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Turkey's New Internet Law Is the Worst Version of Germany's NetzDG Yet For years, free speech and press freedoms have been under attack in Turkey. The country has the distinction of being the world’s largest jailer of journalists and has in recent years been  cracking down on online speech .  Now, a new law, passed by the Turkish Parliament on the 29th of July, introduces sweeping new powers and takes the country another giant step towards further censoring speech online. The law was ushered through parliament quickly and without allowing for opposition or stakeholder inputs and aims for complete control over social media platforms and the speech they host. The bill was introduced after a series of allegedly insulting tweets aimed at President Erdogan’s daughter and son-in-law and ostensibly aims to eradicate hate speech and harassment online. Turkish lawyer and Vice President of Ankara Bar Association IT, Technology & Law Council Gülşah Deniz-Atalar...

Court Denies EFF, ACLU Effort to Unseal Ruling Rejecting DOJ Effort to Break Encryption A federal appeals court last week refused to unseal a court order that reportedly stopped the Justice Department from forcing Facebook to break the encryption it offers to users of its Messenger application. The unpublished decision ends an effort by EFF, ACLU, and Stanford cybersecurity scholar Riana Pfefferkorn to unseal the 2018 ruling from a Fresno, California federal court. The ruling denied an attempt by the Justice Department to hold Facebook in contempt for refusing to decrypt Messenger voice calls. Despite the fact that the ruling has significant implications for Internet users’ security and privacy—and that the only public details about the case come from media reports—the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld an earlier decision by the trial court that the public had no right to access the court decision or related records. As we argued , unsealing records in the cas...

Why EFF Doesn’t Support California Proposition 24 This November, Californians will be called upon to vote on a ballot initiative called the California Privacy Rights Act , or Proposition 24 . EFF does not support it; nor does EFF oppose it. EFF works across the country to enact and defend laws that empower technology users to control how businesses process their personal information. The best consumer data privacy laws require businesses to get consumers’ opt-in consent before processing their data; bar data processing except as necessary to give consumers what they asked for (often called “data minimization”); forbid “pay for privacy” schemes that pressure all consumers, and especially those with lower incomes, to surrender their privacy rights; and let consumers sue businesses that break these rules. In California, we’ve worked with other privacy advocates to try to pass these kinds of strengthening amendments to our existing California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Prop 2...

When the U.S. Patent Office Won’t Do Its Job, Congress Should Step In When people get sued by patent trolls, they can fight back in one of two places: a U.S. district court or the Patent and Trademark Office. But the Patent Office is putting its thumb on the scale again in favor of patent owners and against technology users. This time, the Office is relying on specious legal arguments to shut down patent reviews at the Patent and Trademark Appeals Board (PTAB). The procedure that’s being undermined at PTAB is a procedure called inter partes review, or IPR. Congress created IPRs in 2012, as a faster and less expensive way of resolving patent disputes than district courts. Since then, they have become an important part of maintaining the patent system. Many patents (especially software patents) are granted after woefully inadequate examinations, and are ultimately invalidated when challenged in court. Given that, it makes sense to allow the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to take a...

Mexico's New Copyright Law: Cybersecurity and Human Rights This month, Mexico rushed through a new, expansive copyright law without adequate debate or consultation, and as a result, it adopted a national rule that is absolutely unfit for purpose, with grave implications for human rights and cybersecurity. The new law was passed as part of the country's obligations under Donald Trump's United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), and it imports the US copyright system wholesale, and then erases the USA’s own weak safeguards for fundamental rights. Central to the cybersecurity issue is Article 114 Bis, which establishes a new kind of protection for "Technical Protection Measures" (TPMs) this includes rightsholder technologies commonly known as Digital Rights Management (DRM), but it also includes basic encryption and other security measures that prevent access to copyrighted software. These are the familiar, dreaded locks that stop you from refilling your ...

A Legislative Path to an Interoperable Internet It’s not enough to say that the Internet is built on interoperability. The Internet is interoperability. Billions of machines around the world use the same set of open protocols—like TCP/IP, HTTP, and TLS—to talk to one another. The first Internet-connected devices were only possible because phone lines provided interoperable communication ports, and scientists found a way to send data, rather than voice, over those phone lines. In the early days of the Internet, protocols dictated the rules of the road. Because the Internet was a fundamentally decentralized, open system, services on the Internet defaulted to acting the same way. Companies may have tried to build their own proprietary networking protocols or maintain unilateral control over the content on the network , but they ultimately failed. The ecosystem was fast-moving, chaotic, and welcoming to new ideas. Today, big platforms are ecosystems unto themselves. Companies cr...

California Legislator Introduces Anti-Rural Fiber Legislation That Prioritizes DSL Frontier’s bankruptcy has serious consequences for Americans , including 2 million Californians, who are stuck with their deteriorating DSL monopoly. After deciding for years to never upgrade their networks to fiber—despite the fact that, according to their own bankruptcy filing, they could have profitably upgraded 3 million customers to gigabit fiber already — the pyramid scheme of milking dying DSL assets caught up to the company. This has forced rural communities in California that either lack access to the Internet, or have been dependent on decaying copper DSL lines provided by Frontier Communications, into a serious predicament. The solution, of course, is for the state to build fiber in those markets by empowering local governments and small private ISPs to do the job Frontier neglected for so long. But, rather than leave this mega-corporation to its own demise and chart out a better future ...