The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted its annual holiday wishlist of policy initiatives, business practices, and action by individuals. It's a kind of beautiful dream, and I long for the day that we attain it. And remember: everyone falls short of their ideals, but these are the best ideals to fall short of. I've included some of the wishes after the jump, but go read the full list.
Citizens, organizations, privacy officials, and governments should unite around the International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance and add their voices to declare that mass surveillance violates international human rights.
The U.S. Congress should create a new Church Committee to find out what intelligence agencies are actually doing; since mass surveillance is a global problem, we also need parliamentary commissions of inquiry around the world to look into the same question.
Congress should pass meaningful reform to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
The Department of Justice should notify everyone who's been convicted of a crime using evidence derived—directly or indirectly—from warrantless surveillance programs (not just a cherry-picked handful of defendants).
All communications companies should publish transparency reports showing the scope and nature of government requests for user information. The Internet industry, led by Google, has made this a standard for corporate transparency, but telecom companies are still totally missing in action.
All Internet sites should adopt cryptographic best practices for every connection, every time, including PFS, STARTTLS, HSTS, and encrypted traffic between data centers.
In 2014, every certificate authority and web browser should commit to adopt Google's Certificate Transparency system to detect and stop the issuance of fake certificates that facilitate spying on web users.
(Image: 618 – Party Lights, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from zooboing's photostream)
