The NSA Is Making Us All Less Safe

We all live in an increasingly networked world. One of the preconditions of that world has to be basic computer security—freedom to use strong technologies that are fully trustworthy. That’s why the recent reporting on the NSA’s systematic effort to weaken and sabotage commercially available encryption used by individuals and businesses around the world is so important. By weakening encryption, the NSA allows others to more easily break it. By installing backdoors and other vulnerabilities in systems, the NSA exposes them to other malicious hackers—whether they are foreign governments or criminals.

Lowering Your Standards: DRM and the Future of the W3C

We're deeply disappointed with the W3C announcement that its Director, Tim Berners-Lee, had determined that the "playback of protected content" was in scope for the W3C HTML Working Group's new charter, overriding EFF's formal objection against its inclusion. If the controversial "Encrypted Media Extensions" proposal goes through to become part of a W3C recommendation, you can expect to hear DRM vendors, DRM-locked content providers like Netflix, and browser makers like Microsoft, Opera, and Google stating that they can now offer W3C standards compliant "content protection" for Web video.

Transparent Is The New Black

Cloud storage provider Dropbox has done the right thing by joining Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, and LinkedIn in their consolidated suit before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, demanding permission to publish—for the first time—complete statistics about the US government's national security requests. The government's tradition of secrecy surrounding data requests is no answer to the question before the court. What possible justification can there be to prevent companies from reporting the mere number of national security requests they receive?

EFF Updates

In the Silk Road Case, Don't Blame the Technology

[. . .]