EFF and Open Rights Group Defend the Right to Publish Open Source Software to the UK Government
EFF and Open Rights Group today submitted formal comments to the British Treasury, urging restraint in applying anti-money-laundering regulations to the publication of open-source software.The UK government sought public feedback on proposals to update its financial regulations pertaining to money laundering and terrorism in alignment with a larger European directive....
Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today's Monopolies
Today, Apple is one of the largest, most profitable companies on Earth, but in the early 2000s, the company was fighting for its life. Microsoft's Windows operating system was ascendant, and Microsoft leveraged its dominance to ensure that every Windows user relied on its Microsoft Office suite (Word,...
Same Problem, Different Day: Government Accountability Office Updates Its Review of FBI’s Use of Face Recognition—and It’s Still Terrible
This week the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued an update to its 2016 report on the FBI’s use of face recognition. The takeaway, which they also shared during a Congressional House Oversight Committee hearing: the FBI now has access to 641 million photos—including driver’s license and...
Fines Aren’t Enough: Here’s How the FTC Can Make Facebook Better
The Federal Trade Commission is likely to announce that Facebook’s many violations of users’ privacy in recent years also violated its consent decree with the commission. In its financial filings, Facebook has indicated that it expects to be fined between $3 and $5 billion by the FTC. But...
The Christchurch Call: The Good, the Not-So-Good, and the Ugly
In the wake of the mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed fifty-one people and injured more than forty others, the New Zealand government has released a plan to combat terrorist and violent content online, dubbed the Christchurch Call. The Call has been endorsed by...
Courts to Government Officials: Stop Censoring on Social Media.
The Internet, and social media in particular, is uniquely designed to promote free expression, so much so that the Supreme Court has recognized social media as the “most important places” for speech and sharing viewpoints. Like most of us. government agencies and officials have created social media profiles and...
Why Outlawing Cryptocurrency Purchases is a Terrible Idea
A member of the U.S. House of Representatives last week called for a bill outlawing Americans from making cryptocurrency purchases, aligning with anti-cryptocurrency policies and approaches in countries such as Iran and Egypt. There is no language for this potential bill or any explanation of whether such...
Coin Center’s Report Explores Privacy Coins, Decentralized Exchanges, and the First Amendment
Coin Center’s Peter Van Valkenburgh published a report exploring the potential Constitutional concerns should aggressive regulators attempt to crack down on the coders developing ideas for cryptocurrencies and decentralized exchanges.For long-time readers of the EFF blog, some of these ideas will seem familiar. EFF has been asserting that publishing code...
Shareholders Demand To Know How Northrop Grumman Will Protect Human Rights While Building Massive DHS Database
Over the next few years, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to implement an enormous biometric collection program which will endanger the rights of citizens and foreigners alike. The agency intends to collect at least seven types of biometric identifiers, including face and voice data, DNA, scars, and tattoos,...
Section 230 Is Not A Special “Tech Company” Immunity
Members of Congress are fond of wrongly calling Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230) a “big tech company” immunity, implying that it doesn’t protect anyone else. And they are not alone in this mistake. We frequently hear the same mischaracterization from friends in academia and legacy news media. The characterization...
