Good security practices require us to use different passwords for most or all of the websites and services we interact with. For accounts of any significance, those also need to be strong passwords of one form or another. But if you combine those two requirements (one password per site, most or all passwords are strong) then remembering all of your passwords requires an inhuman display of memory. Of course, when we need to perform inhuman tasks, we use software. And in this case, we use password stores and generators of various sorts. There are a lot of options for password…
Author: EFFSource
People have many reasons to be anonymous online, from the political to the personal. One of the most contentious uses of anonymity is in consumer reviews—some reviewers feel they need the protection of anonymity to post the truth, while some businesses claim that it fuels irresponsibility. But the First Amendment protects anonymous speech online, just as it protects the choice to hand out political flyers in person without identifying oneself. In an amicus brief just filed in the Virginia Supreme Court, EFF explains how the law protects everyone when disagreements about anonymity move from the Internet to the courtroom. This…
EFF Asks Appeals Court to Protect Free Speech and Innovation in Capitol v. VimeoSan Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of advocacy groups have asked a federal appeals court to block record labels’ attempt to thwart federal law in Capitol v. Vimeo—a case that could jeopardize free speech and innovation and the sites that host both. In this lawsuit, the record labels sued online video site Vimeo, alleging that dozens of sound recordings were infringed in videos posted on the site. A ruling from a district court judge earlier this year found Vimeo could be responsible…
The Fourth Amendment protects us from “unreasonable” government searches of our persons, houses, papers and effects. How courts should determine what is and isn’t reasonable in our increasingly digital world is the subject of a new amicus brief we filed today in San Francisco federal court. At issue is historical cell site data—the records of the cell towers a customer’s cell phone connects to. The government has long maintained that it’s unreasonable for customers to expect those records to remain private. As a result, the government argues it does not need a search warrant to obtain historical cell site records from cell phone…
Earlier today, Senator Patrick Leahy introduced a revised version of his USA FREEDOM legislation, the USA FREEDOM Act of 2014, which focuses on telephone record collection and FISA Court reform. While this bill is not a comprehensive solution to overbroad and unconstitutional surveillance, it is a strong first step. EFF urges Congress to support passage of the bill without any amendments that will weaken it The new legislation contains a number of key changes from the gutted House version of USA FREEDOM: The USA FREEDOM Act of 2014 will end bulk collection of phone records under Section 215 EFF, along…
It’s increasingly rare for Congress to actually pass bills into law, but Friday brought some good news from Capitol Hill: More than a year after the exemption covering phone unlocking expired and a White House petition on the topic collected some 114,000 signatures, a narrow bill offering a limited carve-out for consumers unlocking phones made its way to the President’s desk to be signed into law. This is a win for consumers. There was near universal agreement that the restrictions were unreasonable, ranging from a White House statement calling a phone unlocking allowance “common sense,” to a partial solution from…
Human Rights Watch and the ACLU today published a terrific report documenting the chilling effect on journalists and lawyers from the NSA’s surveillance programs entitled: “With Liberty to Monitor All: How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law and American Democracy.” The report, which is chock full of evidence about the very real harms caused by the NSA’s surveillance programs, is the result of interviews of 92 lawyers and journalists, plus several senior government officials. This report adds to the growing body of evidence that the NSA’s surveillance programs are causing real harm. It also links these harms to key…
Yesterday we filed a motion for partial summary judgment in our long running Jewel v. NSA case, focusing on the government’s admitted seizure and search of communications from the Internet backbone, also called “upstream.” We’ve asked the judge to rule that there are two ways in which this is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment: The admitted seizure of communications from the Internet backbone, for which we have government admissions plus the evidence we received long ago from Mark Klein. The government’s admitted search of the entire communications stream, including the content of communications. We’re very proud of this motion (especially…
Graphic Explains to Court and the Public How the NSA Seizes and Searches Innocent Americans’ CommunicationsSan Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today presented a federal court with a detailed explanation of how the NSA taps into the Internet backbone and requested the judge rule that the agency is violating the Fourth Amendment by copying and searching the collected data. EFF argues there are now enough agreed-upon facts in our lawsuit, Jewel v. NSA, to reach a constitutional conclusion. To shed light on how the mass surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment, EFF crafted a new infographic that details each…
EFF’s position on net neutrality simply calls for all data that travels over the Internet to be treated equally. This means that we oppose ISPs blocking content based on its source or destination, or discriminating against certain applications (such as BitTorrent), or imposing special access fees that would make it harder for small websites to reach their users. We have called for the FCC to assume firm legal authority to protect the neutrality of the net from these sorts of abuses, while explicitly forbearing from going any further to regulate the Internet. Do we maintain this same position internationally? Absolutely.…
