Washington Post

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit issued a rare emergency injunction July 21, blocking staffing changes that the Trump Administration’s new head of the Voice of America made to a US organization that protects digital speech worldwide. In a bluntly worded two-page order, the panel warned that actions taken by Michael Pack, a conservative filmmaker and associate of former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, could endanger activists under repressive governments who rely on the Open Technology Fund to combat Internet censorship and surveillance.

The European Union's top court threw a large portion of transatlantic digital commerce into disarray, ruling that data of EU residents is not sufficiently protected from government surveillance when it is transferred to the United States. The European Court of Justice ruled that a commonly-used data protection agreement known as Privacy Shield did not adequately uphold EU privacy law. US security authorities have far-reaching access to personal data stored on US territory that “are not circumscribed” in a way that is equivalent to EU rules, the court ruled. The court said that it was