The Foilies 2020
Recognizing the year’s worst in government transparency“The Ringer,” the first track on Eminem’s 2018 album, Kamikaze, includes a line that piqued Buzzfeed reporter Jason Leopold’s curiosity: the rapper claimed the Secret Service visited him due to some controversial lyrics about Ivanka Trump. To find out if it was true, ...
Automated Copyright Filter Can’t Detect Infringement or Irony
Stop us if you’ve heard this one: legal expert posts video on YouTube with fair use clip in a lecture about copyright law, which is then taken down after a copyright bot finds it. Simply pointing out the mistake doesn’t restore the video to the Internet. Instead, extraordinary measures have...
Court Orders Hearing in Uniloc’s Patent Case Against Apple to be Conducted by Phone, Citing COVID-19 Risks
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, citing public health efforts to mitigate the risks of COVID-19 transmission, ordered that an April hearing in the Uniloc v. Apple patent case be conducted by phone rather than in person and denied EFF’s request to allow the public...
New ¿Where Is My Data? Report: Five Years of Holding ISPs Accountable in Colombia
Five years have passed since Colombian digital rights NGO Fundación Karisma launched its first annual ¿Dónde Están Mis Datos? assessing telecommunication companies’ commitment to transparency and user privacy. Since then, we’ve seen major telecom companies providing more transparency about how and when they divulge their users’ data to the...
Speaking Freely: An Interview With Ada Palmer
New York State Legislator Introduces a Very Bad “Net Neutrality” Bill
In 2018, California established the gold standard of what states should be doing on net neutrality by passing a model law for other states to copy. So, naturally, that makes the job of any legislator truly interested in protecting net neutrality pretty easy: just copy and paste. But that...
The EARN IT Bill Is the Government’s Plan to Scan Every Message Online
Update 10/1/2020: The EARN IT bill has been amended since this blog post was published. We still oppose the bill.Imagine an Internet where the law required every message sent to be read by government-approved scanning software. Companies that handle such messages wouldn’t be allowed to securely encrypt them, or...
Police May Not Need a Warrant to Rummage Through Your Trash, But Warrantless Collection of DNA Is Unconstitutional
This week, we filed an amicus brief in a South Dakota case arguing that the Fourth Amendment prohibits the police from surreptitiously collecting our DNA without a warrant. This case is one of the first to challenge the collection of DNA from a free person after results of...
The Graham-Blumenthal Bill Is an Attack on Online Speech and Security
Members of Congress have mounted a major threat to your freedom of speech and privacy online. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) recently introduced a bill that would undermine key protections for Internet speech in U.S. law. It would also expose providers of the private messaging services we...
FAQ about the Tech Projects Director Role
We're hiring a new Director of Technology Projects. That's the team at EFF that develops and maintains Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, the Certbot client for Let's Encrypt, and Panopticlick, as well as housing our Threat Lab research group. On top of building and...
