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.…