EFF and ACLU filed an amicus brief last week in a case that may finally force the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to resolve one of the most serious problems with National Security Letters: NSL gag orders that have no fixed end date. Similar to subpoenas, NSLs are information requ … | Continue reading
Patent owners shouldn’t be allowed to keep basic facts about their patents secret—especially when they initiate litigation in courts, which are presumptively open to the public. Uniloc is one of the worst examples of such a company: it doesn’t make any products, but sues lots of … | Continue reading
Last week, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation held a hearing on Consumer Perspectives: Policy Principles for a Federal Data Privacy Framework. Unlike previous hearings this year that only featured tech industry panelists, this hearing featured a panel of c … | Continue reading
Over the next few years, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to implement an enormous biometric collection program which will endanger the rights of citizens and foreigners alike. The agency intends to collect at least seven types of biometric identifiers, including f … | Continue reading
For years, Xinjiang has been a testbed for the Chinese government’s novel digital and physical surveillance tactics, as well as human rights abuses. But there is still a lot that the international human rights community doesn’t know, especially when it comes to post-2016 Xinjiang … | Continue reading
Government use of many surveillance technologies, and especially face surveillance, can invade privacy and chill free speech. It also disproportionately harms already marginalized communities: it increases the likelihood that they will be entangled with police, ICE, and other age … | Continue reading
The First Amendment protects the public’s right to use electronic devices to record on-duty police officers, EFF argued in an amicus brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. The case, Frasier v. Evans, was brought by Levi Frasier against five Denver police … | Continue reading
Californians have a constitutional right to privacy, and 94 percent of Californians agree they should be able to take companies that violate their privacy to court.S.B. 561, authored by Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, would provide consumers with that right and also improve existing to … | Continue reading
San Francisco – On Monday, May 6 at 11am, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will argue that a San Francisco court should quash a subpoena from the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society aimed at getting the identity of an anonymous Reddit commenter.Watch Tower is the supervis … | Continue reading
With measles cases on the rise for the first time in decades and anti-vaccine (or “anti-vax”) memes spreading like wildfire on social media, a number of companies—including Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, and GoFundMe—recently banned anti-vax posts.But censorship cannot … | Continue reading
Members of Congress are fond of wrongly calling Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230) a “big tech company” immunity, implying that it doesn’t protect anyone else. And they are not alone in this mistake. We frequently hear the same mischaracterization from friends in academia and legacy n … | Continue reading
This is a guest post by Hugh Handeyside, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project, Nathan Freed Wessler, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, and Esha Bhandari, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. It was originally p … | Continue reading
BOSTON — The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU today asked a federal court to rule without trial that the Department of Homeland Security violates the First and Fourth Amendments by searching travelers’ smartphones and laptops at airports and other U.S. ports of e … | Continue reading
San Francisco – At 9:30 am on Wednesday, May 1, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Law Office of Michael T. Risher will argue against the government’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit challenging law enforcement retention of DNA profiles of hundreds of thousands of innoc … | Continue reading
Social media platforms regularly engage in “content moderation”—the depublication, downranking, and sometimes outright censorship of information and/or user accounts from social media and other digital platforms, usually based on an alleged violation of a platform’s “community st … | Continue reading
EFF's case challenging NSA spying, Jewel v. NSA, has come further than any case trying to end the government's mass surveillance programs. Our clients have survived multiple efforts by the government to end the case, and they continue to push for their day in court. As a result, … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, Georgetown Law Professor Alvaro Bedoya delivered the U.S. Senator Dennis Chavez Memorial Lecture in Law & Civil Rights at The University of New Mexico School of Law, titled “Privacy and Civil Rights in the Age of Facebook, ICE, and the NSA.” His remarks neatly … | Continue reading
To make it easier for everyone to recognize surveillance “in the wild,” EFF is fighting back with Spot the Surveillance, a virtual reality (VR) experience that teaches people how to identify the various spying technologies that police may deploy in communities. And with a major u … | Continue reading
Government agencies and airlines have ignored years of warnings from privacy groups and Senators that using face recognition technology on travelers would massively violate their privacy. Now, the passengers are in revolt as well, and they’re demanding answers. Last week, a lengt … | Continue reading
In recent years, we’ve made major progress getting courts to give full effect to Section 101 of the U.S. Patent Act. That’s the section that defines, and limits, what can get a patent. Section 101 is critical in making sure that only inventions—technological advances attributable … | Continue reading
There's heartening news for our location privacy out of Massachusetts this week. The Supreme Judicial Court, the state's highest court, ruled that police access to real-time cell phone location data—whether it comes from a phone company or from technology like a cell site simulat … | Continue reading
Over nearly two decades, the NSA has searched millions of Americans’ telephone call records—all without a warrant or, for the vast majority of these calls, any suspicion of wrongdoing. It’s time to end the mass telephone Call Detail Records (CDR) program once and for all. Please … | Continue reading
The California State Assembly’s Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee today capitulated to industry complaints that our privacy is inconvenient for its bottom line. It voted to advance five bills opposed by privacy advocates that would undermine the landmark California Consum … | Continue reading
