Only days into heightened tensions between the United States and Iran, media outlets have published disturbing reports of increased scrutiny of people of Iranian descent at U.S. borders, including in at least one case involving a traveler’s phone. EFF strongly opposes any targeti … | Continue reading
Here at EFF, we maintain a repository of self-help resources on circumventing surveillance across a variety of different platforms, devices, and threat models. We call it Surveillance Self-Defense, or SSD for short.SSD covers myriad topics, and is broken up into four main section … | Continue reading
EFF fought for open, transparent governance of the domain name system. Karl Auerbach began asking for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers's (ICANN) corporate records in November 2000, shortly after he was voted as the North American Elected Director of ICANN. ICAN … | Continue reading
2019 has been an eventful year for consumer privacy, both in a few key courts and state legislatures as well as in Silicon Valley. An important decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in August defended the ability of Illinois citizens to protect their biometric data. Mean … | Continue reading
Here at EFF, we maintain a repository of self-help resources on circumventing surveillance across a variety of different platforms, devices, and threat models. We call it Surveillance Self-Defense, or SSD for short.SSD covers myriad topics, and is broken up into four main section … | Continue reading
Vendors woo law enforcement with a seemingly inexhaustible flow of new spy tech. This places concerned community members, civil society, and lawmakers in a seemingly Sisyphean struggle of trying to keep up with new technological threats to privacy, and to shepard the adoption of … | Continue reading
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was enacted in 2018 and goes into effect in 2020. Throughout 2019, EFF and our privacy coalition allies beat back numerous attempts by big business to block this important law before it goes into effect. We did so in the California Legis … | Continue reading
“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter.But interoper … | Continue reading
When someone says something unlawful online, they should be the one held responsible for it, not the website or platform where they said it. Section 230—the most important law protecting free speech online—reflects that common-sense principle. This year, EFF defended Section 230 … | Continue reading
We’ve all heard the expression, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” We might hope that what we do and where we go will only be known to those who were there in person. Yet maintaining such anonymity and privacy in public spaces is becoming ever more difficult. 2019 has marke … | Continue reading
This February, with Venezuela rocked by economic collapse and a presidential succession crisis, an opposition party put out a call for volunteers. Juan Guaidó, a political leader with the Popular Will party, called on supporters to register at the site “Volunteers for Venezuela”. … | Continue reading
Last year, the Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion in a case we’ve written about a lot, called Carpenter v. United States, ruling that the Fourth Amendment protects data generated by our phones called historical cell-site location information or CSLI. The Court recognized tha … | Continue reading
Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s landmark case challenging NSA’s mass spying moved forward in 2019, setting up a crucial decision for the Ninth Circuit in 2020. We’ve pursued this case for over a decade because we believe that mass surveillance, like all general search and seizure schemes, is … | Continue reading
Content moderation and its effects remained at the forefront of the public imagination in 2019, with stories of takedowns from Sweden to Syria and everywhere in between gaining media attention. Inconsistent and unfair moderation from companies—often under great pressure from gove … | Continue reading
While cities and municipalities made clear strides to limit the use of face surveillance technology throughout 2019, airlines and government agencies tasked with identifying travelers have spent much of the year trying to expand its use. But while the Department of Homeland Secur … | Continue reading
None of us signed up for an Internet composed of "a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four", but here we are, watching as hyper-concentrated industries rack up catastrophic victories against net neutrality, right to repair, security aud … | Continue reading
AI and algorithmic decision-making raised important civil liberties issues in 2019, with developments good, bad, and in-between.Starting off in the “disappointing” category, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced in August that it was considering new … | Continue reading
Almost every week, we hear about another corporate data breach or government attack on privacy. For anyone who wants real privacy online, encryption is the essential component.Governments around the world keep trying to break encryption, seeking to enhance the power of their law … | Continue reading
The global nature of the Internet means that police agencies all around the world facing challenges investigating crime when the data is stored in other countries. The pressure to make this process easier is mounting. To many governments, that means stripping away legal protectio … | Continue reading
Earlier this year, EFF noted that the United States is facing a high-speed broadband access crisis. For the foreseeable future, it appears that a supermajority of Americans will not have access to fiber to the home. Instead, it is cable monopolies or nothing at all.Government dat … | Continue reading
The Internet’s decentralized nature has historically been its greatest super-power, granting it the ability to shrug off censors and spies and redistribute power away from corruptible gatekeepers out to the creators and innovators on its edges. But it’s only been in the last few … | Continue reading
Find EFF in Leipzig at the 36th year of one of the largest technology, security, and activism conferences in the world, Chaos Communication Congress. Learn how our team of lawyers, technologists, and activists are working to protect online rights, and connect with the larger inte … | Continue reading
Growing dissatisfaction with political leadership. Social and economic constraints. Reprisals against austerity measures. Harassment against community and political leaders. All issues that in different combinations have led to massive protests and political upheaval in recent mo … | Continue reading
All too often, software patents stop more innovation than they promote. Patents are legal instruments that can be used to sue people and companies for creating, selling, or using software. Very often, the entities wielding software patents are “patent trolls”—companies that make … | Continue reading
