Events
Our speaker this month will be Jake Dunagan. Jake Dunagan is an experiential futurist, governance designer, and teacher. He is Director of Design Futures at verynice.co—a design, innovation, and foresight consultancy that gives half of its work away for free to non-profits, and adjunct professor of Strategic Foresight
Events
EFF-Austin board member Heather Barfield has conceived and directed a new play at The Vortex theater titled Privacy Settings. Based on the ancient Greek play of Prometheus Bound, Privacy Settings imagines Edward Snowden in the titular role of Prometheus, the titan whole stole fire from the gods and gifted it
Events
View it here. "What can ordinary people do? Support and promote projects that are acting at scale. WikiLeaks is my realisation of this tension, but there are a flood of others starting. The clash between diversity and global uniformity which has been created by wiring the world to itself
Privacy
Last night, I represented EFF-Austin on a panel discussion hosted by America’s Future Foundation and Google. The topic for the evening was the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 and a good time was had by all. Fonda San Miguel proved itself a wonderful location for technology and privacy
Events
Albert Einstein is credited with coming up with the observation that "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." He didn't really say that, but actually said something better in 1946 as part
Activism
Gregory Foster of EFF-Austin speaks at the Restore the Fourth event in Austin, Texas (July 4, 2013) on the secret USPS Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, the Edward Snowden NSA leaks, general warrants, and the Fourth Amendment. Restore the Fourth * National - website, @Restore_the4th, #RestoreThe4th, #RT4 * Austin -
Privacy
TxEPC Action! This Thursday May 9th, the Texas House of Representatives votes on HB1608 to determine whether our state will respect the privacy of your mobile phone geolocation data. Mobile phones are designed to track everywhere they go, and we think law enforcement should have to demonstrate probable cause to
Government 2.0
"Freedom of Speech" by Norman Rockwell (1943) One of the most important moments in a piece of legislation's lifecycle is its public hearing. This is the opportunity for a bill to be formally considered by its assigned committee, and a decision made as to whether the
Government 2.0
In late January, Aaron Greenspan announced "Operation Asymptote" to the influential Liberation Technologies mailing list: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=85http://www.plainsite.org/asymptote/index.html I looked into Operation Asymptote, and recommend it as an effective and poetic tribute to Aaron Swartz'
Events
Last week, I attended the monthly meeting for Open Austin, a group which has been around for several years promoting better governance through open technologies. I'm writing to draw attention to their recent successes and increasing importance to the City of Austin. There's an interesting history
Events
EFF Austin is about as ready as we can be to start up monthly meetings again. That's the kind of frank honesty we'd like to cultivate when it comes to all of our activities. We're a volunteer-run organization and all of the board members
Privacy
Being a sequence of quotations from contemporary articles contextualizing the visit of the rising Vice President of China amidst a conspicuously timed introduction of unprecedented domestic cybersecurity legislation. National Post Full Comment (Feb 14) - "From bitter gruel, Xi Jinping to ascend to China's top job"