Surveillance

Phoenix, April 8, 2014–The Committee to Protect Journalists hails today’s decision by the European Court of Justice invalidating the European Union’s mandatory data retention directive. The court found that the indiscriminate collection of metadata poses a “particularly serious” and disproportional interference with the right to privacy. Mass metadata surveillance is “likely to generate in the…

Governments’ capacity to store transactional data and the content of communications poses a unique threat to journalism in the digital age. By Geoffrey King

Surveillance, restrictive Internet legislation, and cyberattacks compel CPJ to add cyberspace to the list of places trending in the wrong direction. By Maya Taal

A mushrooming blogosphere has challenged the state’s media monopoly, drawing a heavy-handed bid to bring the Internet under government control. By Shawn W. Crispin Blogger Pham Viet Dao attends a conference on social media in Hanoi on December 24, 2012. Dao was arrested on June 13, 2013, on accusations of anti-state activity. (Reuters/Nguyen Lan Thang)

Today, a broad coalition of technology companies, human rights organizations, political groups, and others will take to the Web and to the streets to protest mass surveillance. The mobilization, known as “The Day We Fight Back,” honors activist and technologist Aaron Swartz, who passed away just over a year ago. Throughout the day, the campaign…

San Francisco, February 7, 2014–The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled by a report that a potential operation by the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) involved covert surveillance of reporters’ communications. GCHQ sought to use journalists to pass both information and disinformation to intelligence targets, according to documents taken from the National…

Journalists will be central targets of the extensive surveillance program introduced by Russian authorities in Sochi in connection with the 2014 Winter Olympic Games that begin February 7.

New York, January 22, 2014–The Committee to Protect Journalists calls for a full investigation into reports that Costa Rican officials secretly monitored the phone records of the San José-based daily Diario Extra as part of a leak investigation.