サイバーセキュリティタスクフォース（第34回）

2020年基準 消費者物価指数 全国 2021年(令和3年)9月分

電気通信紛争処理委員会（第215回）の開催について

第31回独立行政法人評価制度委員会 議事録

第44回独立行政法人評価制度評価部会 議事録

In commemoration of the inaugural Global Encryption Day, the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) has published a policy brief that highlights restrictions to encryption and what needs to be done by governments in Africa to promote its use.

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On Global Encryption Day, APC joined with over 150 other organisations to call on governments and the private sector to reject efforts to undermine encryption and instead pursue policies that enhance, strengthen and promote use of strong encryption to protect people everywhere.

Oakland residents shared the stories of their personal experience; a broad coalition of advocates, civil society organizations, and local internet service providers (ISPs) lifted their voices; and now the Oakland City Council has unanimously passed Oakland’s Communications Service Provider Choice Ordinance. The newly minted law frees Oakland renters from being constrained to their landlord's preferred ISP by prohibiting owners of multiple occupancy buildings from interfering with an occupant's ability to receive service from the communications provider of their choice.

Across the country—through elaborate kickback schemes—large, corporate ISPs looking to lock out competition have manipulated landlords into denying their tenants the right to choose the internet provider that best meets their family’s needs and values. In August of 2018, an Oakland-based EFF supporter emailed us asking what would need to be done to empower residents with the choice they were being denied. Finally, after three years of community engagement and coalition building, that question has been answered.  

Modeled on a San Francisco law adopted in 2016, Oakland’s new Communications Choice ordinance requires property owners of multiple occupancy buildings to provide reasonable access to any qualified communication provider that has received a service request from a building occupant. San Francisco’s law has already proven effective. There, one competitive local ISP, which had previously been locked out of properties of forty or more units with active revenue sharing agreements, gained access to more than 1800 new units by 2020. Even for those who choose to stay with their existing provider, a competitive communications market benefits all residents by incentivizing providers to offer the best services at the lowest prices. As Tracy Rosenberg, the Executive Director of coalition member Media Alliance—and a leader in the advocacy effort—notes, "residents can use the most affordable and reliable services available, alternative ISP's can get footholds in new areas and maximize competitive benefits, and consumers can vote with their pockets for platform neutrality, privacy protections, and political contributions that align with their values.”

Unfortunately, not every city is as prepared to take advantage of such measures as San Francisco and Oakland. The Bay Area has one of the most competitive ISP markets in the United States, including smaller ISPs committed to defending net neutrality and their users’ privacy. In many U.S. cities, that’s not the case.

We hope to see cities and towns across the country step up to protect competition and foster new competitive options by investing in citywide fiber-optic networks and opening that infrastructure to private ISPs.

We get a lot of requests for help here at EFF, with our tireless intake coordinator being the first point of contact for many. All too often, however, the help needed isn’t legal or technical. Instead, users just need an answer to a simple question: what does this company want me to do to get my account back?

People lose a lot when they lose their account. For example, being kicked off Amazon could mean losing access to your books, music, pictures, or anything else you have only licensed, not bought, from that company. But the loss can have serious financial consequences for people who rely on the major social media platforms for their livelihoods, the way video makers rely on YouTube or many artists rely on Facebook or Twitter for promotion.

And it’s even worse when you can’t figure out why your account was closed, much less how to get it restored.  The deep flaws in the DMCA takedown process are well-documented, but at least the rules of a DMCA takedown are established and laid out in the law. Takedowns based on ill-defined company policies, not so much.

Over the summer, writer and meme king Chuck Tingle found his Twitter account suspended due to running afoul of Twitter’s ill-defined repeat infringer policy. That they have such a policy is not a problem in and of itself: to take advantage of the DMCA safe harbor, Twitter is required to have one. It’s not even a problem that the law doesn’t specify what the policy needs to look like—flexibility is vital for different services to do what makes the most sense for them. However, a company has to make a policy with an actual, tangible set of rules if they expect people to be able to follow it.

This is what Twitter says:

What happens if my account receives multiple copyright complaints?

If multiple copyright complaints are received Twitter may lock accounts or take other actions to warn repeat violators. These warnings may vary across Twitter’s services.  Under appropriate circumstances we may suspend user accounts under our repeat infringer policy. However, we may take retractions and counter-notices into account when applying our repeat infringer policy. 

