Senators Richard Burr [R-NC] and Dianne Feinstein [D-CA] finally introduced their long-rumored anti-crypto bill, which will ban US companies from making products with working cryptography, mandating that US-made products have some way to decrypt information without the user's permission.
Scarfolk is a fictional English horror-town stuck in a perpetual loop, from 1970-1980, from which beautifully weathered artifacts escape onto our modern Web.
Edward Snowden said that Britain's spies have "some of the most extensive surveillance powers in the world," and those powers are about to be dramatically expanded if the Snoopers Charter passes Parliament.
As the UK government passes increasingly far-reaching surveillance laws that bind companies to capture, store and share data on their customers' activities, US tech giants like Facebook and Google are caught in a dilemma: much of what the UK government demands of them, the US government prohibits.
UK Home Secretary Theresa May has introduced the Snoopers Charter, through which your ISP will be required to retain a record of everything you do on the Internet and make it available to government and police without meaningful checks and balances or privacy protection.
Mere moments after publications of an independent report condemning UK's mass surveillance programme, sources in the UK spy agencies — who are pushing for massively expanded surveillance powers through the Snoopers' Charter — leaked an evidence-free story claiming the Russians and Chinese had magically gained the ability to decrypt the files Snowden took with him from the NSA.
In my latest Guardian column, I talk about the real danger from the UK Tories' plan to ban effective cryptography: not the initial mandate forcing companies to help spy on their users, but all the things we'll have to do when that doesn't work.
Don't miss out on a rare opportunity to hear John Perry Barlow speak in London, this Saturday June 8th! John Perry Barlow, co-founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation, will be headlining ORGCon2013 along with writer of The Master Switch, Tim Wu.
Britain's Communications Data Bill — AKA the Snooper's Charter — would effectively eliminate private communications in the UK, giving government and the police the power to spy on virtually everything you do online (which is rapidly merging with everything you do, full stop). — Read the rest
The Snooper's Charter is Britain's pending Internet surveillance law, which requires ISPs, online services and telcoms companies to retain enormous amounts of private online transactions, and to hand them over to government and law enforcement employees without a warrant. A public campaign on the bill had 19,000 responses, every one of which opposed the legislation. — Read the rest
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
As the UK government ramps up to pass the snooper's charter — a sweeping, unaccountable regime of tax-funded, warrantless snooping on all online activity — the Open Rights Group is offering workshops across the country on how to talk to your MP about this proposal. — Read the rest
The UK Conservative party is embroiled in a public internal squabble as its libertarian wing contemplates the "snoopers' charter," a proposed warrantless Internet spying bill that will require ISPs to store fantastic amounts of your online activity and make it accessible to police and government without a warrant, at a cost of billions of pounds that the ISPs can bill the government for. — Read the rest