This February, with Venezuela rocked by economic collapse and a presidential succession crisis, an opposition party put out a call for volunteers. Juan Guaidó, a political leader with the Popular Will party, called on supporters to register at the site “Volunteers for Venezuela”. Guaidó announced that the call...

Last year, the Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion in a case we’ve written about a lot, called Carpenter v. United States, ruling that the Fourth Amendment protects data generated by our phones called historical cell-site location information or CSLI. The Court recognized that CSLI creates a “detailed chronicle...

Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s landmark case challenging NSA’s mass spying moved forward in 2019, setting up a crucial decision for the Ninth Circuit in 2020. We’ve pursued this case for over a decade because we believe that mass surveillance, like all general search and seizure schemes, is both illegal and...

Content moderation and its effects remained at the forefront of the public imagination in 2019, with stories of takedowns from Sweden to Syria and everywhere in between gaining media attention. Inconsistent and unfair moderation from companies—often under great pressure from governments and other external actors—is still a serious...

While cities and municipalities made clear strides to limit the use of face surveillance technology throughout 2019, airlines and government agencies tasked with identifying travelers have spent much of the year trying to expand its use. But while the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP),...

None of us signed up for an Internet composed of "a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four", but here we are, watching as hyper-concentrated industries rack up catastrophic victories against net neutrality, right to repair, security auditing, and...

AI and algorithmic decision-making raised important civil liberties issues in 2019, with developments good, bad, and in-between.Starting off in the “disappointing” category, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced in August that it was considering new rules that would insulate landlords, banks, and insurance companies that...

Almost every week, we hear about another corporate data breach or government attack on privacy. For anyone who wants real privacy online, encryption is the essential component.Governments around the world keep trying to break encryption, seeking to enhance the power of their law enforcement agencies. They’ve tried...

The global nature of the Internet means that police agencies all around the world facing challenges investigating crime when the data is stored in other countries. The pressure to make this process easier is mounting. To many governments, that means stripping away legal protections for privacy. Soon, police in other...

Earlier this year, EFF noted that the United States is facing a high-speed broadband access crisis. For the foreseeable future, it appears that a supermajority of Americans will not have access to fiber to the home. Instead, it is cable monopolies or nothing at all.Government data indicates that this...