That is frustratingly vague. “Under appropriate circumstances” doesn’t tell users what to avoid or what to do if they run afoul of the policy. Furthermore, if an account is suspended, this does not tell users what to do to get it back. We’ve confirmed that “We may take retractions and counter-notices into account when applying our repeat infringer policy” means that Twitter may restore the account after a suspension or ban, in response to counter-notices and retractions of copyright claims. But an equally reasonable reading of it is that they will take those things into account only before suspending or banning a user, so counter-noticing won’t help you get your account back if you lost it after a sudden surge in takedowns.

And that assumes you can even send a counter-notice. When Tingle lost his account under its repeat infringer policy, he found that because his account was suspended, he couldn’t use Twitter’s forms to contest the takedowns. That sounds like a minor thing, but it makes it very difficult for users to take the steps needed to get their accounts back.

Often, being famous or getting press attention to your plight is the way to fast-track getting restored. When Facebook flagged a video of a musician playing a public domain Bach piece, and Sony refused to release the claim, the musician got it resolved by making noise on Twitter and emailing the heads of various Sony departments. Most of us don’t have that kind of reach.

Even when there are clear policies, those rules mean nothing if the companies don’t hold up their end of the bargain. YouTube’s Content ID rules claim a video will be restored if, after an appeal, a month goes by with no word from the complaining party. But there are numerous stories from creators in which a month passes, nothing happens, and nothing is communicated to them by YouTube. While YouTube’s rules need fixing in many ways, many people would be grateful if YouTube would just follow those rules.

These are not new concerns. Clear policies, notice to users, and a mechanism for appeal are at the core of the Santa Clara principles for content moderation. They are basic best practices for services that allow users to post content, and companies that have been hosting content for more than a decade have no excuse not to follow them.

EFF is not a substitute for a company helpline. Press attention is not a substitute for an appeals process. And having policies isn’t a substitute for actually following them.

Technology rarely invents new societal problems. Instead, it digitizes them, supersizes them, and allows them to balloon and duplicate at the speed of light. That’s exactly the problem we’ve seen with location-based, crowd-sourced “public safety” apps like Citizen.

These apps come in a wide spectrum—some let users connect with those around them by posting pictures, items for sale, or local tips. Others, however, focus exclusively on things and people that users see as “suspicious” or potentially hazardous. These alerts run the gamut from active crimes, or the aftermath of crimes, to generally anything a person interprets as helping to keep their community safe and informed about the dangers around them.

"Users of apps like Citizen, Nextdoor, and Neighbors should be vigilant about unverified claims"

These apps are often designed with a goal of crowd-sourced surveillance, like a digital neighborhood watch. A way of turning the aggregate eyes (and phones) of the neighborhood into an early warning system. But instead, they often exacerbate the same dangers, biases, and problems that exist within policing. After all, the likely outcome to posting a suspicious sight to the app isn’t just to warn your neighbors—it’s to summon authorities to address the issue.

And even worse than incentivizing people to share their most paranoid thoughts and racial biases on a popular platform are the experimental new features constantly being rolled out by apps like Citizen. First, it was a private security force, available to be summoned at the touch of a button. Then, it was a service to help make it (theoretically) even easier to summon the police by giving users access to a 24/7 concierge service who will call the police for you. There are scenarios in which a tool like this might be useful—but to charge people for it, and more importantly, to make people think they will eventually need a service like this—adds to the idea that companies benefit from your fear.

These apps might seem like a helpful way to inform your neighbors if the mountain lion roaming your city was spotted in your neighborhood. But in practice they have been a cesspool of racial profiling, cop-calling, gatekeeping, and fear-spreading. Apps where a so-called “suspicious” person’s picture can be blasted out to a paranoid community, because someone with a smartphone thinks they don’t belong, are not helping people to “Connect and stay safe.” Instead, they promote public safety for some, at the expense of surveillance and harassment for others.

Digitizing an Age Old Problem

Paranoia about crime and racial gatekeeping in certain neighborhoods is not a new problem. Citizen takes that old problem and digitizes it, making those knee-jerk sightings of so-called suspicious behavior capable of being broadcast to hundreds, if not thousands of people in the area.

But focusing those forums on crime, suspicion, danger, and bad-faith accusations can create havoc. No one is planning their block party on Citizen like they might be on other apps, which is filled with notifications like “unconfirmed report of a man armed with pipe” and “unknown police activity.” Neighbors aren’t likely to coordinate trick-or-treating on a forum they exclusively use to see if any cars in their neighborhood were broken into. And when you download an app that makes you feel like a neighborhood you were formerly comfortable in is now under siege, you’re going to use it not just to doom scroll your way through strange sightings, but also to report your own suspicions.

