Execs representing the biggest tech companies in America are gathering for a meeting with Donald Trump tomorrow in New York; these companies have it in their power to spy on us, locate us, censor us, and terminally compromise the free and open internet.
Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has published a heartfelt and defiant statement about the EFF's plans for the coming four years under a president who has demanded back-doors in crypto, promised mass surveillance and roundups of millions of people, and threatened the freedom of the press.
We've all heard that there's a federal judge in California who ordered Apple to make a tool to help the FBI decrypt a phone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters — but despite the FBI's insistence that this is a special circumstance, San Bernardino is just one of a dozen-odd cases where the FBI is making similar demands on Apple.
Journalist/educator Lisa Rein is looking for $20,000 to complete a documentary called "From DeadDrop to SecureDrop," which chronicles the development of the last technology project that Aaron Swartz worked on: a tool to help whistleblowers and journalists communicate and exchange documents in secret.
Last weekend's bombshell report on AT&T's enthusiastic cooperation with NSA mass surveillance revealed that the NSA categorized many of its most egregious spying programs as "Partner [AT&T] Controlled."
EFF's executive director, the wonderful Cindy Cohn, will host a Q&A before a night of outstanding comedy and improv.
With the sunsetting of Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the passage of the USA Freedom Act, Congress has, for the first time since the 1970s, put limits on the surveillance powers of America's spooks.
Department of Justice lawyers told a judge that when the FBI gives one of its secret National Security Letters to a company, the company is allowed to reveal the NSL's existence and discuss its quality — it lied.
Lisa Rein writes, "This year's annual Aaron Swartz Day event is happening Saturday, November 8th at 6pm at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. The reception starts at 6pm, and activities are going on straight through until 10:30 pm."
“The next time a law enforcement official demands that Apple and Google put backdoors back into their products, remember what they're really demanding: that everyone's security be sacrificed in order to make their job marginally easier.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cindy Cohn is on fire: "Let's be clear: Under international human rights law, secret "law" doesn't even qualify as 'law' at all." — Read the rest
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has rounded up the five most discredited arguments advanced by apologists for NSA spying, including "The NSA has Stopped 54 Terrorist Attacks with Mass Spying"; Just collecting call detail records isn't a big deal"; "There Have Been No Abuses of Power"; "Invading Privacy is Okay Because It's Done to Prevent Terrorist Attacks"; and "There's Plenty of Oversight From Congress, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and Agency Watchdogs." — Read the rest
Here's another great post from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in honor of Copyright Week, explaining the relationship between copyright and free expression. Copyright is a monopoly on speech — the right to decide, within limits, who can express themselves with certain words, tunes, and images — so it's important that the law be structured so that monopoly doesn't jeopardize free debate and artistic expression. — Read the rest
Lisa Rein writes, "The Internet Archive is hosting its first ever 'Ethics in Tech' event
this Wednesday, December 11th at 6:30pm. (Show starts promptly at 7:00
pm.) Political Comedian Will Durst will be on a panel with the EFF's Legal
Director, Cindy Cohn Frontier Foundation and the Internet Archive's own
Digital Librarian, Brewster Kahle. — Read the rest
Lisa Rein writes, "Noisebridge and the Internet Archive are hosting a big event on Nov 8 (1830h-2100h) to celebrate
Aaron Swartz's life and accomplishments, and kick off an international
series of hackathons that will be taking place all over the world in his
honor, during what would have been his 27th birthday weekend, November
8-10, 2013. — Read the rest
Rainey Reitman says, "This Friday, the Freedom of the Press Foundation is hosting a panel discussion at Noisebridge on WikiLeaks and the movie The Fifth Estate. It will be at 5:30 PM. It will be EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn, Wired Senior Reporter Kim Zetter, Forbes senior online editor Kashmir Hill, and me. — Read the rest
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cindy Cohn and Trevor Timm look at the NSA's Bullrun program, through which the US and UK governments have spent $250M/year sabotaging computer security. Cindy is the lawyer who argued the Bernstein case, which legalized civilian access to strong cryptography — in other words, it's her work that gave us all the ability to communicate securely online. — Read the rest
