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Video: Ruth Taylor Describes Her Win Against an Online Voting Patent We’ve been fighting abuses of the patent system for years. Many of the worst abuses we see are committed by software patent owners who make money suing people instead of building anything. These are patent owners we call patent trolls. They demand money from people who use technology to perform ordinary activities. And they’re able to do that because they’re able to get patents on basic ideas that aren’t inventions, like running a scavenger hunt and teaching foreign languages . Efforts at reforming this broken system got a big boost in 2014, when the Supreme Court decided the Alice v. CLS Bank case . In a unanimous decision, the high court held that you can’t get a patent on an abstract idea just by adding generic computer language. Now, courts are supposed to dismiss lawsuits based on abstract patents as early as possible. We need an efficient way to throw out bad software patents because patent litigation is

DEEP DIVE: EFF to DHS: Stop Mass Collection of Social Media Information The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently released a proposed rule expanding the agency’s collection of social media information on key visa forms and immigration applications. Earlier this month, EFF joined over 40 civil society organizations that signed on to comments drafted by the Brennan Center for Justice. These comments identify the free speech and privacy risks the proposed rule poses to U.S. persons both directly, if they are required to fill out these forms, and indirectly, if they are connected via social media to friends, family, or associates required to fill out these forms. DHS’s Proposed Rule In the proposed rule, “Generic Clearance for the Collection of Social Media Information on Immigration and Foreign Travel Forms,” DHS claims that it has “identified the collection of social media user identifications . . . as important for identity verification, immigration and national securit

Sanctions, Protests, and Shutdowns: Fighting to Open Iran’s Internet Last week, Iranians took to the streets nationwide in protest after an abrupt spike in fuel prices. As the protests grew, the government disrupted the internet across Iran in an apparent attempt to quell unrest. The slowdown was, for most, experienced as a full blackout of internet and mobile connectivity. EFF joins a number of Iranian and international organizations in expressing grave concerns over the internet blackout and violence against protesters. What happened? A number of complicating factors have led to this shutdown. Renewed US sanctions have exacerbated economic hardship for Iranians, and tech companies’ compliance—and at times over-compliance —with these sanctions has led to diminished reliance on international services (such as Amazon Web Services , Apple and Github outright prohibiting access to users in Iran). This trend has led to further isolation of Iranians from the global Intern

About Face: Ending Government use of Face Surveillance EFF wants to help end government use of face surveillance in your community. To aid in that effort, we’ve partnered with community-based organizations in the Electronic Frontier Alliance —and other concerned civil society organizations—in launching About Face . Our About Face campaign is a way for residents in communities throughout the United States to call for an end to government use of face surveillance. TAKE ACTION End Face Surveillance in your community The About Face campaign site (aboutfacenow.org) offers a petition where you can show your support for ending face surveillance in your community. The About Face campaign site also features helpful resources to support your local efforts, and draft legislation community members and local lawmakers can adapt to meet the needs of your community. Our model legislation addresses the most critical concerns: defining the technology, setting the scope of the ban, and assur

Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG EFF and 26 other organizations just sent a letter to the Internet Society (ISOC) urging it to stop the sale of the Public Interest Registry (PIR)—the organization that manages the .ORG top-level domain—to private equity firm Ethos Capital. Our message is clear: .ORG is extremely important to the non-governmental organization (NGO) community, and our community should have a voice in decisions affecting the future of .ORG. From our letter : Non-governmental organizations all over the world rely on the .ORG top-level domain. Decisions affecting .ORG must be made with the consultation of the NGO community, overseen by a trusted community leader. If the Internet Society (ISOC) can no longer be that leader, it should work with the NGO community and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to find an appropriate replacement. New .ORG Agreement Spells Danger for NGOs EFF was stunned when ISOC announced the sal

Three Political Ad Policies and No Good Answers Observations of election manipulation on social media , and fears about how it could get worse in future elections, are prompting several platforms to take action. Twitter’s new political ads policy goes into effect today, just days after Google announced changes to its own ads policy and in the midst of potential adjustments to the policy Facebook announced last month. Social media advertising, because it is so inexpensive compared to broadcast and print, is a valuable tool for campaigns and causes with less funding. Nevertheless, these giant platforms can and should make changes to prevent the use of their advertising tools from distorting the political process. But moderating content—including advertising—at scale is a difficult and unsolved problem . In appointing themselves the judges of who and what qualifies as “political,” all three of these companies will have to make impossible decisions that will inevitably

Victory: Pennsylvania Supreme Court Rules Police Can’t Force You to Tell Them Your Password The Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a forceful opinion today holding that the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects individuals from being forced to disclose the passcode to their devices to the police. In a 4-3 decision in Commonwealth v. Davis , the court found that disclosing a password is “testimony” protected by the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination. EFF filed an amicus brief in Davis , and we were gratified that the court’s opinion closely parallels our arguments. The Fifth Amendment privilege prohibits the government from coercing a confession or forcing a suspect to lead police to incriminating evidence. We argue that unlocking and decrypting a smartphone or computer is the modern equivalent of these forms of self-incrimination. Crucially, the court held that the narrow “foregone conclusion exception” to the Fifth Amendment does not apply to dis

Five Senators Join the Fight to Learn Just How Bad Ring Really Is Amid months of damaging investigative reporting and pressure by advocacy groups like EFF, senators are finally joining the fight to learn just how invasive and harmful Amazon’s Ring cameras are to the privacy of people in their vicinity. In September, after it had been revealed that over 400 police departments around the country had entered into agreements with Ring, Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) sent a letter to the company demanding answers. These agreements give police departments access to a portal that allows them to bulk request footage from Ring users with little beyond an incident number connected to a specific case to prove they need the footage. This simple process to access potentially hundreds of cameras in the vicinity of an incident creates a vested interest for police to help expand the use of Ring cameras within their towns. We’ve written before about concerns with Ring-law enforcement partnerships; as