There is a massive difference between listening to police scanners, a medium that reflects the ever-changing and updating nature of fluid situations on the street, and taking one second of that live broadcast and turning it into a fixed, unverified, news report. Police scanners can be useful by many people for many reasons and ought to stay accessible, but listening to a livestream presents an entirely different context than seeing a fixed geo-tagged alert on a map. 

As the New York Times writes, Citizen is “converting raw scanner traffic—which is by nature unvetted and mostly operational—into filtered, curated digital content, legible to regular people, rendered on a map in a far more digestible form.” In other words, they’re turning static into content with the same formula the long-running show Cops used to normalize both paranoia and police violence.

Police scanners reflect the raw data of dispatch calls and police response to them, not a confirmation of crime and wrongdoing. This is not to say that the scanner traffic isn’t valuable or important—the public often uses it to learn what police are doing in their neighborhood. And last year, protesters relied on scanner traffic to protect themselves as they exercised their First Amendment rights.

But publication of raw data is likely to give the impression that a neighborhood has far more crime than it does. As any journalist will tell you, scanner traffic should be viewed like a tip and be the starting point of a potential story, rather than being republished without any verification or context. Worse, once Citizen receives a report, many stay up for days, giving the overall impression to a user that a neighborhood is currently besieged by incidents—when many are unconfirmed, and some happened four or five days ago.

From Neighborhood Forum to Vigilante-Enabler

It’s well known that Citizen began its life as “Vigilante,” and much of its DNA and operating procedure continue to match its former moniker. Citizen, more so than any other app, is unsure if it wants to be a community forum or a Star Wars cantina where bounty hunters and vigilantes wait for the app to post a reward for information leading to a person’s arrest.

When a brush fire broke out in Los Angeles in May 2021, almost a million people saw a notification pushed by Citizen offering a $30,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of a man they thought was responsible. It is the definition of dangerous that the app offered money to thousands of users, inviting them to turn over information on an unhoused man who was totally innocent.

Make no mistake, this kind of crass stunt can get people hurt. It demonstrates a very narrow view of who the “public” is and what “safety” entails.

Ending Suspicion as a Service

Users of apps like Citizen, Nextdoor, and Neighbors should be vigilant about unverified claims that could get people hurt, and be careful not to feed the fertile ground for destructive hoaxes.

These apps are part of the larger landscape that law professor Elizabeth Joh calls “networked surveillance ecosystems.” The lawlessness that governs private surveillance networks like Amazon Ring and other home surveillance systems—in conjunction with social networking and vigilante apps—is only exacerbating age-old problems. This is one ecosystem that should be much better contained.

Srinidhi Raghavan, coordinator of the EROTICS Regional Survey 2020, shares her learnings from cross-country feminist research on the internet and sexuality through the lens of the Feminist Principles of the Internet.

Srinidhi Raghavan, coordinator of the EROTICS Regional Survey 2020, shares her learnings from cross-country feminist research on the internet and sexuality in South Asia. In this first part, she reflects on issues around identity, community, agency and language.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　「６千余名の朝鮮人の命が奪われた」１９２３年の関東大震災から９８年。朝鮮人犠牲者追悼式典（同実行委員会主催）がコロナ対策のため一般参加なしの、オンライン生中継開催となった。５年連続で追悼文を出さなかった小池百合子都知事を批判する挨拶が続いた後、韓国無形文化財の伝統舞踊家・金順子さんが追悼碑の前で鎮魂の舞を献じた=１日、東京都墨田区・横網町公園、酒井憲太郎撮影　ＪＣＪ月刊機関紙「ジャーナリスト」２０２１年９月２５日号

At EFF, we talk a lot about strong encryption. It’s critical for our privacy and security online. That’s why we litigate in courts to protect the right to encrypt, build technologies to encrypt the web, and it’s why we lead the fight against anti-encryption legislation like last year’s EARN IT Act.

We’ve seen big victories in our fight to defend encryption. But we haven’t done it alone. That’s why we’re proud this year to join dozens of other organizations in the Global Encryption Coalition as we celebrate the first Global Encryption Day, which is today, October 21, 2021.

For this inaugural year, we’re joining our partner organizations to ask people, companies, governments, and NGOs to “Make the Switch” to strong encryption. We’re hoping this day can encourage people to make the switch to end-to-end encrypted platforms, creating a more secure and private online world. It’s a great time to turn on encryption on all the devices or services you use, or switch to an end-to-end encrypted app for messaging—and talk to others about why you made that choice. Using strong passwords and two-factor authentication are also security measures that can help keep you safe. 

