The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cindy Cohn and Trevor Timm have compiled an extensive list of things to demand from NSA reform legislation, from obvious things like ending bulk collection to crucial legal subtleties like fixing the problem of standing in cases regarding surveillance.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Legal Director Cindy Cohn writes in detail about the MIT report on its involvement in Aaron Swartz's prosecution. She criticizes MIT's claim to neutrality in the matter, showing the way that the university went to great, voluntary lengths to help the government prosecute Aaron, and eventually siding with the government in motions to keep the evidence that it turned over to the prosecutor admissable. — Read the rest
Electronic Frontier Foundation legal director Cindy Cohn has published an original take on the Bradley Manning prosecution at the EFF's blog. In it, she recounts how government prosecutors portrayed the 25 year old former Army intelligence specialist as uniquely menacing because of his knowledge of computers and digital tools. — Read the rest
In an explosive investigative piece published in the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald details a top-secret US court order that gave the NSA the ability to gather call records for every phone call completed on Verizon's network, even calls that originated and terminated in the USA (the NSA is legally prohibited from spying on Americans). — Read the rest
Further to Xeni's post from yesterday about the landmark ruling by a San Francisco district court judge that the FBI may not issue "national security letters" (NSLs), the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who fought the case, has posted a good explanation about what NSLs are and why they were so creepy:
The controversial NSL provisions EFF challenged on behalf of the unnamed client allow the FBI to issue administrative letters — on its own authority and without court approval — to telecommunications companies demanding information about their customers.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Legal Director Cindy Cohn was in the UK for the launch of the Snooper's Charter (AKA the Draft Communications Data Bill), and she provides some much-needed global context on the totalitarian slide of the United Kingdom. — Read the rest
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Open Rights Group will co-host a speakeasy event — a kind of pub night — in east London on June 14. I'll be there, with several ORG employees, supporters and volunteers, and so will Cindy Cohn, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's legal director and veteran of many of the Internet's most important legal skirmishes (she's the one who argued the Bernstein case, legalizing civilian use of strong cryptography — among many other accomplishments). — Read the rest
When popular YouTuber ASL Ally — who posts videos that interpret song lyrics in American Sign Language for deaf and hard-of-hearing people — had her YouTube channel yanked after complaints by Warner and Universal, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cindy Cohn came to the rescue. — Read the rest
Cnet's Greg Sandoval interviews Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on the bulk copyright lawsuits coming out of big US law firms. Cindy is my favorite legal explainer in the world (she's one of the people who changed my mind about DRM!), — Read the rest
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Onion Router (TOR) project have teamed up to release a new privacy-enhancing Firefox plugin called HTTPS Everywhere. It was inspired by Google's new encrypted search engine, and it ensures that whenever you visit a site that accepts encrypted connections, your browser switches into encrypted mode, hiding your traffic from snoops on your local network and at your ISP. — Read the rest
One of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's founding principles was Mitch Kapor's aphorism, "Architecture is politics." The design of systems determines the kinds of politics that can take place in them, and designing a system is itself a political act. As part of EFF's ongoing 20th anniversary celebrations, it held a panel called "Architecture is policy" at Carnegie-Mellon, featuring Ed Felten, Dave Farber, Lorrie Cranor, John Buckman, and Cindy Cohn — all heavy hitters in their own right, and dynamite together. — Read the rest
My friend, the wonderful sf writer Peter Watts was beaten without provocation and arrested by US border guards on Tuesday. I heard about it early Wednesday morning in London and called Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. — Read the rest
NPR's Morning Edition did a great segment on the privacy concerns raised by Google's deal with publishers and authors to make books available as search-results. I love the idea in principle, but I'm really worried that Google won't put a decent privacy policy in writing — for example, they won't promise to keep your reading history (which potentially includes the search terms you used, the pages you viewed, etc) secret from warrantless police requests. — Read the rest
EFF's patent-busting project has put another notch in its belt: today they killed a truly outrageous patent on the use of subdomains for navigation and content management, as with jwz.livejournal.com. Can you believe that the patent office granted that patent in 2004, based on a 1999 application? — Read the rest
Last Sunday, my young adult novel Little Brother won the Emperor Norton Award (for "extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason" in San Francisco), presented at the 13th birthday party for Tachyon Books, at Borderlands Bookstore in San Francisco. — Read the rest
For about the last 9 years I've been handling a case against Chevron for their involvement in a shooting of unarmed environmental protesters in Nigeria. The case is called Bowoto v. Chevron and it's finally set for trial in San Francisco federal court in September.
This excellent conference is about the ethical implications of using computer technology in warfare. There is still plenty of room for people to register for the conference, and it's open to the public.