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地方公務員等共済組合法施行規則の一部を改正する省令案に対する意見募集

地方公務員等共済組合法施行令及び被用者年金制度の一元化等を図るための厚生年金保険法等の一部を改正する法律及び地方公務員等共済組合法及び被用者年金制度の一元化等を図るための厚生年金保険法等の一部を改正する法律の一部を改正する法律の施行に伴う地方公務員等共済組合法による長期給付等に関する経過措置に関する政令の一部を改正する政令の一部を改正する政令案に対する意見募集

地方自治法施行規則の一部を改正する省令（案）に対する意見募集

衛星放送ワーキンググループ（第10回）配付資料

令和6年8月5日付　総務省人事

令和6年8月5日付　公害等調整委員会事務局人事

情報通信審議会 情報通信技術分科会 航空・海上無線通信委員会 X帯沿岸監視用レーダー作業班（第4回）

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　７月6日、辺野古ゲート前座り込み開始（2014年7月7日）10周年を前に、米軍キャンプ・シュワブを囲む「人間の鎖」と県民集会が開かれ、猛暑の中、1200人が参加した＝写真＝。辺野古への埋立土砂が搬出される安和桟橋のダンプ事故で亡くなった警備員に全員で黙とうを行い、相次ぐ米兵による性暴力事件、大浦湾へのくい打ち強行に怒りと抗議の声を上げた。　6月25日、昨年12月に起こった米空軍兵による16歳未満の少女への誘拐・暴行事件が、発生から半年、容疑者..

情報通信審議会 情報通信技術分科会 陸上無線通信委員会 小電力システム作業班 TPMS・RKEシステムアドホックグループ（第6回）

令和6年8月4日付　総務省人事

令和6年8月4日付　公害等調整委員会事務局人事

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　角川歴彦氏の新刊『人間の証明　勾留２２６日と私の生存権について』(リトルモア１２００円)を興味深く読んだ。２１年に開催された東京五輪では、その後の２２年に２０人近くが汚職・談合容疑で逮捕、起訴された。当時K A D O K A W Aの会長だった歴彦氏もその一人であった。　殆どの関係者が容疑を認めて保釈される中で、歴彦氏は一貫して容疑を否認したため、保釈請求は三度も却下され、勾留は２２６日に及んだ。容疑を認めない者は懲..

Legal intern Danya Hajjaji was the lead author of this post.

EFF filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit supporting a group of journalists in their lawsuit against Israeli spyware company NSO Group. In our amicus brief backing the plaintiffs’ appeal, we argued that victims of human rights abuses enabled by powerful surveillance technologies must be able to seek redress through U.S. courts against both foreign and domestic corporations. 

NSO Group notoriously manufactures “Pegasus” spyware, which enables full remote control of a target’s smartphone. Pegasus attacks are stealthy and sophisticated: the spyware embeds itself into phones without an owner having to click anything (such as an email or text message). A Pegasus-infected phone allows government operatives to intercept personal data on a device as well as cloud-based data connected to the device.

Our brief highlights multiple examples of Pegasus spyware having been used by governmental bodies around the world to spy on targets such as journalists, human rights defenders, dissidents, and their families. For example, the Saudi Arabian government was found to have deployed Pegasus against Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

In the present case, Dada v. NSO Group, the plaintiffs are affiliated with El Faro, a prominent independent news outlet based in El Salvador, and were targeted with Pegasus through their iPhones. The attacks on El Faro journalists coincided with their investigative reporting into the Salvadorian government.

The plaintiffs sued NSO Group in California because NSO Group, in deploying Pegasus against iPhones, abused the services of Apple, a California-based company. However, the district court dismissed the case on a forum non conveniens theory, holding that California is an inconvenient forum for NSO Group. The court thus concluded that exercising jurisdiction over the foreign corporation was inappropriate and that the case would be better considered by a court in Israel or elsewhere.

However, as we argued in our brief, NSO Group is already defending two other lawsuits in California brought by both Apple and WhatsApp. And the company is unlikely to face legal accountability in its home country—the Israeli Ministry of Defense provides an export license to NSO Group, and its technology has been used against citizens within Israel.

That's why this case is critical—victims of powerful, increasingly-common surveillance technologies like Pegasus spyware must not be barred from U.S. courts.

