Nest Labs, a home automation company acquired by Google in 2014, will disable some of its customers' home automation control devices in May. This move is causing quite a stir among people who purchased the $300 Revolv Hub devices—customers who reasonably expected that the promised "lifetime" of updates would enable the hardware they paid for to actually work, only to discover the manufacturer can turn their device into a useless brick when it so chooses.

It used to be that when you bought an appliance, you owned it, and you could take it apart, repair it, and plug in whatever accessories you wanted without the manufacturer's knowledge or permission.

The Federal Communications Commission is trying to open up the closed world of TV set-top boxes, with the goal of finally killing that dust-gathering, power-sucking box altogether. They’ve proposed a new rule known as “Unlock the Box” that allows devices and apps from any manufacturer to connect with your home cable or satellite TV feeds. We think the FCC’s effort has the potential to unlock new competition, delivering cost savings and innovation.

State lawmakers recently introduced some misguided changes to California’s Assembly Bill 1681, which would require that manufacturers and operating system providers be able to decrypt smartphones sold in the state. On first glance, the amendment to A.B. 1681 might seem to address some of EFF’s previous criticisms, but the new version actually makes an already bad bill even worse. EFF has signed on to a new letter in opposition to the bill, and you can still join our action calling on lawmakers to vote against it. 

Publishers are seeking to expand the copyright restrictions they can impose on news platforms, in the latest example of a phenomenon known as “copyright creep.” That kind of creep happens when lawmakers lose sight of the central purpose of copyright: to ultimately grow the cultural commons by ensuring that authors and their heirs can collect compensation for specific uses of their works. In line with that purpose, copyright is not a fundamental right so much as a bundle of restrictions we allow creators to impose for limited times, subject to numerous exceptions such as fair use which are intended to ensure that those restrictions don't impede new expression and innovation. Copyright creep undermines that a delicate balance.

Laws are only as strong as their enforcement. 

That's why last weekend more than 30 citizen watchdogs joined EFF's team to hold California law enforcement and public safety agencies accountable. Together, we combed through nearly 170 California government websites to identify privacy and usage policies for surveillance technology that must now be posted online under state law.

Last week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned an injunction issued by a federal district court judge last year. The injunction would have prevented Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood from enforcing his massively large and demanding administrative subpoena against Google. The injunction would also have prohibited the Attorney General from bringing civil or criminal charges against the company for making third-party content accessible to Internet users.

EFF supported the injunction as a measure necessary to nip the abusive use of a state official’s investigatory subpoena power in the bud, and we’re sorry to see the injunction overturned.

The House is finally moving forward with updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), one of the main laws protecting the privacy of online communications. This year, The Email Privacy Act (H.R. 699), which updates ECPA to ensure all of our private online messages are protected by a warrant, garnered 315 cosponsors, almost three-quarters of the entire House. This impressive number of cosponsors makes a powerful statement. And it’s why Rep. Bob Goodlatte, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, scheduled a committee meeting on Wednesday to advance the bill.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice is getting in the digital censorship game with a new policy that would punish an offender for having a social media presence, even when someone on the outside is posting updates on their behalf.

As reported by Fusion, Texas’ new offender manual [.pdf] creates a prohibition on inmates "maintaining active social media accounts for the purposes of soliciting, updating, or engaging others, through a third party or otherwise." The rule flies in the face of free expression by penalizing offenders not only for their own use of social media, but also when their friends and family on the outside maintain their social media accounts to draw attention to prisoner issues.

The California Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection has scuttled A.B. 1681, the anti-smartphone encryption bill that EFF has been fighting against for the last few months. The bill was unable to get a second in committee, so it died without a formal vote.

UPDATE: AEPROVI is denying that it cooperated with the Ecuadorian government to block websites, despite the Telefónica memorandum.

According to a leaked internal memo of the multinational ISP Telefónica in Ecuador, the Association of Internet Providers of Ecuador (AEPROVI) collaborated with the Ecuadorian government to block their users' access to websites. The memo was obtained and published by the Associated Whistleblowing Press and the Ecuadorian whistleblowing platform, Ecuador Transparente. 

En México, la Segunda Sala de la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación (SCJN) está a punto de resolver los juicios de amparo contra la disposición de la Ley Federal de Telecomunicaciones (also know as Ley Telecom) que obliga a las operadoras de telefonía y empresas proveedores de Internet a retener masiva e indiscriminadamente los datos de comunicaciones – e incluso geolocalización – de sus usuarios por un periodo de 24 meses.