The Cybertiger is vicious. He is cunning. And he is full of dad jokes. Last week, EFF’s Cooper “Cybertiger” Quintin led three judges and eleven teams in five challenging (and comic) rounds of tech trivia, covering everything from fictional search engines in television to historic … | Continue reading
We are disappointed the California Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee will not hear A.B. 1760, which would have substantially strengthened the California Consumer Privacy Act.Tomorrow, the Privacy Committee will instead vote on several bills backed by Big Tech int … | Continue reading
Do you know where you were five years ago? Did you have an Android phone at the time? It turns out Google might know—and it might be telling law enforcement.In a new article, the New York Times details a little-known technique increasingly used by law enforcement to figure out ev … | Continue reading
This is a guest post by Tracy Rosenberg, executive director of Media Alliance. It was originally published on the Media Alliance website. For the last two years (2017 and 2018) of the Urban Shield weapons expo and SWAT drill in Alameda County, I was a community observer. I went a … | Continue reading
California made strides to protect privacy last year with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). This year, we want to make sure that the state has tools necessary to make sure it can enforce that law, and that everyone will be able to stand up for their own privacy without … | Continue reading
In a win for the open source community, router maker TP-Link will be required to allow consumers to install third-party firmware on their wireless routers, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced Monday. The announcement comes on the heels of a settlement requiring … | Continue reading
Stupid Patent of the MonthThere’s an increasing insistence from the highest echelons of the patent world that patent abuse just isn’t a thing anymore. The Director of the U.S. Patent Office, Andre Iancu, has called patent trolls—a term for companies that do nothing but collect pa … | Continue reading
Hours after the ejection of Julian Assange from the London Ecuadorean embassy last week, police officers in Ecuador detained the Swedish citizen and open source developer Ola Bini. They seized him as he prepared to travel from his home in Quito to Japan, claiming that he was atte … | Continue reading
Wabash, IN—At 10 a.m. on Thursday, April 18, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will argue to the Indiana Supreme Court that police cannot force a criminal suspect to turn over a passcode or otherwise decrypt her cell phone. The case is Katelin Seo v. State of Indiana.The F … | Continue reading
Thanks to a recent ruling by Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Robert J. Smith, drivers in Fairfax County, Virginia need not worry that local police are maintaining ALPR records of their travels for work, prayer, protest or play. Earlier this month, Judge Smith ordered an injunc … | Continue reading
Get ready for a tale as good as anything you’d see on television. Here’s the sequence of events: the website TorrentFreak publishes an article about a leak of TV episodes, including shows from the network Starz. TorrentFreak tweets its article, Starz sends a copyright takedown no … | Continue reading
Despite Facebook’s repeated warnings that law enforcement is required to use “authentic identities” on the social media platform, cops continue to create fake and impersonator accounts to secretly spy on users. By pretending to be someone else, cops are able to sneak past the pri … | Continue reading
The U.S. House Judiciary Committee held a hearing this week to discuss the spread of white nationalism, online and offline. The hearing tackled hard questions about how online platforms respond to extremism online and what role, if any, lawmakers should play. The desire for more … | Continue reading
The U.S. government admits—and, of course, it’s common knowledge—that the NSA conducts mass, dragnet surveillance of hundreds of millions of Americans’ communications. It has done so via a series of different technical strategies and legal arguments for over 18 years. Yet the Jus … | Continue reading
California’s lawmakers took a much-needed step last year by passing the California Consumer Privacy Act as a foundation for consumer privacy rights. Now they need to step up to make sure it can work as intended. One of the major issues identified by the California Attorney Genera … | Continue reading
While the indictment of Julian Assange centers on an alleged attempt to break a password—an attempt that was not apparently successful—it is still, at root, an attack on the publication of leaked material and the most recent act in an almost decade-long effort to punish a whistle … | Continue reading
In a vote of 232-190, the House of Representatives passed the Save the Internet Act (H.R. 1644). This is a major step forward in the fight for net neutrality protections, and it’s because you spoke up about what you want.The Save the Internet Act was written to restore the strong … | Continue reading
The Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) is about to make a bad privacy situation worse, and it’s urgent that Los Angeles residents contact their city council representatives today to demand they put the brakes on LADOT’s irresponsible data collection. The agency plan … | Continue reading
In April 2018, House Republicans held a hearing on the “Filtering Practices of Social Media Platforms” that focused on misguided claims that Internet platforms like Google, Twitter, and Facebook actively discriminate against conservative political viewpoints. Now, a year later, S … | Continue reading
In a victory for online freedom of expression, the Second Circuit has affirmed the dismissal of a dangerous lawsuit that would threatened to undercut what makes the Internet an essential tool for modern life. EFF filed an amicus brief in the case, Herrick v. Grindr, last fall, ur … | Continue reading
New York, San Francisco, and Washington D.C.—As policymakers around the U. S. contemplate regulations to protect and/or restrict online speech, a group of public interest organizations dedicated to free expression are publishing a set of legal guideposts that must inform any legi … | Continue reading
Once again, Facebook is in the news for bad security practices, dark design patterns, and secretly reappropriating sensitive data meant for “authentication” to its own ends. Incredibly, this time, the company managed to accomplish all three in one fell swoop.What happened?Last we … | Continue reading
EFF is proud to announce its newest investigative team: the Threat Lab. Using a combination of research skills, the Threat Lab will take a deep dive into how surveillance technologies are used to target communities, activists, or individuals.The Threat Lab is a multidisciplinary … | Continue reading
Congress took a big step today toward protecting net neutrality, competition, and privacy for Internet users. The House Energy and Commerce Committee just voted 30-22 to approve an amended version of the Save the Internet Act of 2019 (H.R.1644). Please join us in urging your memb … | Continue reading