EFF’s Threat Lab Team has only just launched and already has reached some fantastic milestones. This team was created to look deeply into how surveillance technologies are used to target vulnerable communities, activists, and individuals. Here are some of the highlights: Fighting … | Continue reading
Thanks to your support, this year EFF was able to take a stand in state legislatures across the country to fight well-funded industry efforts to encroach on your data privacy rights, to push back against government use of face surveillance, and to support bills that improve your … | Continue reading
Saeed Malekpour crossed the border from Iran to Turkey at night, terrified of capture. He was fleeing from the country that had held him prisoner for a decade, escaping with just a backpack into one of the most chaotic regions of the world. Malekpour was a Canadian web developer … | Continue reading
There is certainly more than enough room in this world for new copyright laws that would improve the lives of artists and their audiences. And then there’s the Copyright Alternatives in Small-Claims Enforcement Act (CASE Act), a proposal which doesn’t help the artists it claims t … | Continue reading
If 2019 confirmed anything, it is that we should not trust the microphones and cameras that large corporations sell us to put inside and near our homes. Thanks to the due diligence of reporters, public records requesters, and privacy researchers and activists, consumers have been … | Continue reading
Ever since the FCC repealed net neutrality protections in 2017, we’ve been fighting to return as many protections to as many Americans as possible. In 2019, the battles in the courts and Congress both kept those committed to a free and open Internet very busy.Mozilla v. FCC Takes … | Continue reading
In November’s landmark opinion in Alasaad v. McAleenan, a federal judge ruled that suspicionless electronic device searches at U.S. ports of entry violate the Fourth Amendment. The Alasaad opinion was the perfect way to end 2019—the culmination of two years of hard work by EFF, A … | Continue reading
Uh oh, Senators Chris Coons (D-DE) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) have teamed up again to introduce legislation that would promote the interests of patent owners at the public’s expense. This is the same duo that earlier this year sought to dismantle the protections against patents on hu … | Continue reading
With the passage of Article 25 on December 11, the town of Brookline, Massachusetts, became the fifth municipality in the nation to ban its government agencies from using face surveillance. Brookline joins nearby Somerville as the two Massachusetts municipalities to have banned f … | Continue reading
Protecting human rights comes in many forms. Some human rights defenders are lawyers, defending clients against violations of their basic humanity. Some are journalists, exposing corruption and the secret injustices that might otherwise hide behind power. Some are activists, work … | Continue reading
Just a week after hackers broke into a Ring camera in a child’s bedroom, taunting the child and sparking serious concerns about the company’s security practices, Buzzfeed News is reporting that over 3,600 Ring owners’ email addresses, passwords, camera locations, and camera names … | Continue reading
Donate before 2020 and help the Electronic Frontier Foundation unlock eight challenge grants that increase in size from $200 to $20,000. Every supporter counts! We love the post-apocalyptic cyberpunk aesthetic around these parts, but we don’t have to live that way. EFF is working … | Continue reading
Over 500 organizations and 18,000 individuals have signed a letter urging the Internet Society to stop the private equity takeover of the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the organization that manages the .ORG top-level domain. It’s rare that EFF, Greenpeace, Consumer Reports, Oxf … | Continue reading
Marking a big win for privacy and immigrant rights, the California Department of Justice (CADOJ) has cut off deportation agents from access to the state’s law enforcement network. Earlier this year, the Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) division of U.S. Immigration and Cus … | Continue reading
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the normally-secretive federal court based in Washington, D.C. that oversees much of the nation’s foreign intelligence surveillance programs, took an unusual step yesterday: it issued a public order chastising the FBI for its handling … | Continue reading
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today said a private equity firm newly created by domain name industry insiders should be stopped from acquiring the .ORG domain registry, which provides a home on the Internet to thousands of public interest nonprofits organ … | Continue reading
San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has bolstered its European policy work with the hiring of two important new staffers: Icelandic poet, artist, and free expression activist Birgitta Jónsdóttir, and European Internet policy expert Christoph Schmon.Birgitta J … | Continue reading
EFF has long fought to end the FBI’s ability to impose gag orders via National Security Letters (NSLs). They violate the First Amendment and result in indefinite prohibitions on recipients’ ability to speak publicly about controversial government surveillance powers. Records and … | Continue reading
We just stopped one of the largest, longest running, and most controversial face recognition programs operated by local law enforcement in the United States. A face recognition system used by more than 30 agencies in San Diego County, California will be suspended on Jan. 1, 2020, … | Continue reading
This morning the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on encryption and “lawful access.” That’s the fanciful idea that encryption providers can somehow allow law enforcement access to users’ encrypted data while otherwise preventing the “bad guys” from accessing this very sa … | Continue reading
This week, GEDmatch, a genetic genealogy company that gained notoriety for giving law enforcement access to its customers’ DNA data, quietly informed its users it is now operated by Verogen, Inc., a company expressly formed two years ago to market “next-generation [DNA] sequencin … | Continue reading
Ásta Guðrún Helgadóttir is a former Pirate Party member of the Icelandic parliament who currently serves as a digital policy advisor to a member of the European parliament. She’s known online for her passion for the Internet and digital policy, as well as her love of golden retri … | Continue reading
Around the globe, freedom of expression (or free speech) varies wildly in definition, scope, and level of access. The impact of the digital age on perceptions and censorship of speech has been felt across the political spectrum on a worldwide scale. In the debate over what counts … | Continue reading
Rima Sghaier is a human rights activist and researcher who works at the intersection of technology and human rights, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa. Rima grew up in Tunisia under the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, which lasted for twenty-four years. Although … | Continue reading