Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

A call for a UN mandate on privacy emerged from an expert seminar held in Geneva this week on “The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age”.

February is Black History Month and that history is intimately linked with surveillance by the federal government in the name of “national security.” Indeed, the history of surveillance in the African-American community plays an important role in the debate around spying today and in the calls for a congressional investigation into that surveillance.

It is believed that Mr. Quan’s detention is politically motivated and a reaction to his blog, where he frequently exposed human rights violations by the Vietnamese government.

Jailed Vietnamese blogger and human rights lawyer Le Quoc Quan has launched a hunger strike to protest the refusal by prison authorities to provide him access to legal counsel, access to legal and religious books, and access to a priest for spiritual guidance, ahead of his appeal trial on 18 February 2014 in Hanoi.

On 11 February, The Day We Fight Back, organisations and individuals around the world demanded an end to mass surveillance.

11 February is the Day We Fight Back Against Mass Surveillance. Join more than 400 organisations, including several IFEX members, and 250,000 individuals and sign on to the Necessary and Proportionate Principles.

195 civil society organisations from around the world have called on the UN to put government accountability and independent media at the centre of a new framework for global development.

Network neutrality—the idea that Internet service providers should treat all data that travels over their networks equally—is a principle that EFF strongly supports. However, the power to enforce equal treatment on the Internet can easily become the power to control the Internet in less beneficent ways.