Surveillance

The British government’s attempt to rush through a bill on data retention before the House of Commons summer recess next week has run into opposition–not from members across the aisle but from Internet companies, civil liberty defenders, and lawyers, who say the law would extend the authorities’ already vast snooping capabilities.

San Francisco, June 25, 2014–The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes today’s unanimous ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that held that law enforcement officials need search warrants to search the mobile phones of individuals they arrest. The court found that the data found in cellphones should be protected from routine inspection, news reports said.

In Pakistan, where freedom of expression is largely perceived as a Western notion, the Snowden revelations have had a damaging effect. The deeply polarized narrative has become starker as the corridors of power push back on attempts to curb government surveillance. “If the citizens of the United States of America cannot have these rights, how…

Journalism is increasingly mediated by the same digital tools to which we entrust the rest of our lives. In keeping with CPJ’s mission to enable and protect journalists wherever they find themselves under threat, we are pleased to announce the hire of Tom Lowenthal, our first staff technologist.

The constitutional chamber of the Costa Rican Supreme Court ruled on March 21, 2014, that the government’s secret monitoring of phone records of the San José-based daily Diario Extra as part of a leak investigation was unconstitutional, according to news reports. 

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…