Thanks for the interview and for spending time. Great to have you here today. And thanks everybody for the questions and for tuning in. See you next time.
@Mary Yes - and that makes it all the more difficult to pick and choose which issues to take on! We're only about 35 people, and our international team is just 3...soon to be 4. But yes, I think that our name is growing, both in the US and internationally.
@Jillian: It seems the role of EFF will only get more vital from here on. There are so many issues, as we've seen just in this interview. Do you agree that EFF has a growing significance?
Jillian, does EFF take any position on The Pirate Parties launched in a number of countries? Their Internet freedom and information transparency platform seems to be something you'd be sympathetic to.
I'm certainly traveling a lot more than I expected! But it's been great, honestly - making connections all over the world is vital for what I do, because I want to ensure that we're not imposing our views, but rather, supporting existing views in the countries in which we work.
Since you've been in the job for such a short time, is there anything that has surprised you about your position over the last few months? Anything you weren't expecting?
Paul also asked a question about the challenges of funding...And I can say that we're really lucky to have an amazing membership base that makes up a large proportion of our funding. We often hold members-only events too - I just did one in NYC last weekend!
@Nicole It is tricky, and I think that, unfortunately, it may be an area in which government enforcement is needed...I'm still trying to figure this one out too :)
@Mary - our patent work is a bit outside my purview, but as I've been following it with interest, I can say that we have a fantastic member of our legal team, Julie Samuels, who's been doing excellent work in that area (https://www.eff.org/related/5460/blog). I think EFF's voice in this space -- particularly in respect to "patent trolls" -- is incredibly valuable.
Regarding the Bill of Privacy Rights, though, I guess I'm just a bit confused about how this could be enforced. Would it be something the sites themselves would have to include as part of their privacy policies?
@Paul - That's a tough one for me to answer too, as I don't really work on intellectual property issues - that's largely our domestic legal team. That said, I believe that our victories help enable innovation in the long term.
@Nicole - I'd prefer it be left up to users, with support from organizations. There are rare times where I think the government should step in, and I'm not sure that's one of them.
@Jillian: Some of EFF’s legal victories affect artists who remix or extract from existing videos. What were the issues in these cases, and how will EFF’s victories benefit video artists and documentary film producers?
@Paul - I'm not sure I'd say they "can't," but they're certainly not at this point. Nearly every foreign government engaging in internet censorship is using Western-made products (some American, some Canadian, some European). It's simply reality at this point.
@jillian, regarding the bill of privacy rights... do you think this is an area where the government should step in to enforce something or should it be left up to organizations like EFF?
Nicole - re: a Bill of Privacy Rights - I love the idea. Rebecca MacKinnon (@rmack on Twitter) is doing some great work in this space; her book, Consent of the Networked, comes out early next year and I can't wait to read it.
@jwallace - The leaks demonstrated that there was little oversight and accountability in the creation of such blacklists...the Australian one, for example, included the website of a dentist. That's a problem - it chills speech and affects commerce.
My response to that Paul on that question: I think that the threat comes from corporate spaces as well. Chinese, Kuwaiti, Saudi, Tunisian censorship are all assisted by American companies like Cisco and SmartFilter, for example... Not to mention the rules and regulations on sites like Facebook, which are often stricter than the First Amendment.
@Jillian: Has there been any improvement to the FBI’s online intelligence operations as a result of the exposure of the EFF Intelligence Oversight Board earlier this year? If not, what will change the alarming trends EFF cited then?
@jillian: One question I didn't get to ask on air was about the EFF's suggestion that we create a Bill of Privacy Rights for social network users. Something like this would purportedly provide users The Right to Informed Decision-Making, The Right to Control, and The Right to Leave. Do you see merit in this idea? How would something like this be enforced?
Paul Whyte had a great question awhile back:Do most of the important online issues today still involve clashes between individual rights and government powers, or have they shifted more toward industrial commerce, fraud and protection of consumers’ rights?
@jwallace - What Wikileaks did was leak the blacklists of several countries--including Australia--that were filtering, or planning to filter child pornography, but which had accidentally included other sites in their proposed blacklists.
"Wikileaks weren't amused when they suffered a DDOS attack either, although they'd been quite happy when Anonymous was attacking PayPal in support of them." - did I hear correctly that wikileaks took part in exposing child pornography? if so, wikileaks can do no wrong from my view. and that is tenure!
Jillian, how do you make a distinction between protests in the UK and, say, Syria, if they are regarded by both governments as illegal? Can we really cherrypick here?
Wikileaks weren't amused when they suffered a DDOS attack either, although they'd been quite happy when Anonymous was attacking PayPal in support of them.
Interesting that the UK went the Syrian route of using social media for surveillance after briefly considering the Egyptian approach of shutting them down.
I think it's very difficult to give blanket approval for US intervention in other nation's networks. We all think of the middle east, but how would we have felt if it had been the CIA interfering in Nicaragua and El Salvador?
@York: Do most of the important online issues today still involve clashes between individual rights and government powers, or have they shifted more toward industrial commerce, fraud and protection of consumers’ rights?
in saying you don't have resources to fight every fight, what then constitutes the core fights the EFF is currently engaged or will engage in the future
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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