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Why the Whole World Should Be Up in Arms About the EU’s Looming Internet Catastrophe In exactly one week, the European Parliament will hold a crucial debate and vote that on a proposal so terrible , it can only be called an extinction-level event for the Internet as we know it. At issue is the text of the new EU Copyright Directive, which updates the 17-year-old copyright regulations for the 28 member-states of the EU. It makes a vast array of technical changes to EU copyright law, each of which has stakeholders rooting for it, guaranteeing that whatever the final text says will become the law of the land across the EU. The Directive was pretty uncontroversial, right up to the day last May when the EU started enforcing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a seismic event that eclipsed all other Internet news for weeks afterward. On that very day, a German MEP called Axl Voss quietly changed the text of the Directive to reintroduce two long-discarded proposals — “Artic...

The NSA Continues to Blame Technology for Breaking the Law In late June, the NSA announced a magic trick—hundreds of millions of collected call records would disappear. Its lovely assistant? Straight from the agency’s statement: “Technical irregularities.” These “technical irregularities” are part of a broad and troubling pattern within the NSA—it has repeatedly blamed its failure to comply with federal laws on technical problems purportedly beyond its control. EFF has a long history of criticizing Congress for giving the NSA broad authority for its surveillance programs, but allowing the NSA to flout what limits Congress has put on the programs because of vague “technical” issues is wholly unacceptable. If the NSA can’t get its technology in order, Congress should question whether the NSA should be conducting mass surveillance at all. For example, the NSA is currently required to report numbers called “unique identifiers” in a transparency report compiled annually by the agency...

Solutions for a Stalled NAFTA: Stop Pushing So Hard on IP, and Release the Text The deadline for concluding a modernized North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), originally scheduled for last year, has continued to slip. An eighth and final formal round of negotiations was cancelled last week , and despite earlier optimistic plans  that the parties could announce an “agreement in principle” at the Summit of the Americas in Peru this Friday 13 April, these plans have since been abandoned . An over-optimistic negotiation schedule isn’t the only problem here. The other is that United States Trade Representative (USTR) is pushing a hard line on topics such as intellectual property that neither of the other negotiating parties find remotely palatable. As a result, although advances have been made in some other chapters, reports suggest that virtually the whole of the agreement’s IP chapter remains up in the air. In October 2016, as the Trans-Pacif...