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Jewel v. NSA: On to the Ninth Circuit: 2019 Year in Review Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s landmark case challenging NSA’s mass spying moved forward in 2019, setting up a crucial decision for the Ninth Circuit in 2020.  We’ve pursued this case for over a decade because we believe that mass surveillance, like all general search and seizure schemes, is both illegal and unconstitutional.  The case arises from general seizures and searches conducted through three NSA surveillance programs: the NSA’s current Upstream tapping of the Internet backbone, its past actions collecting Internet metadata and its discontinued mass telephone records collection, purportedly authorized by section 215 of the Patriot Act. Congress just shamefully kicked debate on reauthorization of section 215 until March, 2020, even though it was stopped in 2018 after concerns of massive overcollection by the secret FISA Court and has never helped catch a terrorist. In 2019, we had bad news and good news on the liti...

The Year in Corporate Speech Controls Content moderation and its effects remained at the forefront of the public imagination in 2019, with stories of takedowns from Sweden to Syria and everywhere in between gaining media attention. Inconsistent and unfair moderation from companies—often under great pressure from governments and other external actors—is still a serious problem, but one that EFF and our many allies are actively working to shine a light on, and improve. To that end, we were proud to see so many companies respond favorably to our Who Has Your Back? demands to provide more transparency to users. This year, we ranked companies based on six criteria, which only one company—Reddit—met in full. Still, we were particularly pleased that twelve companies chose to endorse the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation , and hope that their support propels them to implementation. Another key development this year came from Facebook, ...

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Austmine 2019 , the biennial conference of Austmine, the leading industry body for the Australian Mining, Equipment, Technology and Services (METS) sector , was held last week (May 21-23, 2019) in my hometown of Brisbane. I spoke on Augmented Reality (AR) in the sessions on Mineral Processing Plants, and it was a topic of great interest if you can judge by the hits on our LinkedIn posts, the people talking to me after the presentation, and the wide range of AR helmet and AR glasses vendors reaching out to me! Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality To begin with, let’s start by looking at how AR is different from VR and MR: Augmented Reality (AR) overlays virtual objects onto a real-world environment. Virtual Reality (VR) immerses users in a fully artificial digital environment. Mixed Reality (MR) doesn’t just overlay virtual objects onto a virtual reality but anchors them to the real-world. Maybe the best way to understand what AR is is to first take just a moment to watch this v...

It’s World Environment Day, a day dedicated by the UN to encourage worldwide awareness and action for the protection of our environment. More than 143 countries participate annually, and this year’s host country is China, with the theme: Fight Air Pollution . It’s an appropriate aspiration for the largest greenhouse gas emitting nation. It’s estimated that air pollution causes more than a million deaths a year in China alone—not to mention destroying more than 20 tonnes of food crops like rice, wheat, and soybeans, worth roughly $38B. But China is not alone. Worldwide, poor air quality is blamed for more than 6 million premature deaths per year. Most pollution victims are in developing countries, where indoor smoke from the combustion of fuels ranging from manure to wood to kerosene pose a significant threat to health. Children are at particular risk; a UNICEF study found that 17 million infants live in areas where air pollution is higher than international limits. But air quali...

The Foilies 2019 Recognizing the year’s worst in government transparency The cause of government transparency finally broke through to the popular zeitgeist this year. It wasn’t an investigative journalism exposé or a civil rights lawsuit that did it, but a light-hearted sitcom about a Taiwanese American family set in Orlando, Florida, in the late 1990s. In a January episode of ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat , the Huang family’s two youngest children—overachievers Evan and Emery—decide if they sprint on all their homework, they’ll have time to plan their father’s birthday party. “Like the time we knocked out two English papers, a science experiment, and built the White House out of sugar cubes,” Evan said. “It opened up our Sunday for filing Freedom of Information requests.” “They may not have figured out who shot JFK,” Emery added. “But we will.” The eldest child, teenage slacker Eddie, concluded with a sage nod, “You know, once in a while, it’s good to know nerds.” Amen to that...