The U.S. White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is considering a new policy for sharing source code for software created by or for government projects. There’s a lot to love about the proposed policy: it would make it easier for people to find and reuse government software, and explicitly encourages government agencies to prioritize free and open source software options in their procurement decisions.

EFF submitted a comment on the policy through the White House’s GitHub repository (you can also download our comment as a PDF). The OMB is encouraging people to send comments through GitHub, reply to and +1 each other’s comments, and even offer direct edits to the policy via pull requests.

The Google Books case is over after a decade of litigation, leaving in its wake new guidance on the reach of the fair use doctrine and, not incidentally, protection for an extraordinary public resource for finding books and information.

Last fall, the Second Circuit issued a long-anticipated ruling soundly rejecting the Authors Guild’s claim that the Google Books Project infringes copyright. The Authors Guild asked the Supreme Court to review that ruling, and today the Supreme Court said no. That decision means the Guild has run out of options, at least in the courts.

Fair use is one of the biggest undelivered promises of a report of the Australian Law Reform Commission to the Australian government two years ago, which recommended improvements to Australian copyright law. Instead of delivering a fair use exception, the government slapped users with onerous new enforcement provisions such as SOPA-style web blocking and data retention, along with a now-shelved attempt at a graduated response code for penalizing users suspected of infringement.

Tech experts and industry representatives squared off against law enforcement officials in two sessions of lively testimony today in front of the House Energy and Commerce committee. Today's hearing is the latest in the ongoing battle in the courts and legislature commonly called the second “Crypto Wars,” after a similar national debate in the 1990s.

Close Comparison Reveals Negotiators Repeating TPP's Mistakes

A secretive trade agreement currently being negotiated behind closed doors could lay down new, inflexible copyright standards across the Asia-Pacific region. If you are thinking of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), think again—we're talking about the lesser-known Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). While RCEP doesn't include the United States, it does include the two biggest Asian giants that the TPP omits—China and India. So while you won't read about it in the mainstream U.S. press, it's a very big deal indeed, and will assume even more importance should the TPP fail to pass Congress.

The federal district court in San Francisco in EFF’s National Security Letter (NSL) cases has unsealed its order from last month, which denies our clients’ long-running First Amendment challenges to the NSL statute.

This is the first public decision interpreting the NSL statute since it was amended last year by the USA FREEDOM Act, and unfortunately, it’s a disappointing one. Although the court previously found the statute unconstitutional, it held that Congress successfully addressed these problems by passing USA FREEDOM.

EFF and our clients disagree with this ruling, and we will be appealing it to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. 

How Did We Get Here?

Defenders of the NSA's mass spying have lost an important talking point: that the erosion of our privacy and associational rights is justified given the focus of surveillance efforts on combating terrorism and protecting the national security. That argument has always been dubious for a number of reasons. But after a November 2015 ruling [.pdf] by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) was unsealed this week, it's lost another chunk of its credibility. The ruling confirms that NSA's warrantless spying has been formally approved for use in general criminal investigations. The national security justification has been entirely blown. 

We're excited to welcome to EFF the newest member of our tech operations team, Rocket Lee. Rocket comes to EFF with deep and wide ranging experience, and said after joining the team, "I'm really excited to be part of the Tech Ops team… contributing to help make everything run smoothly."

Rocket's experience spans several disciplines. They studied game design in grad school at MIT through the Comparative Media Studies program and designed a thesis project entailing a seven-day alternate reality game for 15 players called Civilité based on The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas.

We entrust our most sensitive, private, and personal information to the companies which provide us access to the Internet. Collectively, these companies are privy to the online conversations, behavior, and even the location of almost every Internet user. As this reality increasingly penetrates the Brazilian public consciousness, Brazilian Internet users are justifiably concerned about which companies are willing to take a stand for their privacy and protection of personal data. That is why InternetLab, one of the leading independent research centers on Internet policy in Brazil, has evaluated key Brazilian telecommunications companies’ policies to assess their commitment to user privacy when the government comes calling for their users' personal data.

A proposal to rewrite parts of copyright law being pushed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would create new restrictions for filmmakers, journalists, and others using recordings of audiovisual performances. Against the background of the the Next Great Copyright Act lurching forward and the Copyright Office convening a new series of roundtables on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, few have noticed the USPTO push happening now. But these proposals are a classic instance of copyright creep and are dangerous for users, creators, and service providers alike.

The secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) had its first opportunity to review a government request for telephone call records since the enactment in June 2015 of the USA FREEDOM Act, which placed some restrictions and oversight on the NSA’s surveillance powers. Unfortunately the results of this first post-USA FREEDOM FISC review are not pretty, and remind us all that there is still much work to be done.