Despite widespread complaints about its effects on human rights, the Brazilian Senate has fast-tracked the approval of “PLS 2630/2020”, the so-called “Fake News” bill. The bill lacked the necessarily broad and intense social participation that characterized the development of the … | Continue reading
Two bills before the California legislature in its final month of session, S.B. 1130 and A.B. 570, chart very different courses for the state’s broadband infrastructure program. In considering them, the state faces a fundamental question about how to invest its money: in modern, … | Continue reading
If you’re familiar with EFF, you know that we do our best to defend and promote digital civil liberties through a powerful blend of impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, technological development, and more. But you may not know that EFF also provides a legal in … | Continue reading
Businesses across the world are harvesting and monetizing our biometrics without our knowledge or consent. For example, Clearview AI extracted faceprints from three billion people, and now it sells face-matching services to police departments. Likewise, retail stores use face sur … | Continue reading
It is ironic that, while purporting to protect America from China’s authoritarian government, President Trump is threatening to ban the TikTok app. Censorship of both speech and social media applications, after all, is one of the hallmarks of the Chinese Internet strategy. While … | Continue reading
During a typical year, EFF staff members would be headed to Las Vegas to present our latest work to the world and ensure legal support for computer security researchers at the long-running hacker events BSidesLV, Black Hat, and DEF CON. These summer security conferences are a nat … | Continue reading
Can secret software be used to generate key evidence against a criminal defendant? In an amicus filed ten days ago with the United States District Court of the Western District of Pennsylvania, EFF and the ACLU of Pennsylvania explain that secret forensic technology is inconsiste … | Continue reading
Over the past few days, EFF and one of our staff technologists, the talented Micah Lee, have had an illuminating back and forth with Canonical Ltd over the use of the Ubuntu mark. While we don’t believe that Canonical has acted with malice or intent to censor, its silly invocatio … | Continue reading
On July 28, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary held another in its year-long series of hearings on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The topic of this hearing was “How Does the DMCA Contemplate Limitations and Exceptions Like Fair Use?” We’re glad Congress is asking … | Continue reading
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued an historic opinion in B.L. v. Mahanoy Area School District, upholding the free speech rights of public school students. The court adopted the position EFF urged in our amicus brief that the First Amendment prohibits discipli … | Continue reading
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued an historic opinion in B.L. v. Mahanoy Area School District, upholding the free speech rights of public school students. The court adopted the position EFF urged in our amicus brief that the First Amendment prohibits discipli … | Continue reading
The Senate Commerce Committee’s Tuesday hearing on the PACT Act and Section 230 was a refreshingly substantive bipartisan discussion about the thorny issues related to how online platforms moderate user content, and to what extent these companies should be held liable for harmful … | Continue reading
As students, parents, and schools prepare the new school year, universities are considering ways to make returning to campus safer. Some are considering and even mandating that students install COVID-related technology on their personal devices, but this is the wrong call. Exposu … | Continue reading
Mexico has just adopted a terrible new copyright law, thanks to pressure from the United States (and specifically from the copyright maximalists that hold outsized influence on US foreign policy).This law closely resembles the Digital Millennium Copyright Act enacted in the US 19 … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, Mexico's Congress hastily imported most of the US copyright system into Mexican law, in a dangerous and ill-considered act. But neither this action nor its consequences occurred in a vacuum: rather, it was a consequence of Donald Trump's US-Mexico-Canada Agree … | Continue reading
Mexico's new copyright law was rushed through Congress without adequate debate or consultation, and that's a problem, because the law -- a wholesale copy of the US copyright system -- creates unique risks to the human rights of the Mexican people, and the commercial fortunes of M … | Continue reading
For years, free speech and press freedoms have been under attack in Turkey. The country has the distinction of being the world’s largest jailer of journalists and has in recent years been cracking down on online speech. Now, a new law, passed by the Turkish Parliament on the 29th … | Continue reading
A federal appeals court last week refused to unseal a court order that reportedly stopped the Justice Department from forcing Facebook to break the encryption it offers to users of its Messenger application.The unpublished decision ends an effort by EFF, ACLU, and Stanford cybers … | Continue reading
This November, Californians will be called upon to vote on a ballot initiative called the California Privacy Rights Act, or Proposition 24. EFF does not support it; nor does EFF oppose it.EFF works across the country to enact and defend laws that empower technology users to contr … | Continue reading
When people get sued by patent trolls, they can fight back in one of two places: a U.S. district court or the Patent and Trademark Office. But the Patent Office is putting its thumb on the scale again in favor of patent owners and against technology users. This time, the Office i … | Continue reading
This month, Mexico rushed through a new, expansive copyright law without adequate debate or consultation, and as a result, it adopted a national rule that is absolutely unfit for purpose, with grave implications for human rights and cybersecurity.The new law was passed as part of … | Continue reading
It’s not enough to say that the Internet is built on interoperability. The Internet is interoperability. Billions of machines around the world use the same set of open protocols—like TCP/IP, HTTP, and TLS—to talk to one another. The first Internet-connected devices were only poss … | Continue reading
Frontier’s bankruptcy has serious consequences for Americans, including 2 million Californians, who are stuck with their deteriorating DSL monopoly. After deciding for years to never upgrade their networks to fiber—despite the fact that, according to their own bankruptcy filing, … | Continue reading
When Mexico's Congress rushed through a new copyright law as part of its adoption of Donald Trump's United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), it largely copy-pasted the US copyright statute, with some modifications that made the law even worse for human rights.The result is … | Continue reading