If you already have a handle on encryption and its benefits, today would be a great day to talk to a friend about it. On social media, we’re using the hashtag #MakeTheSwitch.

The Global Encryption Day website has some ideas about what you could do to make your online life more private and secure. Another great resource is EFF’s Surveillance Self Defense Guide, where you can get tips on everything from private web browsing, to using encrypted apps, to keeping your privacy in particular security scenarios—like attending a protest, or crossing the U.S. border. 

We need to keep talking about the importance of encryption, partly because it’s under threat. In the U.S. and around the world, law enforcement agencies have been seeking an encryption “backdoor” to access peoples’ messages. At EFF, we’ve resisted these efforts for decades. We’ve also pushed back against efforts like client-side scanning, which would break the promises of user privacy and security while technically maintaining encryption.

If you already have a handle on encryption and its benefits, today would be a great day to talk to a friend about it. On social media, we’re using the hashtag #MakeTheSwitch.

The Global Encryption Coalition is listing events around the world today. EFF Senior Staff Technologist Erica Portnoy will be participating in an “Ask Me Anything” about encryption on Reddit, at 17:00 UTC, which is 10:00 A.M. Pacific Time. Jon Callas, EFF Director of Technology Projects, will join an online panel about how to improve user agency in end-to-end encrypted services, on Oct. 28.

The European Parliament’s regulations and policy-making decisions on technology and the internet have unique influence across the globe. With great influence comes great responsibility. We believe the European Parliament (EP) has a duty to set an example with the Digital Services Act (DSA), the first major overhaul of European internet regulations in 20 years. The EP should show that the DSA can address tough challenges—hate speech, misinformation, and users’ lack of control on big platforms—without compromising human rights protections, free speech and expression rights, and users’ privacy and security.

Balancing these principles is complex, but imperative. A step in the wrong direction could reverberate around the world, affecting fundamental rights beyond European Union borders. To this end, 12 civil society organizations from around the globe, standing for transparency, accountability, and human rights-centered lawmaking, have formed the Digital Services Act Human Rights Alliance to establish and promote a world standard for internet platform governance. The Alliance is comprised of digital and human rights advocacy organization representing diverse communities across the globe, including in the Arab world, Europe, United Nations member states, Mexico, Syria, and the U.S.

In its first action towards this goal, the Alliance today is calling on the EP to embrace a human rights framework for the DSA and take steps to ensure that it protects access to information for everyone, especially marginalized communities, rejects inflexible and unrealistic take down mandates that lead to over-removals and impinge on free expression, and strengthen mandatory human rights impact assessments so issues like faulty algorithm decision-making is identified before people get hurt.

This call to action follows a troubling round of amendments approved by an influential EP committee that crossed red lines protecting fundamental rights and freedom of expression. EFF and other civil society organizations told the EP prior to the amendments that the DSA offers an unparalleled opportunity to address some of the internet ecosystem’s most pressing challenges and help better protect fundamental rights online—if done right.

So, it was disappointing to see the EP committee take a wrong turn, voting in September to limit liability exemptions for internet companies that perform basic functions of content moderation and content curation, force companies to analyze and indiscriminately monitor users’ communication or use upload filters, and bestow special advantages, not available to ordinary users, on politicians and popular public figures treated as trusted flaggers.

In a joint letter, the Alliance today called on the EU lawmakers to take steps to put the DSA back on track:

• Avoid disproportionate demands on smaller providers that would put users’ access to information in serious jeopardy.
• Reject legally mandated strict and short time frames for content removals that will lead to removals of legitimate speech and opinion, impinging rights to freedom of expression.
• Reject mandatory reporting obligations to Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), especially without appropriate safeguards and transparency requirements.
• Prevent public authorities, including LEAs, from becoming trusted flaggers and subject conditions for becoming trusted flaggers to regular reviews and proper public oversight.   
• Consider mandatory human rights impact assessments as the primary mechanism for examining and mitigating systemic risks stemming from platforms' operations.

For the DSA Human Rights Alliance Joint Statement:
https://www.eff.org/document/dsa-human-rights-alliance-joint-statement

For more on the DSA:
https://www.eff.org/issues/eu-policy-principles

避妊の失敗や性暴力などによる望まない妊娠を防ぐための緊急避妊薬は、早く飲むほど効果がある。産婦人科医の遠見才希子氏によれば、24時間以内の服用なら阻止率は95％、72時間経過すると58％になるという。海外では薬局や自動販 […]