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Deeplinks

EFF"s Deeplinks Blog: Noteworthy news from around the internet

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NSA Surveillance and Section 702 of FISA: 2024 in Review

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/28

Mass surveillance authority Section 702 of FISA, which allows the government to collect international communications, many of which happen to have one side in the United States, has been renewed several times since its creation with the passage of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. This law has been an incessant threat to privacy for over a decade because the FBI operates on the “finders keepers” rule of surveillance which means that it thinks because the NSA has “incidentally” collected the US-side of

Global Age Verification Measures: 2024 in Review

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/27

EFF has spent this year urging governments around the world, from Canada to Australia, to abandon their reckless plans to introduce age verification for a variety of online content under the guise of protecting children online. Mandatory age verification tools are surveillance systems that threaten everyone’s rights to speech and privacy, and introduce more harm than they seek to combat.Kids Experiencing Harm is Not Just an Online Phenomena In November, Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese,

While the Court Fights Over AI and Copyright...

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/27

The phrase “move fast and break things” carries pretty negative connotations in these days of (Big) techlash. So it’s surprising that state and federal policymakers are doing just that with the latest big issue in tech and the public consciousness: generative AI, or more specifically its uses to generate deepfakes. Creators of all kinds are expressing a lot of anxiety around the use of generative artificial intelligence, some of it justified. The anxiety, combined with some people’s understandable

Electronic Frontier Alliance Fought and Taught...

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/27

The EFF-chaired Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA) has had a big year! EFA is a loose network of local groups fighting for digital rights in the United States. With an ever-increasing roster of allies across the country, including significant growth on university campuses, EFA has also undergone a bit of a facelift. With the new branding comes more resources to support local organizing and popular education efforts around the country. If you’re a member of a local or state group in the United

The Growing Intersection of Reproductive Rights and...

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/27

Dear reader of our blog, surely by now you know the format: as we approach the end of the year, we look back on our work, count our wins, learn from our misses, and lay the groundwork strategies for a better future. It's been an intense year in the fight for reproductive rights and its intersections with digital civil liberties. Going after cops illegally sharing location data, fighting the data broker industry, and building coalitions with the broader movement for reproductive justice—we've stayed

You Can Be a Part of this Grassroots Movement 🧑‍💻

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/26

You ever hear the saying, "it takes a village"? I never really understood the saying until I started going to conferences, attending protests, and working on EFF's membership team. You see, EFF's mission thrives because we are powered by people like you. Just as we fight for your privacy and free expression through grassroots advocacy, we rely on grassroots support to make all of our work possible. Will you join our movement with a small monthly donation today? Start A Monthly Donation Your Support

Surveillance Self-Defense: 2024 in Review

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/26

This year, we celebrated the 15th anniversary of our Surveillance-Self Defense (SSD) guide. How’d we celebrate? We kept at it—continuing to work on, refine, and update one of the longest running security and privacy guides on the internet. Technology changes quickly enough as it is, but so does the language we use to describe that technology. In order for SSD to thrive, it needs careful attention throughout the year. So, we like to think of SSD as a garden, always in need of a little watering,

EU Tech Regulation—Good Intentions, Unclear...

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/26

For a decade, the EU has served as the regulatory frontrunner for online services and new technology. Over the past two EU mandates (terms), the EU Commission brought down many regulations covering all sectors, but Big Tech has been the center of their focus. As the EU seeks to regulate the world’s largest tech companies, the world is taking notice, and debates about the landmark Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA) have spread far beyond Europe. The DSA’s focus is the

Celebrating Digital Freedom with EFF Supporters: 2024...

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/26

“EFF's mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world.” It can be a tough job. A lot of our time is spent fighting bad things that are happening in the world or fixing things that have been broken for a long time. But this work is important, and we've accomplished great things this year! Thanks to your help, we pushed the USPTO to withdraw harmful patent review proposals, fought for the public's right to access police drone footage, and

Fighting For Progress On Patents: 2024 in Review

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/25

The rights we have in the offline world–to speak freely, create culture, play games, build new things and do business–must be available to us online, as well. This core belief drives EFF’s work to fight the misuse of the patent system. Despite significant progress we’ve made over the last decade, patents, and in particular vague software patents, remain a serious threat to online rights. The median patent lawsuit isn't filed by what Americans would recognize as an ‘inventor,’ but by an anonymous

We Stood Up for Access to the Law and Congress...