Today, the House Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on “remedies” in copyright law—that is, the penalties, injunctions, and other means of challenging and penalizing alleged infringement. This is hugely important: fixing copyright’s remedy provisions (like excessive, unpredictable monetary penalties and government seizures of domain names) is key to ensuring that copyright does its job—helping to encourage creativity—without unduly interfering with free speech and innovation. To help the Judiciary Committee, and to explain why fixing this part of copyright law is so important, EFF is releasing a white paper today. Collateral Damages explains how copyright’s system of “statutory damages” chills…
In many parts of the developing world, students face barriers to access academic materials. Libraries are often inadequate, and schools and universities are often unable to pay dues for expensive, specialized databases. For these students, the Internet is a vital tool and resource to access materials that are otherwise unavailable to them. Yet despite the opportunities enabled by the Internet, there are still major risks to accessing and sharing academic resources online. A current situation in Colombia exemplifies this problem: a graduate student is facing four to eight years in prison for sharing an academic article on the Internet. He…
Yesterday, ProPublica reported on new research by a team at KU Leuven and Princeton on canvas fingerprinting. One of the most intrusive users of the technology is a company called AddThis, who by are employing it in “shadowing visitors to thousands of top websites, from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn.com.” Canvas fingerprinting allows sites to get even more identifying information than we had previously warned about with our Panopticlick fingerprinting experiment. Canvas fingerprinting exploits the fact that different browsers have slightly different algorithms, parameters, and hardware for turning text into pictures on your screen (or more specifically, into an HTML 5 canvas…
In the TV series Person of Interest, two government artificial intelligence programs—one gone rogue—can access virtually every surveillance camera across New York City, including privately operated ones in places like parking garages, hotels, and apartment complexes. The creators of the show try to stay one step ahead of modern technology. So the question is: do cities really create networks of interconnected private and public security cameras? Yes, they do. If you’re going to San Diego Comic-Con (and the Person of Interest team is), you’ll want to pull on your Batman mask or slather on the Sith paint if you’re passing…
More than 100,000 people will descend on San Diego Comic-Con this week, including yours truly representing the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you’re one of the the lucky badge-holders with an interest in protecting Internet freedom, I’d love to chat with you and give you a sticker (while supplies last, obviously). Our friends at Alaska Robotics and musician Marian Call have generously offered us a spot at their table. You can find me there (#1134 in the main exhibition hall) from 2 – 3 pm on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. But EFF isn’t the only opportunity at SDCC to ponder issues…
El 10 de Julio marca un año desde que EFF y una coalición de cientos de expertos y activistas de DDHH pusieron los toques finales a los Principios Necesario y Proporcional. Estos 13 Principios articulan cómo la ley internacional de los derechos humanos se debe aplicar a la vigilancia gubernamental. Los Principios han recibido desde entonces firme apoyo en todo el mundo, impulsados parcialmente por la indignación popular ante el espionaje de la NSA, el GCHQ y otras agencias de inteligencia remarcada en los documentos filtrados por el denunciante Edward Snowden. Activistas locales y nacionales de México a Corea del…
July 10 marks one year since EFF and a coalition of hundreds of experts and human rights activists put the finishing touches on the Necessary and Proportionate Principles. These 13 Principles articulate how international human rights law should be applied to government surveillance. The Principles have since received strong support across the globe, fueled in part by the popular outrage over spying by the NSA, GCHQ and other intelligence agencies highlighted in documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden. National and local activists from Mexico to South Korea to Canada to Brazil have used the Principles to push for stronger protections…
Add-On for Firefox and Chrome Prevents Spying by Ads, Social Widgets, and Hidden TrackersSan Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released a beta version of Privacy Badger, a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome that detects and blocks online advertising and other embedded content that tracks you without your permission. Privacy Badger was launched in an alpha version less than three months ago, and already more than 150,000 users have installed the extension. Today’s beta release includes a feature that automatically limits the tracking function of social media widgets, like the Facebook “Like” button, replacing them with a…
EFF is releasing an experimental hacker alpha release of wireless router software specifically designed to support secure, shareable Open Wireless networks. We will be officially launching the Open Wireless Router today at the HOPE X (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in New York City, aiming to bring aboard members of the hacker community. This release is a work in progress and is intended only for developers and people willing to deal with the bleeding edge. The software aims to do several things that existing routers don’t do well—or don’t do at all. We are beginning a journey that we hope…
“What kind of data is the NSA collecting on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?” That’s the question John Napier Tye, a former State Department section chief for Internet freedom, calls on the government to answer in his powerful op-ed published today by the Washington Post. In it, Tye calls the NSA’s surveillance operations abroad, conducted under Executive Order 12333, a threat to American democracy, stating that this power “authorizes collection of the content of communications, not just metadata, even for U.S. persons.” Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan on December 4, 1981, established rough guidelines for…