Tag: eff

Feb 23 2015

TBC: Morning Musing 2.23.15

I’m going mostly light this Monday morning cuz, let’s be honest, who wants to think too hard on a Monday morning?

First, now you can find out whether you’ve been spied on:

Find Out if You’ve Been Spied on-and Join the Fight for Privacy

Because of the ruling, there is an opportunity for people to try to find out if their communications were among those shared by NSA with GCHQ. Intelligence agencies use information like ip addresses and email addresses as “selectors” when sifting through the massive quantities of data they collect. GCHQ will comply with the IPT’s ruling by searching “selectors” it received from the NSA prior to December 2014.

But this won’t happen automatically. People need to actually file requests with the IPT. To help people do so, PI is collecting people’s names, numbers, and emails in order to assist them in asserting their rights and finding out whether those selectors were subject to unlawful sharing. If they were, PI will help individuals seek a declaration that that person’s privacy rights have been violated under Article 8 and Article 10 of the UK Human Rights Act, the law that codified the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law. Once the IPT issues a declaration for an individual, that individual can also request that their records be deleted. There’s no need to be a UK citizen-anyone can participate.

Jump!

Apr 10 2009

Gibbs: Obama “absolutely” agrees with DoJ “states secrets” filing

According to White House Press Secretary Gibbs, who spoke yesterday to reporters, President Obama agrees with the position taken by his DoJ.

Responding late Friday afternoon to a suit filed by the EFF against the NSA, the Justice Department

argued that the case should be dismissed because information surrounding the program was a “state secret” and therefore couldn’t be litigated or discussed. It also proposed that the government was protected by “sovereign immunity” under federal wiretapping statutes and the Patriot Act, arguing that the United States could only face lawsuits if they willfully elected to disclose intelligence obtained by wiretapping.

follow me…  

Apr 06 2009

Obama = Bush, when it comes to Warrantless Wiretapping

From Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):

Obama Administration Embraces Bush Position on Warrantless Wiretapping and Secrecy

Says Court Must Dismiss Jewel v. NSA to Protect ‘State Secrets’

San Francisco – The Obama administration formally adopted the Bush administration’s position that the courts cannot judge the legality of the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) warrantless wiretapping program, filing a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA late Friday.

n Jewel v. NSA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is challenging the agency’s dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans. The Obama Justice Department claims in its motion that litigation over the wiretapping program would require the government to disclose privileged “state secrets.” These are essentially the same arguments made by the Bush administration three years ago in Hepting v. AT&T, EFF’s lawsuit against one of the telecom giants complicit in the NSA spying.

Feb 27 2008

ACLU & EFF Intervene in Wikileaks Case

Here comes the cavalry:

San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Northern California (ACLU-Northern California) Tuesday filed a motion to intervene in a lawsuit where a federal judge ordered the disabling of one of the domain names associated with “Wikileaks,” a website designed to give whistleblowers a forum for posting materials of public concern.

For those who may be unfamiliar with this case: the Swiss bank Julius Baer sued the whistleblower site Wikileaks and its Internet host Dynadot to remove documents related to the bank’s alleged money laundering activities in the Cayman Islands.

In a highly unusual ruling, the District Court, per a secret agreement between Dynadot and Julius Baer, granted the bank’s motion for a permanent injunction to both disable the Wikileak’s domain name and prevent its transfer to another registrar. The Court also ordered Dynadot to divulge all of Wikileak’s private client information and ruled it illegal for anyone (apparently anywhere in the world) to link to the documents at issue.  

Indeed, what makes this case even more unusual is that Wikileaks was informed of the bank’s motion by email only hours before the hearing, and when a Wikileaks attorney showed up informally to find out what was going on, she was ordered to leave the courtroom.

For more on this case, see Valtin’s excellent essay (also check out the comments) as well as this summary over at Wired.

The court’s injunction has far reaching implications for free speech on the Internet, because if allowed to stand, it means that anyone who doesn’t like what you post on the Internet can simply sue your host to shut you down.

Feb 20 2008

The Supreme Court did the right thing…

in rejecting ACLU vs. NSA today.

A number of good folks in the blogosphere are huffing and puffing over the Supreme Court’s rejection of the ACLU’s Petition for Certiori in the case of ACLU v. NSA.  They don’t need to.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court today dismissed the first legal challenge to President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping order, but without ruling on any of the key issues.

It is traditional and expected in our Federal system that the Supreme Court wait until a controversial legal issue is litigated in more than one of the lower Circuits before creating a binding precedent.  This way, the Supreme Court both allows for a broader range of opinion and ensures that a greater number of arguments and issues are considered before the Court decides the final law.  

In ACLU vs. NSA, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had the first bite at the apple on unwarranted wiretapping, and spit out a Bushie worm. Yet the sour 6th is not the only Circuit with a say about whether our government can secretly spy on us.