As we explained in our brief, the private spyware industry is a lucrative industry worth an estimated $12 billion, largely bankrolled by repressive governments. These parties widely fail to comport with the United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which caution against creating a situation where victims of human rights abuses “face a denial of justice in a host State and cannot access home State courts regardless of the merits of the claim.”

The U.S. government has endorsed the Guiding Principles as applied to U.S. companies selling surveillance technologies to foreign governments, but also sought to address the issue of spyware facilitating state-sponsored human rights violations. In 2021, for example, the Biden Administration recognized NSO Group as engaging in such practices by placing it on a list of entities prohibited from receiving U.S. exports of hardware or software.

Unfortunately, the Guiding Principles expressly avoid creating any “new international law obligations,” thus leaving accountability to either domestic law or voluntary mechanisms.

Yet voluntary enforcement mechanisms are wholly inadequate for human rights accountability. The weakness of voluntary enforcement is best illustrated by NSO Group supposedly implementing its own human rights policies, all the while acting as a facilitator of human rights abuses.

Restraining the use of the forum non conveniens doctrine and opening courthouse doors to victims of human rights violations wrought by surveillance technologies would bind companies like NSO Group through judicial liability.

But this would not mean that U.S. courts have unfettered discretion over foreign corporations. The reach of courts is limited by rules of personal jurisdiction and plaintiffs must still prove the specific required elements of their legal claims.

The Ninth Circuit must give the El Faro plaintiffs the chance to vindicate their rights in federal court. Shielding spyware companies like NSO Group from legal accountability does not only diminish digital civil liberties like privacy and freedom of speech—it paves the way for the worst of the worst human rights abuses, including physical apprehensions, unlawful detentions, torture, and even summary executions by the governments that use the spyware.

Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a ban on reading any copyrighted work that is encumbered by access restrictions. It makes it illegal for you to read and understand the code that determines how your phone or car works and whether those devices are safe. It makes it illegal to create fair use videos for expressive purposes, reporting, or teaching. It makes it illegal for people with disabilities to convert ebooks they own into a format they can perceive. EFF and co-counsel at WSGR challenged Section 1201 in court on behalf of computer science professor Matthew Green and engineer Andrew “bunnie” Huang, and we asked the court to invalidate the law on First Amendment grounds.

Despite this law's many burdens on expression and research, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit concluded that these restrictions are necessary to incentivize copyright owners to publish works online, and rejected our court challenge. It reached this conclusion despite the evidence that many works are published without digital access restrictions (such as mp3 files sold without DRM) and the fact that people willingly pay for copyrighted works even though they're readily available through piracy. Once again, copyright law has been used to squash expression in order to serve a particular business model favored by rightsholders, and we are all the poorer for it.

Integral to the Court’s decision was the conclusion that Section 1201’s ban on circumvention of access restrictions is a regulation of “conduct” rather than “speech.” This is akin to saying that the government could regulate the reading of microfiche as “conduct” rather than “speech,” because technology is necessary to do so. Of course you want to be able to read the microfiche you purchased, but you can only do so using the licensed microfiche reader the copyright owner sells you. And if that reader doesn’t meet your needs because you’re blind or you want to excerpt the microfiche to make your own fair use materials, the government can make it illegal for you to use a reader that does.

It’s a back door into speech regulation that favors large, commercial entertainment products over everyday people using those works for their own, fair-use expression or for documentary films or media literacy.

Even worse, the law governs access to copyrighted software. In the microfiche analogy, this would be microfiche that’s locked inside your car or phone or other digital device that you’re never allowed to read. It’s illegal to learn how technology works under this regime, which is very dangerous for our digital future.

The Court asserts that the existing defenses to the anti-circumvention law are good enough – even though the Library of Congress has repeatedly admitted that they weren’t when it decided to issue exemptions to expand them.

All in all, the opinion represents a victory for rightsholder business models that allow them to profit by eroding the traditional rights of fair users, and a victory for device manufacturers that would like to run software in your devices that you’re not allowed to understand or change.

Courts must reject the mistaken notion that draconian copyright regimes are helpful to “expression” as a general matter rather than just the largest copyright owners. EFF will continue to fight for your rights to express yourself and to understand the technology in your life.

Related Cases: Green v. U.S. Department of Justice