EFF in the News
“The FBI could have handled this investigation in a different way, but they failed to,” Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Mark Rumold told TechCrunch. The EFF has argued in another Playpen-related case that the NIT warrant was unconstitutional. “They just cast their net as wide as they could, and now they’re having to fight tooth and nail to bring these prosecutions. If they had done it in a way that was targeted in the first place, they wouldn’t have this problem,” he added.
Although this ruling is likely the end of the case against Levin, other defendants linked to Playpen are standing trial across the country. Judges in those cases are not bound to follow Young’s ruling, and those cases may still proceed. The Justice Department may also continue to bring charges against other suspected Playpen users — but Rumold says that’s not a good idea.
“At this point, there were so many problems with the way the FBI conducted this investigation that DOJ should just stop bringing these cases,” Rumold said.
“I think that it is a small percentage, but it's also very difficult to measure because frequently there is no place to report it to, and people have different ideas about what qualifies as harassment,” Eva Galperin, global policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Motherboard in a phone call. “We can't really know.”
Andrew Crocker a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the San Bernardino case highlights the need for oversight of the government’s purchase and use of zero days.
“The fact that it was not useful is the biggest headline to me,” says Crocker told WIRED. “It’s a lot of money, but there’s nothing to compare it to. There’s no insight into how this fits into the [government] market for vulnerabilities. If the government is going to continue on a course of spending a lot of money on vulnerabilities that are perhaps not useful or short-lived, it’s the sort of thing that Congress should have some oversight on it.”
"Our heroic clients want to talk about the NSLs they received from the government, but they’ve been gagged—one of them since 2011," EFF Deputy Executive Director Kurt Opsahl said in a statement. "This government silencing means the service providers cannot issue open and honest transparency reports and can’t share their experiences as part of the ongoing public debate over NSLs and their potential for abuse."
Opsahl said the digital rights group would appeal Illston's decision.
“U.S. privacy laws are so far behind the rest of the world that it … falls short of the requirements of international human rights norms,” said Jeremy Malcolm, an analyst at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based digital rights group.
Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who wrote an amicus brief in the Maryland case with Wessler, agrees.
“We’re starting to see other stingray cases bubble up, and it’s pretty fantastic that the first opinion on this came out so strongly in favor of the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights,” she says.
"The case very much remains up in the air," said Mitch Stoltz, lawyer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in the case.
"If this case were to go the way Flo and Eddie want, it would create a right that never existed" and would be "disruptive for innovation," Stoltz said in a phone interview Wednesday.
"We seriously doubt that this bill is constitutional," said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "A law that essentially requires you to hand over your phone to a cop in a roadside situation without a warrant is a non-starter."
Guest:
Nate Cardozo, Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that defends civil liberties in the digital world
"The U.S. government is unlawfully and unconstitutionally preventing Microsoft from telling its users about surveillance activity," said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for Internet Rights at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "We deserve to know when the government is collecting data about our digital lives."
Coming from Microsoft, the lawsuit helps educate the court on the severity of the issue and shed some light on how secret orders are affecting users, according to Tien. "Large providers like [Microsoft] have a view of the Internet, of the cloud, and of the U.S. government's practices and tactics that most companies (or groups like EFF) don't have," he said. "[Microsoft] can clearly and authoritatively tell the court, as it has, about how often it is gagged, and for how long."
eff.org/nsa-spying