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/25

For a while, ever since they lost in court, a number of industry giants have pushed a bill that purported to be about increasing access to the law. In fact, it would give them enormous power over the public ability to access, share, teach, and comment on the law. This sounds crazy—no one should be able to own the law. But these industry associations claim there’s a glaring exception to the rule: safety and building codes. The key distinction, they insist, is how these particular laws are

Police Surveillance in San Francisco: 2024 Year in...

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/25

From a historic ban on police using face recognition, to landmark CCOPS legislation, to the first ban in the United States of police deploying deadly force via robot, for several years San Francisco has been leading the way on necessary reforms over how police use technology. Unfortunately, 2024 was a far cry from those victories. While EFF continues to fight for common sense police reforms in our own backyard, this year saw a change in city politics to something that was darker and more

The Atlas of Surveillance Expands Its Data on Police...

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/24

EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance is one of the most useful resources for those who want to understand the use of police surveillance by local law enforcement agencies across the United States. This year, as the police surveillance industry has shifted, expanded, and doubled down on its efforts to win new cop customers, our team has been busily adding new spyware and equipment to this database. We also saw many great uses of the Atlas from journalists, students, and researchers, as well as a growing

The U.S. Supreme Court Continues its Foray into Free...

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/24

As we said last year, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken an unusually active interest in internet free speech issues over the past couple years.All five pending cases at the end of last year, covering three issues, were decided this year, with varying degrees of First Amendment guidance for internet users and online platforms. We posted some takeaways from these recent cases. We additionally filed an amicus brief in a new case before the Supreme Court challenging the Texas age verification

EFF Continued to Champion Users’ Online Speech and...

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/24

People’s ability to speak online, share ideas, and advocate for change are enabled by the countless online services that host everyone’s views. Despite the central role these online services play in our digital lives, lawmakers and courts spent the last year trying to undermine a key U.S. law, Section 230, that enables services to host our speech. EFF was there to fight back on behalf of all internet users. Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230) is not an accident. Congress passed the law in 1996 because it

EFF in the Press: 2024 in Review

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/23

EFF’s attorneys, activists, and technologists were media rockstars in 2024, informing the public about important issues that affect privacy, free speech, and innovation for people around the world. Perhaps the single most exciting media hit for EFF in 2024 was “Secrets in Your Data,” the NOVA PBS documentary episode exploring “what happens to all the data we’re shedding and explores the latest efforts to maximize benefits – without compromising personal privacy.” EFFers Hayley Tsukayama, Eva

Defending Encryption in the U.S. and Abroad: 2024 in...

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/23

EFF supporters get that strong encryption is tied to one of our most basic rights: the right to have a private conversation. In the digital world, privacy is impossible without strong encryption. That’s why we’ve always got an eye out for attacks on encryption. This year, we pushed back—successfully—against anti-encryption laws proposed in the U.S., the U.K. and the E.U. And we had a stark reminder of just how dangerous backdoor access to our communications can be. U.S. Bills Pushing Mass

2024 Year in Review

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/23

It is our end-of-year tradition at EFF to look back at the last 12 months of digital rights. This year, the number and diversity of our reflections attest that 2024 was a big year. If there is something uniting all the disparate threads of work EFF has done this year, it is this: that law and policy should be careful, precise, practical, and technologically neutral. We do not care if a cop is using a glass pressed against your door or the most advanced microphone: they need a warrant. For

EFF Tells Appeals Court To Keep Copyright’s Fair Use...

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/21

It’s critical that copyright be balanced with limitations that support users’ rights, and perhaps no limitation is more important than fair use. Critics, humorists, artists, and activists all must have rights to re-use and re-purpose source material, even when it’s copyrighted. Yesterday, EFF weighed in on another case that could shape the future of our fair use rights. In Sedlik v. Von Drachenberg, a Los Angeles tattoo artist created a tattoo based on a well-known photograph of Miles Davis taken

Ninth Circuit Gets It: Interoperability Isn’t an...

Deeplinks ·

2024/12/20

A federal appeals court just gave software developers, and users, an early holiday present, holding that software updates aren’t necessarily “derivative,” for purposes of copyright law, just because they are designed to interoperate the software they update. This sounds kind of obscure, so let’s cut through the legalese. Lots of developers build software designed to interoperate with preexisting works. This kind of interoperability is crucial to innovation, particularly in a world where a small

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