We at EFF have long recognized the threats posed by the unchecked technological prowess of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Since our founding in 1990, we have been in the forefront of efforts to impose meaningful legal controls and accountability on the secretive activities of those entities, including the National...
EFF has joined with 23 other organizations including the ACLU, Restore the Fourth, the Brennan Center for Justice, Access Now, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation to demand that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) furnish the public with an estimate of exactly how many...
When someone is placed on location monitoring for one purpose, it does not justify law enforcement’s access to that information for a completely different purpose without a proper warrant. EFF joined the Committee for Public Counsel Services, ACLU, ACLU of Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, in...
A new bombshell scoop from NBC News revealed an internal U.S. Border Patrol memo claiming that 30 percent of camera towers that compose the agency's "Remote Video Surveillance System" (RVSS) program are broken. Except, this isn't a bombshell. What should actually be shocking is that Congressional leaders are acting shocked.
UPDATE: On October 23, 2024, the Third Circuit denied TikTok's petition for rehearing en banc.EFF legal intern Nick Delehanty was the principal author of this post.EFF filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in support of TikTok’s request that the full court...
Antitrust law has long recognized that monopolies stifle innovation and gouge consumers on price. When it comes to Big Tech, harm to innovation—in the form of “kill zones,” where major corporations buy up new entrants to a market before they can compete with them—has been easy to find. Consumer...
California law enforcement should take note: the state’s Attorney General has issued a new bulletin advising them on how to comply with AB 481—a state law that regulates how law enforcement agencies can use, purchase, and disclose information about military equipment at their disposal. This important guidance comes...
The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, which handles all prosecutions in the Seattle area, has instructed police in no uncertain terms: do not use AI to write police reports...for now. This is a good development. We hope prosecutors across the country will exercise such caution as companies continue to...
Big Tech is borrowing a page from Big Tobacco's playbook to wage war on your privacy, according to Jake Snow of the ACLU of Northern California. We agree. In the 1990s, the tobacco industry attempted to use federal law to override a broad swath of existing state laws and...
Some people just don’t know how to take a hint. For more than a decade, giant standards-development organizations (SDOs) have been fighting in courts around the country, trying use copyright law to control access to other laws.
Deeplinks Blog by Emma Leeds Armstrong | October 15, 2024
In its recent report, Civil Rights Implications of Face Recognition Technology (FRT), the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights identified serious problems with the federal government’s use of face recognition technology, and in doing so recognized EFF’s expertise on this issue. The Commission focused its investigation on the Department of...
Governments increasingly rely on algorithmic systems to support consequential assessments and determinations about people’s lives, from judging eligibility for social assistance to trying to predict crime and criminals. Latin America is no exception. With the use of artificial intelligence (AI) posing human rights challenges in...
Young people have a right to speak and access information online. Legislatures should remember that protecting kids' online safety shouldn't require sweeping online surveillance and censorship.EFF reminded the New York Attorney General of this important fact in comments responding to the state's recently passed Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE)...
A mobile driver’s license (often called an mDL) is a version of your ID that you keep on your phone instead of in your pocket. In theory, it would work wherever your regular ID works—TSA, liquor stores, to pick up a prescription, or to get into a bar. This sounds...
This episode was first released in March 2023.With this year’s election just weeks away, concerns about disinformation and conspiracy theories are on the rise. We covered this issue in a really enlightening talk in March 2023 with Alice Marwick, the director of research at Data &...
