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Since our report last week on Australia's Internet censorship bill, the bill did indeed pass the Senate yesterday, and will become the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act 2015. The new law provides an accelerated process for rightsholders to obtain court orders for ISPs to block sites...
A new bombshell scoop from NBC News revealed an internal U.S. Border Patrol memo claiming that 30 percent of camera towers that compose the agency's "Remote Video Surveillance System" (RVSS) program are broken. Except, this isn't a bombshell. What should actually be shocking is that Congressional leaders are acting…
Update II: Apparently not frightened off by Apple's letter defending its developers, Lodsys went ahead and sued at least seven developers in the Eastern District of Texas for patent infringement. In its original cease-and-desist letters, Lodsys gave developers 21 days to respond. But – apparently...
This is part 1 of a series on the security of HTTPS and TLS/SSL HTTPS is a lot more secure than HTTP! If a site uses accounts, or publishes material that people might prefer to read in private, the site should be protected with HTTPS. Unfortunately, is still feasible for some attackers to break...
EFF has petitioned a federal appeals court to reconsider its flawed ruling in our national security letter case on behalf of CREDO Mobile and Cloudflare. In July, the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco upheld the NSL statute against our First Amendment challenge. The court ruled that the FBI is...
This is part 2 of a series on the security of HTTPS and TLS/SSL. [Part 1] In a previous post, we discussed some structural insecurities in HTTPS and TLS/SSL, and how those are beginning to pose serious problems for the security of the Web. In this post I will introduce a new proposal called "...
Xinjiang, home of the China's muslim Uighur minority, has long been the world's laboratory for Internet repression. Faced with widespread local unrest, and online debate, China has done everything it can to enforce its vision of the Net in the region, from imprisoning bloggers and online publishers...
New EFF Report Maps Legal Threats to Free Expression in the Arab WorldFreedom of expression is a universal right, but the specific threats to it vary widely from country to country and region to region. As activists fighting for free speech worldwide, it is essential that we better understand the...
Facebook has announced that it’s teaming up with four of the world’s largest corporate data brokers to “enhance” the ad experience for users. Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai obtain information gathered about users through online means (such as through cookies when users surf the web) as...
A federal magistrate judge in Brooklyn took an admirable stand last week when he questioned the government’s authority to compel Apple to unlock a seized mobile device using the All Writs Act. That’s a general-purpose law passed in 1789 that allows a court to require third parties’ assistance to...
One of the trends we've seen is how, as the word of the NSA's spying has spread, more and more ordinary people want to know how (or if) they can defend themselves from surveillance online. But where to start? The bad news is: if you're being personally targeted by a powerful intelligence agency...
Until just last week, the U.S. government kept up the charade that its use of a stockpile of security vulnerabilities for hacking was a closely held secret.[fn]For what it's worth, the government denies having a “Raiders of the Lost Ark style” stockpile of zero days.[/fn] In fact, in response to...
During Congressional hearings about Facebook’s data practices in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, Mark Zuckerberg drew an important distinction between what we expect from our Internet service providers (ISPs, such as Comcast or Verizon) as opposed to platforms like Facebook that operate...
On December 14, James Harr, the owner of an online store called ComradeWorkwear, announced on social media that he planned to sell a deck of “Most Wanted CEO” playing cards, satirizing the infamous “Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards” introduced by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2003. Per the...
The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) yesterday released another report on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act between 2007 and 2009. The report was long delayed due to declassification and redaction issues, but the timing is...
The Council of the European Union this week adopted new language for regulations governing internet systems that may put the security of your browser at greater risk.The new language affects the EU’s electronic identification, authentication and trust services (eIDAS) rules, which are supposed to...
It's time to shed light on the technical methods and business practices behind third-party tracking. For journalists, policy makers, and concerned consumers, this paper will demystify the fundamentals of third-party tracking, explain the scope of the problem, and suggest ways for users and legislation to fight back…
EFF and over a dozen other organizations are urging U.S. lawmakers to oppose a dangerous bill proposed by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Lindsey Graham that would make the already-flawed Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) worse. The joint letter sent Wednesday explains that the legislation fails to...
Today the High Court of the United Kingdom handed down an excellent decision—excellent because the result is so unreasonable, so out of touch with reality, and so divorced from the needs and expectations of ordinary users, that it provides a textbook illustration of the need for urgent reform of...
A court filing unsealed late Wednesday shows that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) made a highly misleading argument to an appeals court in October during a hearing on the constitutionality of National Security Letters (NSLs). On October 8, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued before the...
Congress has begun debating the TAKE IT DOWN Act (S. 146), a bill that seeks to speed up the removal of a troubling type of online content: non-consensual intimate imagery, or NCII. In recent years, concerns have also grown about the use of digital tools to alter or create such images, sometimes...
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 computers in ways that...
In the dead of night, the California Legislature shelved legislation that would have protected every Internet user in the state from having their data collected and sold by ISPs without their permission. By failing to pass A.B. 375, the legislature demonstrated that they put the profits of Verizon...
Right before Congress left for its annual summer vacation the Obama Administration endorsed the Senate Intelligence Committee's Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA). EFF opposes the bill because its vague definitions, broad legal immunity, and new spying powers allow for a tremendous amount...
When children turn 13, they age out of the data protections provided by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Then, they become targets for data collection from data brokers that collect their information from social media apps, shopping history, location tracking services, and more.
FBI agents arrested a Mexican tycoon named Jose Susumo Azano Matsura at his Coronado, Calif. home on Wednesday as part of a political bribery investigation based on captured emails, seized banking records, and covertly recorded conversations. The unfolding scandal is soaked in irony: Azano is a...
The White House Office of Management and Budget has published a new standard recommending full HTTPS on all federal web sites and web services. They are accepting public comments until April 14; if you care about privacy and security, you should weigh in.This post is our public comment: we whole-...
Update, April 9, 2021 : We've launched Am I FLoCed, a new site that will tell you whether your Chrome browser has been turned into a guinea pig for Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC, Google’s latest targeted advertising experiment. Today, Google launched an “origin trial” of Federated Learning...
Co-Authored with Peter Bibring, Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Southern California Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using sophisticated cameras, called “automated license plate readers” or ALPR, to scan and record the license plates of millions of cars across the country. These...
ANDREA MITCHELL: “Why do you need every telephone number? Why is it such a broad vacuum cleaner approach?” JAMES CLAPPER: “Well, you have to start someplace.”—NBC Meet the Press, this past Sunday Concerned about the surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans, last year Senator Ron Wyden asked...