The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) conducted mass surveillance of protesters at the end of May and in early June using a downtown business district's camera network, according to new records obtained by EFF. The records show that SFPD received real-time live access to hun … | Continue reading
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today joined a group of 17 leading U.S.-based Internet freedom organizations in telling a federal appeals court that Trump administration appointee Michael Pack has no legal authority to purge leadership at the Open Technolog … | Continue reading
Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation joins a coalition of international organizations in publishing an open letter of opposition to Mexico's new copyright law; the letter lays out the threats that Mexico's new law poses to fundamental human rights and calls upon Mexico's Nat … | Continue reading
EFF staff members will present some of our latest work at 2600 Magazine's biennial Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference beginning this weekend. HOPE is a diverse hacker event that has drawn thousands of tinkerers, security researchers, activists, artists, and makers since 19 … | Continue reading
EFF joined dozens of other groups in a letter condemning the behavior of federal law enforcement agencies in Portland, Oregon. Despite the wishes of local government officials, the federal government deployed law enforcement, including U.S. Marshals and Customs and Border Protect … | Continue reading
Cybersecurity policy expert. Security researcher. Women in tech advocate. Entrepreneur. Tarah Wheeler’s expertise and experience encompasses the most pressing issues in tech, and we’re honored to announce that she is joining EFF’s advisory board. She will be helping us with our w … | Continue reading
Recently, nearly every week brings a new effort to undercut or overhaul a key U.S. law—47 U.S.C. § 230 (“Section 230”)—that protects online services and allows Internet users to express themselves. Many of these proposals jeopardize users’ free speech and privacy, while others ar … | Continue reading
Financial records contain a trove of sensitive information about people’s personal lives, beliefs, and affiliations—which is why law enforcement should be required to get a warrant in order to obtain financial transaction data. Courts and lawmakers have gotten this wrong in the c … | Continue reading
Earlier this week, chaos reigned supreme on Twitter as high-profile public figures—from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos to President Barack Obama—started tweeting links to the same bitcoin scam.Twitter’s public statement and reporting from Motherboard suggest attackers gained access to a … | Continue reading
Definitions matter. Especially when those definitions come from the federal government. In the case of “broadband,” the definition set by the federal government creates our standard of Internet living. Depressingly, the American government’s definition means ISPs get away with of … | Continue reading
The European Union’s highest court today made clear—once again—that the US government’s mass surveillance programs are incompatible with the privacy rights of EU citizens. The judgment was made in the latest case involving Austrian privacy advocate and EFF Pioneer Award winner Ma … | Continue reading
The International Trade Commission, or ITC, is a forum that’s meant to protect U.S. industries from unfair trade practices. But in recent years, the prime beneficiaries of the sprawling ITC haven't been American manufacturers, but patent owners, patent lawyers, and—you guessed it … | Continue reading
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), in partnership with the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, today launched the largest-ever collection of searchable data on police use of surveillance technologies, created as a tool for the pub … | Continue reading
On Friday, July 10, 1990, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was officially born. It's safe to say that on that day, co-founders Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow were ahead of their time in imagining that there needed to be an organization that fought to protect ordinary people' … | Continue reading
When you send an email or browse the web, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may track what sites you visit and when, as well as any unencrypted information you read or send. So Maine requires ISPs to get their customers’ opt-in consent before using or disclosing this and other … | Continue reading
As the European Union is gearing up for a major reform of the current backbone of the EU’s Internet regulation—the e-Commerce Directive will be replaced by the Digital Services Act (DSA)—there are choices to be made. Rather than following in the footsteps of recent disastrous Int … | Continue reading
Washington, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and leading cybersecurity experts today urged the Supreme Court to rein in the scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—and protect the security research we all rely on to keep us safe—by holding that accessing com … | Continue reading
Privacy and security are both team sports, and no one person or organization completely changes the landscape alone. This is why coalition-building is often at the heart of activism. In 2019, EFF was one of the ten organizations that founded the Coalition Against Stalkerware, a g … | Continue reading
EFF Joins Coalition to Call on the EU to Introduce Interoperability RulesToday, EFF sent a joint letter to European Commission Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, highlighting the enormous potential of interoperability to help achieve the EU’s goals for Europe’s digital … | Continue reading
Should the police be able to force Google to turn over identifying information on every phone within a certain geographic area—potentially hundreds or thousands of devices—just because a crime occurred there? We don’t think so. As we argued in an amicus brief filed recently in Pe … | Continue reading
The day before a committee debate and vote on the EARN IT Act, the bill’s sponsors replaced their bill with an amended version. Here’s their new idea: instead of giving a 19-person federal commission, dominated by law enforcement, the power to regulate the Internet, the bill now … | Continue reading
Have you ever clicked on a link after googling something, only to find that Google didn’t take you to the actual webpage but to some weird Google-fied version of it? Instead of the web address being the source of the article, it still says “google” in the address bar on your phon … | Continue reading
Ring, Amazon’s “smart” doorbell camera company, recently began sharing statistics on how many video requests police departments submit to users, and the numbers are staggering. In the first quarter of 2020 alone, police requested videos over 5000 times, using their partnerships w … | Continue reading