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After Nonprofits Protest at ICANN, California's Attorney General Steps Into the .ORG Battle Once appearing to be a done deal, the sale of the .ORG registry to private equity is facing new delays and new opposition, after a successful protest in front of ICANN last week by nonprofits and an intervention by the California Attorney General . Private equity firm Ethos Capital’s proposed $1.1 billion purchase of the Public Interest Registry (PIR) has raised nearly unanimous opposition from the nonprofit world , along with expressions of concern from technical experts , members of Congress , two UN Special Rapporteurs , and U.S. state charities regulators . ICANN, the nonprofit body that oversees the Internet’s domain name system, has found itself under increasing pressure to reject the deal. “ICANN, You Can Stop The Sale!” Last Friday’s protest at ICANN’s Los Angeles headquarters was the culmination of two months of intense backlash to the sale by nonprofits from around t

Congress Must Stop the Graham-Blumenthal Anti-Security Bill There’s a new and serious threat to both free speech and security online. Under a draft bill that Bloomberg recently leaked , the Attorney General could unilaterally dictate how online platforms and services must operate. If those companies don’t follow the Attorney General’s rules, they could be on the hook for millions of dollars in civil damages and even state criminal penalties. The bill, known as the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act , grants sweeping powers to the Executive Branch. It opens the door for the government to require new measures to screen users’ speech and even backdoors to read your private communications—a stated goal of one of the bill’s authors . Senators Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) have been quietly circulating a draft version of EARN IT. Congress must forcefully reject this dangerous bill before it is introduced. EARN IT Is

Clearview AI—Yet Another Example of Why We Need A Ban on Law Enforcement Use of Face Recognition Now This week, additional stories came out about Clearview AI , the company we wrote about earlier that’s marketing a powerful facial recognition tool to law enforcement. These stories discuss some of the police departments around the country that have been secretly using Clearview’s technology, and they show, yet again, why we need strict federal, state, and local laws that ban—or at least press pause—on law enforcement use of face recognition. Clearview’s service allows law enforcement officers to upload a photo of an unidentified person to its database and see publicly-posted photos of that person along with links to where those photos were posted on the internet. This could allow the police to learn that person’s identity along with significant and highly personal information. Clearview claims to have amassed a dataset of over three billion face images by scraping millions

Lawsuit in India Seeks to Shut Down Access to U.S. Journalism Website Computer security researchers and journalists play a critical role in uncovering flaws in software and information systems. Their research and reporting allows users to protect themselves, and vendors to repair their products before attackers can exploit security flaws. But all too often, corporations and governments try to silence reporters, and punish the people who expose these flaws to the public. This dynamic is playing out right now in a court in India, where a company is seeking to block Indian readers from accessing journalism by the American security journalist known as Dissent Doe . If it succeeds, more than a billion people in India would be blocked from reading Dissent Doe’s reporting. Here’s what happened: last summer, Dissent Doe discovered that an employee wellness company was leaking patients’ private counseling information on the publicly available Web. Dissent alerted the company, called 1to1

Same Old NFL: League Abuses Trademark to Shut Down New York Jets Parody Store The National Football League seems to be gunning for a spot in our Hall of Shame by setting a record for all-time career TDs—no, not touchdowns, but takedowns. We’ve written before about the NFL’s crusade against anyone who dares use the words “Super Bowl” to talk about, well, the Super Bowl. But the NFL’s trademark bullying doesn’t end there. One of the NFL’s latest victims is Zach Berger, a New Yorker who sells merchandise for frustrated New York Jets fans through a website called Same Old Jets Store. Most of Berger’s products feature a parody version of the Jets’ logo, modified to say “SAME OLD JETS”—a phrase that’s been used for decades to criticize the team’s performance and express fans’ sense of inevitable disappointment. His other products include “MAKE THE JETS GREAT AGAIN” hats and clothing that says “SELL THE TEAM” in a font similar to one used on Jets merchandise. But if you’re a cynical J

Speaking Freely: An Interview with Christian Frank Christian Frank is a freelance IT consultant who was born and raised, and currently resides, in Cologne, Germany. Last year, he did some work protesting the Article 13 demonstrations in Europe, a topic that he remains passionate about, as you’ll see in this interview. Our conversation gives some perspective as to the differences between German and U.S. views on freedom of expression, particularly when it comes to hate speech. But there’s also a lot of similarities: Christian’s experiences growing up in Germany during the split between East and West, with parents who experienced World War II, have shaped his views about who should—and shouldn’t—regulate what we can and cannot say. We also discussed the promise of social media, and the internet as—to use Christian’s words—“another living space” that we need to keep fighting to protect. Jillian C. York: Thanks for joining me today, Christian. Let me start with a basic question: Wha

