The Atlanta Police Department has been snooping on social media to closely monitor the meetings, protests, canvassing–even book clubs and pizza parties–of the political movement to stop “Cop City,” a police training center that would destroy part of an urban forest. Activists already believed they were likely under surveillance by...
This analysis is based on the latest draft of the U.N. Cybercrime Treaty (Rev 3) or before, and highlights its potential risks to free expression and misuse.The draft UN Cybercrime Convention was supposed to help tackle serious online threats like ransomware attacks, which cost billions of dollars in damages every...
The Texas settlement is welcome, but it also highlights the need to give consumers their own private right of action to enforce consumer data privacy laws.
The proposed UN Cybercrime Treaty puts security researchers and journalists at risk of being criminally prosecuted for their work identifying and reporting computer system vulnerabilities, work that keeps the digital ecosystem safer for everyone.The proposed text fails to exempt security research from the expansive scope of its cybercrime...
As UN delegates sat down in New York this week to restart negotiations, calls are mounting from all corners—from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to Big Tech—to add critical human rights protections to, and fix other major flaws in, the proposed UN surveillance treaty, which as...
EFF’s Certbot is now installed on over 4 million web servers, where it’s used to maintain HTTPS certificates for more than 31 million websites. The recent achievement of these milestones helps show the success of the project and the important role it plays in the infrastructure of a secure...
The Senate just passed a bill that will let the federal and state governments investigate and sue websites that they claim cause kids mental distress. Don't let politicians and bureaucrats decide what people should read and view online.
The proposed UN Cybercrime Convention dangerously undermines human rights, opening the door to unchecked cross-border surveillance and government overreach. Despite two and a half years of negotiations, the draft treaty authorizes extensive surveillance powers without robust safeguards, omitting essential data protection principles. This risks turning international efforts to fight cybercrime...
In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week, Senators Ron Wyden and Edward Markey urged the FTC to investigate several car companies caught selling and sharing customer information without clear consent. Alongside details previously gathered from reporting by The New York Times, the letter also...
Update: This post has been updated to clarify the scope of the compelled assistance provisions and the broad nature of criminalization and electronic evidence gathering. The final version of the draft convention can still be used to expand the reach of repression under the pretext of combating cybercrime. By permitting...
International UN treaties aren’t usually on users’ radar. They are debated, often over the course of many years, by diplomats and government functionaries in Vienna or New York, and their significance is often overlooked or lost in the flood of information and news we process every day, even when they...
This is part one of an ongoing series. Part two on the role of big tech in human rights abuses is here.Government involvement in content moderation raises serious human rights concerns in every context. Since October 7, social media platforms have been challenged for the unjustified takedowns of...
At a virtual briefing today, experts from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Access Now, Derechos Digitales, Human Rights Watch, and the International Fund for Public Interest Media outlined the human rights risks posed by the proposed UN Cybercrime Treaty. They explained that the draft convention, instead of addressing core cybercrimes,...
We don’t know a lot more about when government jawboning social media companies—that is, attempting to pressure them to censor users’ speech— violates the First Amendment; but we do know that lawsuits based on such actions will be hard to win. In Murthy v. Missouri, the U.S. Supreme...
