Thrown last-minute into a torrent of competing legislation, a new bill meant to expand the NSA’s broad surveillance powers is the most recent threat to American privacy. It increases who is subject to surveillance, allows warrantless search of American communications, expands how collected data can be used, and treats constitutional...
We’ve taken a stand for the First Amendment rights of individuals to receive and comment on social media posts from governmental officials and agencies. We’ve received a lot of good questions about why we believe that public servants—mayors, sheriffs, senators, even President Donald Trump—can’t block people...
Washington, D.C. - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against the Department of Justice, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Homeland Security today, demanding records about the agencies’ work on the federal Tattoo Recognition Technology program.
This secretive program involves a coalition of government, academia,...
Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all data that travels over their networks fairly, without improper discrimination in favor of particular apps, sites or services. Even as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is pushing a plan to end net neutrality protections in the...
SESTA and FOSTA Are Cut from the Same Cloth. Both Would Be Disastrous for Online Communities There are two bills racing through Congress that would undermine your right to free expression online and threaten the online communities that we all rely on. The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA,...
EFF is taking the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), FBI, and DHS to court to obtain records about a program to refine automated tattoo recognition technology.
Beginning in 2014, NIST, with support from the FBI and DHS, created a multi-part technology challenge that encouraged public universities and...
Securely browsing the Internet—even when you know what you’re doing—is tough. That’s partly why, nearly seven years ago, EFF worked together with The Tor Project to develop a privacy tool called HTTPS Everywhere, which automatically provides users with secure, encrypted connections to websites when available.
While HTTPS Everywhere can...
After the 2016 U.S. election, the prospects for digital rights under the incoming administration seemed particularly grim. A silver lining in this dark cloud has been the concerted efforts we’ve seen by groups working to defend digital rights at the local level. Over the past year, a growing network of...
While most people are focused on net neutrality, surveillance, and tax reform, a few legislators are quietly mulling over a different problem: copyright reform.
Five years ago, Representative Bob Goodlatte, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, launched a series of hearings and studies that he said would lead...
Too often local, state, and federal law enforcement use surveillance tools against the public without meaningful oversight or a public discussion about their impact on free expression and privacy.
Join Aaron Mackey, an EFF staff attorney, to discuss how transparency laws play a critical role in uncovering law enforcement...
EFF has joined over 80 groups in writing once again [PDF] to European politicians about disastrous new EU copyright proposals. Along with human and digital rights organizations, media freedom organizations, publishers, journalists, libraries, scientific and research institutions, educational institutions including universities, creator representatives, consumers, software developers, start-ups, technology businesses...
The fifth round of negotiations over a modernized North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) wound up last week in Mexico. Following conclusion of the round, Mexican Trade Minister Ildefonso Guajardo told reporters that he hoped that the next round, to be held in Washington, DC in the week of...
UPDATE (6/26/18): We have updated this post to reflect how AdBlock Plus has changed the settings interface for its Chrome and Opera plugins so that they are now the same as the version for Firefox.Millions of users are trying to protect their privacy from commercial tracking online, be it...
Today we’re launching a new version of Panopticlick, an EFF site which audits your browser privacy protection. Conceived to raise awareness about the threat of device fingerprinting, Panopticlick was extended in December 2015 to check for protection against tracking by ads and invisible beacons. This new update...
