A year ago US cell carriers agreed to implement more lenient unlocking policies. I compared what they committed to do with what they actually did. Here are the results: (I made this graphic and am releasing it to the public domain - feel free to use it however you want, but a link back to where it originally appears on RepeaterStore would be much appreciated.) Summary: Sprint and T-Mobile have…
Any minute now President Obama is going to sign the “Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act” into law (it’s scheduled for 3:45 ET today). The bill reinstates an exemption for unlocking cellphones in the Digital Millennium opyright Act, and moves unlocking cellphones from a legal grey area back to lawfullness. My original petition did a lot to kick off the process, but it took about…
It’s been well over a year since I started advocating for Congress to reverse a controversial decision by the Librarian to remove an anti-circumvention exemption for cellphone unlocking. While other advocates and I had to retract support from the version of the bill that passed in the House, we thankfully now are one step closer to a better bill. Here’s a full statement by Kyle Wiens and I on the…
Since January 2013 I’ve been advocating for the government make unlocking cell phones legal, and today a bill is finally up for a vote in the House. Disappointingly, a last-minute addition to the bill means I prefer it doesn’t pass at all. A bit of background In late 2005, I was sent a a cease and desist letter by Motorola that claimed I was in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act…
Last night, New York Times’s Nicole Perloth published a post titled “ The Day the Internet Didn’t Fight Back .” It presents Tuesday’s protest in a negative light, claiming that it “barely registered.” I’m biased as someone who’s been working on the campaign for the last month, but the article strikes me as a little lazy. It contains factual inaccuracies that could easily have been fixed by…
Snowden’s leaks have revealed that the NSA monitors our phone and internet records. Technology companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft have been quick to call (and sue) the government for greater transparency. But telecoms, who we now know facilitate most of that data collection, have been silent throught. As Natasha Lennard eloquently put it in a recent Salon article , they’ve “marched in…
A few weeks ago Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, was detained at London Heathrow airport under schedule 7 of the UK’s 2000 Terrorism Act. London’s Metropolitan police used the following justification for invoking terrorism laws to detain him: “We assess that Miranda is knowingly carrying material, the release of which would endanger people’s lives. Additionally the disclosure or threat of…
A little earlier tonight, the US government shut down . There’s plenty of analysis out there on why that’s happened. But the specific reason doesn’t matter: there are larger, systemic issues at play. Congress’s approval rate is at 10%, an all-time low. Our elected officials are ineffective, our political parties are inept, and voters are unhappy. It seems pretty clear that the system is ripe for…
Today may be the single most important day so far since Edward Snowden began revealing the extent of the NSA’s surveillance dragnet. If you care about privacy, and you’ve read the news, you should have already picked up the phone and called your representative . For the very first time, a vote is scheduled to occur in Congress on NSA surveillance. And unfortunately, this might also be the last…
Last week I wrote about the need for a “Rapid Response Taskforce” that would build tools for online activism and throw up fast campaign sites in coordination with public advocacy and grass roots organizations. The post got some exposure on Hacker News, and over 70 designers, developers, copywriters, and general technologists have signed up to get involved. When I wrote the post, I didn’t expect…
For the last two weeks I’ve been helping build and launch StopWatching.us with EFF, Free Press, Mozilla, Fight for the Future and others. The site is a response to Snowden’s revelations about the breadth of NSA’s surveillance programs. My main takeaway from the experience is this: The Internet desperately needs a team of rapid responders to help build effective campaigns on short notice. Building…
This morning we sent a letter to the heads of the House and Senate Judiciary Comittees asking them to pass a bill that permanently legalizes cell phone unlocking and calls for hearings on reforming of Section 1201 of the DMCA. The letter is signed by over 30 technology companies and public policy organizations including Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reddit, YCombinator,…
About six days ago I started started a petition to the White House to make unlocking cell phones legal. If you haven’t signed it yet, please do. In September 2005, I received a cease and desist letter from Motorola for selling software to unlock their cell phones. The letter indicated that I was in breach of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) by circumventing protection measures in their…