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Before and After: What We Learned About the Hemisphere Program After Suing the DEA As the year draws to a close, so has EFF’s long-running Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Drug Enforcement Agency about the mass phone surveillance program infamously known as “ Hemisphere .” We won our case and freed up tons of records . (So did the Electronic Privacy Information Center .) The government, on the other hand, only succeeded in dragging out the fake secrecy. In late 2013, right as the world was already reeling from the Snowden revelations, the New York Times revealed that the AT&T gives federal and local drug enforcement investigators access to a phone records surveillance system that dwarfs the NSA’s. Through this program, code-named Hemisphere, police tap into trillions of of phone records going back decades. It’s been five long years of privacy scandals, and Hemisphere has faded somewhat from the headlines since it was first revealed. That was long enough for of...

The Heavy Focus on 5G Wireless Means We Are Ignoring 68 Million Americans Facing High-Speed Cable Monopolies All across the country right now, major wireless Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are talking to legislators, mayors, regulators, and the press about the potential of 5G wireless services as if they will cure all of the problems Americans face right now in the high-speed access market. But the cold hard reality is the newest advancements in wireless services will probably do very little about the high-speed monopolies that a majority of this country faces. According to a ground-breaking study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, more than 68 million Americans facing high-speed cable monopolies today . This is why we see wild claims about how 5G will do things like solve rural America’s lack of access to broadband or that wireless broadband will be just as good as any wireline service (it won’t). In reality, we are already woefully behind South Korea and many countri...