As students were sent home from school in the spring due to the coronavirus pandemic, schools followed them home with invasive surveillance technology. This trend, spurred by the surge in remote learning, was an opportunistic move by tech companies and schools already in a race to control students through...

On March 15, 2020, Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act—a surveillance law with a rich history of government overreach and abuse—expired due to its sunset clause. Along with two other PATRIOT Act provisions, Section 215 lapsed after lawmakers failed to reach an agreement on a broader set of reforms...

These days it's easy to feel adrift from the people in your life. At times, physical distance alongside social and political unrest seems like a never-ending rising tide. It can feel overwhelming. We have felt it here at EFF, but thankfully during our 30th Anniversary, EFF's purpose has never...

One nice thing about democracy is that—at least in theory—we don’t need permission to speak freely and privately. We don’t have to prove that our speech meets the government’s criteria, online or offline. We don’t have to “earn” our rights to free speech or privacy.Times have changed. Today, some U.S....

For many years, we have urged platforms to operate with more transparency—both to the public and to their users—and to ensure that the people who use their services have the ability to appeal wrongful content moderation decisions. As such, in conjunction with several other organizations and academic experts, we launched...

As the world rapidly changed in 2020, new threats arose to our digital security. The shift to online education and the wave of police brutality protests brought new avenues for surveillance, so EFF created new resources to help people protect themselves.EFF maintains a repository of self-help resources for fighting back...

Over a year ago, EFF raised the desperate need for the United States to have a universal fiber infrastructure plan in order to ensure that all Americans can obtain access to 21st century communications technology. Since then, we’ve produced technical research showing why fiber is vastly superior to...

While 2019 saw the EU ramming through a disastrous Internet copyright rule that continues to reverberate through legal and policy circles, 2020 was a very different story as the EU introduced the Digital Services Act (DSA), the most significant reform of Europe’s platform legislation the EU has...

Below is a message from whistleblower Edward Snowden. His revelations about secret surveillance programs opened the world’s eyes to a new level of government misconduct, and reinvigorated EFF’s continuing work in the courts and with lawmakers to end unlawful mass spying.EFF is grateful to Ed for his support in...

This summer’s Black-led protest movement against police violence was one of the largest political movements in the history of the United States--and with it, came a massive proliferation of government surveillance technology aimed at activists and demonstrators. EFF has been standing up for the right to protest without being...