New Bill Would Make Needed Steps Toward Curbing Mass Surveillance The Safeguarding Americans’ Private Records Act is a Strong Bill That Builds on Previous Surveillance Reforms Last week, Sens. Ron Wyden (D–Oregon) and Steve Daines (R–Montana) along with Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D–California), Warren Davidson (R–Ohio), and Pramila Jayapal (D–Washington) introduced the Safeguarding Americans’ Private Records Act (SAPRA) , H.R 5675 . This bipartisan legislation includes significant reforms to the government’s foreign intelligence surveillance authorities, including Section 215 of the Patriot Act . Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act allows the government to obtain a secret court order requiring third parties, such as telephone providers, Internet providers, and financial institutions, to hand over business records or any other “tangible thing” deemed “relevant” to an international terrorism, counterespionage, or foreign intelligence investigation. If Congress does not act, Section 215 is set t

U.K. Police Will Soon be able to Search Through U.S. Data Without Asking a Judge Law enforcement officials in the U.S. and U.K. have negotiated a deal that sells out the privacy rights of the public in both nations. For Americans, it will effectively abrogate Fourth Amendment protections, and subject their data to search and seizure by foreign police. This is all going to start happening in a few months—unless Congress does something to stop it now. That’s why we’re launching an action today, asking you to reach out to your members of Congress and tell them to introduce a joint resolution that could put a halt to the deal. If it isn’t stopped, the worst parts of this deal will likely come standard on future agreements, and Americans will be subject to more and more searches by foreign police. TAKE ACTION Tell Congress to Stop the U.S.-U.K. Cloud Act Deal The full text of the U.S.-U.K. Cloud Act Agreement was unveiled in November, and it’s just as bad as we thought it would be.

Why Public Wi-Fi is a Lot Safer Than You Think If you follow security on the Internet, you may have seen articles warning you to “beware of public Wi-Fi networks" in cafes, airports, hotels, and other public places. But now, due to the widespread deployment of HTTPS encryption on most popular websites, advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date and applicable to a lot fewer people than it once was . The advice stems from the early days of the Internet, when most communication was not encrypted. At that time, if someone could snoop on your network communications—for instance by sniffing packets from unencrypted Wi-Fi or by being the NSA —they could read your email. They could also steal your passwords or your login cookies and impersonate you on your favorite sites. This was widely accepted as a risk of using the Internet. Sites that used HTTPS on all pages were safe, but such sites were vanishingly rare. However, starting in 2010 that all changed. Eric Butler r

Design Patents Are Useless. So Why Are They Getting a Boost in DC? When we talk about patents, we’re usually talking about “utility” patents. Utility patents protect inventions that claim to have some practical application or use. (A lot of them still claim things that are actually useless , but they’re supposed to be potentially useful.) “Design” patents, by contrast, protect only the ornamental or decorative aspects of a design. They don’t protect any kind of functionality. If there’s a functional work to protect, only a utility patent will do. Because design patents can only protect non-functional works, they’re kind of like copyrights for visual works. And the bar for creativity and originality in a patented design is low—so low that even a standard-issue graphical user interface can get patent protection, as our latest Stupid Patent of the Month shows.  Shown below is a patented design owned by Siemens Healthcare GmbH, a company that’s part of Siemens, the most prolific pat

Off-Facebook Activity is a Welcome but Incomplete Move Today Facebook announced the roll-out of its Off-Facebook Activity tool (initially introduced as “Clear History” nearly two years ago ). The tools shows you a list of apps, websites, and businesses that Facebook knows you have visited through its business tools (including Facebook Login, Facebook’s tracking Pixel, social widgets such as Like and Share buttons, and other less visible features for developers). It also gives you options to “clear” or “disconnect” the identifiable information they have linked to your account. For more on how to use the setting, see our tutorial post . This is a good step for Facebook to take, and we hope it pushes other companies who talk a big game about transparency—looking at you, Google—to follow suit. If even Facebook can give people this level of transparency and control around a particular data stream, other adtech players should be able to get their act together. That said, it&

EFF and Other Groups to PCLOB: Urge the Ban of Face Recognition This week EFF joined a coalition letter asking the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board (PCLOB) to urge that the government suspend its use of face recognition technology. The letter was signed by organizations like Color of Change, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, National Center for Transgender Equality, and the Project on Government Oversight, to name a few. In it, the groups point to the many ways that face recognition can track people, presumes guilt of the people whose faces have been collected or identified, and can even misidentify them to great consequence. “While we do not believe that that improved accuracy of facial recognition would justify further deployment,” the letter’s authors write, “we do believe that the obvious problems with bias and discrimination in the systems that are currently in use is an additional reason to recommend a blanket moratorium.” The l

How to Change Your Off-Facebook Activity Settings Facebook's  long-awaited Off-Facebook Activity tool  started rolling out today. While it's not a perfect measure , and we still need stronger data privacy laws, this tool is a good step toward greater transparency and user control regarding third-party tracking. We hope other companies follow suit, and we encourage users to take advantage of it. This tutorial will guide you through the steps to not only “clear” the off-Facebook activity already linked with your account, but also to prevent future activity from being associated with your account going forward. Note that this won’t stop third parties from sending Facebook information about you—it will only stop Facebook from associating that information with your account. 1. Navigate to the “Your Facebook Information” section of your settings and select “Off-Facebook Activity.” (Or, just go to https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/ while logged into your account