Katherine Maher

On Tuesday, Access and more than 80 organizations and internet companies sent a letter to Congress demanding an immediate halt to and investigation of the U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. Other signatories include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, and reddit.

As Istanbul’s Taksim Square swelled with protesters on Friday night, local authorities seemingly disabled livestreams from the municipality’s ‘Turistik Kameralar,’ or Tourist Cameras, that showed views of the plaza. By scraping the feed, Access was able to identify when the camera was disabled, as well as evidence that seems to prove that the feeds were disabled deliberately, rather than collapsing under ‘viewer load.’

Last week, we documented network interference in Malaysia: local internet service providers (ISPs) were obstructing the free flow of traffic from selected sites hosting opposition political content, right ahead of a critical election. We asked the Access community to demand accountability from the Malaysian government, and ensure the Malaysian internet stayed free and open. Thousands of members from more than 60 countries signed a petition telling the MCMC to keep Malaysia online–and we delivered that petition. On Sunday, May 5th, in the midst of the elections, we wrote to Sharil Tarmizi, head of the MCMC, to remind them that the world was watching: network interference is an unacceptable violation of Malaysians’ rights.

The Access team has reviewed Microsoft’s transparency report and analyzed what it does–and does not–tell us about law enforcement requests for Skype data, as well as how it measures up to the demands in the January open letter from civil society.

This week, Access joins a coalition of Internet advocacy organizations in a week of action to express our opposition to the U.S. Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).

CISPA, the ill-conceived piece of US legislation on information sharing and cybersecurity, is back. Yesterday, the Intelligence Committee of the US House of Representatives held a hearing on cybersecurity, under the banner of “Advanced Threats Facing Our Nation.” The committee, chaired by Republican congressman Mike Rogers, heard testimony from representatives of the financial, energy, corporate, and security industries. No representative of the civil liberties or privacy community was invited to testify.