Finally, the Supreme Court Agrees to Review the Federal Circuit’s Dangerous Decisions in Oracle v. Google Good news! The U.S. Supreme Court has finally agreed to review the Federal Circuit’s dangerous decisions in the long-running case of Oracle v. Google . The Supreme Court now has an opportunity to reverse the damage done by the Federal Circuit. The Court can explain why copyrighting Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is a bad idea and why—even if there is copyright protection—fair use applies. To summarize the last nine years: Oracle claims a copyright on the Java APIs, and that Google infringed that copyright by using certain Java APIs in the Android OS. When it created the Android OS, Google wrote its own version of Java. But in order to allow developers to write their own programs for Android, Google used certain specifications of the Java APIs. Since APIs are, generally speaking, specifications that let programs talk to each other, it would strike at the heart of

The Intelligence Community Took Months to Respond to a Key Question About Section 215, And It Still Doesn’t Have Any “Legal Conclusion” Even with the looming expiration of Section 215 and other key provisions of the Patriot Act, it took the Intelligence Community almost four months to respond to a letter written by Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) seeking clarification on how the Intelligence Community interprets the landmark Supreme Court decision in Carpenter v. United States and whether it is using Section 215 to collect Americans’ location data. Wyden’s concerns were entirely justified. We know that the NSA has used Section 215 to collect cell phone location data in the past. But last year in Carpenter , the Supreme Court held that police violated the Fourth Amendment when they collected days of cell site location information about a robbery suspect without a warrant. In his letter, Senator Wyden noted that he and other senators had repeatedly asked others in the government what

House Lawmakers Extend Section 215 into Next Year Even Though They Had Years to Stop Illegal Overcollection of Americans’ Sensitive Data With federal agencies set to run out of money this week, House lawmakers today passed a short-term funding bill that contained a nasty surprise. Tucked into the end of this must-pass legislation, in a section titled “Other Matters,” is language reauthorizing three Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorities currently set to expire on December 15, 2019. The new expiration date would be March 15, 2020. The extension of these surveillance authorities, even for three months, is bad enough. Hiding the language in the back of a must-pass funding bill shows a patent disregard for the importance of this issue. One of the expiring authorities in question is Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. Section 215 has become synonymous with the NSA’s database of billions of telephone records, known as the Call Detail Records (CDR) program, but it ac

EFF, Antivirus Companies, and Human Rights Groups Launch Coalition to Combat Stalkerware Survivor Groups, Tech Companies Unite To Stand Against Malicious Software That Spies On and Threatens Safety of Women, Partners, Workers San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Kaspersky, Operation Safe Escape and seven other organizations today launched the Coalition Against Stalkerware to unite and mobilize security software companies and advocates for domestic abuse victims in actions to combat and shut down malicious stalkerware apps. Stalkerware , a type of commercially-available surveillance software, is installed on phones without device owners’ knowledge or consent to secretly spy on them. The apps track victims’ locations and allow abusers to read their text messages , monitor phone calls, see photos, videos, and web browsing, and much more. It’s being used all over the world to intimidate, harass, and harm victims, and is a favorite tool for stalkers and abusiv

The Council of Europe Shouldn’t Throw Out Our Privacy Rights Just to Speed Up Police Access Foreign police often want to investigate a crime by gathering potential evidence from Internet companies located in another country. What if police in Poland want to get a user’s data from an ISP in Germany, Philippines, Japan—or vice versa? Can they do this? Under what rules, and with what kind of oversight? It’s easy to get this wrong by making deals that undercut human rights protections, like having judges review data requests after the fact, rather than needing to authorize them beforehand. Another danger is signing agreements that ignore differences between countries’ legal systems, like whether or not particular actions are even crimes in both countries. But the pressure to find ways to give police routine and streamlined access to potential evidence is mounting. We’ve seen this before with the CLOUD Act in the United States, the US-UK Cloud Act Agreement , and the European e-evi

The FCC Is About to Raise Billions. Congress Should Invest it in Fiber Infrastructure FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has announced his plans to begin freeing up valuable airwaves within the C-Band, a part of the spectrum—the radio frequencies that our cell carriers, television stations, and others use to transmit services—historically used for satellite television. Once freed, the spectrum would be auctioned and used for 5G and other advanced wireless services. The FCC is making the right call here. This announcement puts the public interest ahead of the desires of the few private actors currently occupying the spectrum, who sought to leverage the hype around 5G to enrich themselves at the public’s expense. Their proposal, known as the C-Band Alliance proposal, attempted to argue that the nation’s 5G coverage would benefit if they engaged in a private sale of public property , because it would be faster than the FCC conducting a public auction. But limited spectrum is not the main bottle

Federal Judge Issues Historic Opinion for Digital Privacy at the Border In a historic opinion on privacy at the border, a federal judge this week recognized that international travelers have significant privacy interests in their digital data and ruled that suspicionless electronic device searches at U.S. ports of entry violate the Fourth Amendment. U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston held that border agents must have reasonable suspicion that a device contains digital contraband before searching or seizing the device. The summary judgment opinion was issued in EFF and ACLU’s case Alasaad v. McAleenan , in which we represent 11 plaintiffs against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The case is a constitutional challenge to the agencies’ polices on border searches and seizures of electronic devices. CBP and ICE policies permit suspicionless manual or “basic” device s