Deeplinks

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.

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. 

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. 

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