Tag: Regulation

Today Access and the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched a campaign to demand security and privacy in our electronic communications.

The 30th Session of the U.N. Human Rights Council (“HRC30”) has begun in Geneva. Over the course of the three-week session, the 47 Member States of the Council – and a full slate of civil society representatives, observer states, and technical experts – will debate resolutions and reports on the current status of human rights worldwide. Access and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) have compiled highlights identifying the key digital rights issues on the Council’s agenda, as well as relevant side events and countries under review in the Universal Periodic Review.

The U.S. Senate is heading home for summer recess without taking further action on the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), a.k.a. the “Darth Vader” surveillance bill. This is a victory for everyone who has spoken out against CISA. So far, you’ve generated more than six million faxes, sending a strong message to Congress: We want real security, not more cybersurveillance.

Last week the U.N. Human Rights Committee graded the United States on its surveillance practices. It also issued “concluding observations” for seven countries on human rights, including “Five Eyes” members Canada and the United Kingdom. In the conclusions the Committee strongly condemned the use of surveillance as a violation of the right to privacy.

In the joint letter, we told the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that requiring mass retention of phone records “exposes consumers to data breaches, stifles innovation, reduces market competition, and threatens fundamental privacy rights.”

Last week, the UK High Court issued an opinion explaining how emergency legislation passed last summer — the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act of 2014 (DRIPA) — violates EU law. We analyze the ruling and consider the implications for the future of privacy and data retention in Europe.

Today, senior members of the Obama Administration, including the director of the FBI, visited the U.S. Senate Judiciary and Intelligence committees to discuss encryption policy. FBI Director James Comey, along with officials from the Department of Justice and state law enforcement, requested a “dialogue” with the private sector to enable the government to obtain exceptional access to encrypted data. Yet leading security experts have made clear that such access would undermine the security of technology and the privacy of internet users around the world.

This afternoon, the Paraguayan Senate voted against a bill that would have mandated internet service providers (ISPs) to store internet communications metadata for one year, thus rejecting the “Pyrawebs” initiative for good.

On Wednesday, President Obama signed into law the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015, which bans bulk collection under some U.S. surveillance powers, increases transparency, and improves accountability of surveillance agencies and oversight mechanisms. The law is far from perfect, but its passage is the first step in a long journey toward comprehensive surveillance reform that protects the human rights of all people around the world.

The United States sat through its 2nd-ever hearing at the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday. The hearing is part of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process, a fairly new mechanism through which every U.N. member state undergoes scrutiny of its human rights record. We give an overview of what was said about U.S. surveillance, provide the U.S. response in full, and offer our analysis of that response.