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Help Us Save the Internet: EFF Seeks a Tech Projects Director There’s a very rare opportunity available right now for an engineering director to join EFF’s leadership team , and we’re asking our community to help us find the perfect candidate. We’re doing an open hire for our Technology Projects Director role. The role will lead a 16-person team that uses its creativity and skill to create a more secure, private, and censorship-resistant Internet. In addition, this director position joins our senior leadership team, helping EFF figure out what positions to take, what projects to invest resources in, and the strategic direction of the organization. That’s because EFF believes that technical expertise should be embedded at every level of our organizational decision-making. This role has two huge benefits: the ability to use your work to change the world and a chance to work at a place that cares deeply about the people doing the work. What do we mean by change the world? This role

Schools Are Pushing the Boundaries of Surveillance Technologies A school district in New York recently adopted facial recognition technology to monitor students, and it is now one of a growing number of schools across the country conducting mass privacy violations of kids in the name of “safety.” The invasive use of surveillance technologies in schools has grown exponentially, often without oversight or recourse for concerned students or their parents. Not only that, but schools are experimenting with the very same surveillance technologies that totalitarian governments use to surveil and abuse the rights of their citizens everywhere: online, offline, and on their phones. What does that mean? We are surveilling our students as if they were dissidents under an authoritarian regime. Schools must stop using these invasive technologies. Americans are already overwhelmingly uneasy with governments’ and corporations’ constant infringements on our personal privacy. Privacy invasions

Reform or Expire Earlier today, the House Committee on the Judiciary was scheduled to mark up the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act of 2020 , a bill meant to reform and reauthorize Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, as well as some other provisions of FISA , before they are due to expire on March 15, 2010. At the last minute, this markup was postponed without warning and without a new date, throwing the process into chaos. It is time to enact real reforms to the government’s use of national security authorities, beginning with the obvious, overdue step of prohibiting the intelligence community from using Section 215 to collect the call records of innocent Americans on an ongoing basis. Just yesterday, the New York Times reported that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board (PCLOB) found that between 2015 and 2019, the CDR program cost $100 million taxpayer dollars, but yielded only one significant investigation.  Especially when compared to the previously introduced Safeguarding

How Ring Could Really Protect Its Users: Encrypt Footage End-To-End Last week, we responded to recent changes Amazon’s surveillance doorbell company Ring made to the security and privacy of their devices. In our response, we made a number of suggestions for what Ring could do to be responsive to the privacy and security concerns of its customers and the larger community. One of our suggestions was for Ring to implement measures that require warrants to be issued directly to device owners in order for law enforcement to gain access to footage. This post will elaborate on this suggestion by introducing a technical scheme that would serve to protect both Ring's customers and the wider community by employing end-to-end encryption between doorbells and user devices. Introduction: The Cloud and User Notification In traditional surveillance systems, law enforcement had to approach the owners of footage directly in order to gain access to it. In so doing, law enforcement in

Empty Promises Won’t Save the .ORG Takeover The Internet Society’s (ISOC) November announcement that it intended to sell the Public Interest Registry (PIR, the organization that oversees the .ORG domain name registry) to a private equity firm sent shockwaves through the global NGO sector. The announcement came just after a change to the .ORG registry agreement—the agreement that outlines how the registry operator must run the domain—that gives PIR significantly more power to raise registration fees and implement new measures to censor organizations’ speech. It didn’t take long for the global NGO sector to put two and two together: take a new agreement that gives the registry owner power to hurt NGOs; combine it with a new owner whose primary obligation is to its investors, not its users; and you have a recipe for danger for nonprofits and NGOs all over the world that rely on .ORG. Since November, over 800 organizations and 24,000 individuals from all over the world have sign

EFF Files Comments Criticizing Proposed CCPA Regulations Today, EFF joined a coalition of privacy advocates in filing comments with the California Attorney General regarding its ongoing rulemaking process for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) . The CCPA was passed in 2018, and took effect on January 1, 2020. Later this year, the Attorney General (AG) will finalize regulations that dictate how exactly the law will be enforced. Last time we weighed in , we called the AG’s initial proposed regulations a “good step forward” but encouraged them to go further. Now, we are disappointed that the latest proposed regulations are, compared to the AG’s initial proposal, largely a step backwards for privacy. To start, the modified regulations improperly reduce the scope of the CCPA by trying to carve out certain identifiers (such as IP addresses) from the definition of “personal information.” This classifies potentially sensitive information as outside the law’s reach—and denies

Apple, Tell Us More About Your App Store Takedowns EFF and 10 human rights organizations called out Apple for enabling China's censorship and surveillance regime through overly broad content restrictions on the App Store in China, and for its decision to move iCloud backups and encryption keys to within China. In a letter to Philip Schiller, Apple senior vice president and App Store lead, the groups asked for more transparency about App Store takedowns and to meet with Apple executives to discuss the company's decisions and ways Apple can rectify harms against Apple users most affected by the removals. Apple removed thousands of applications in China , including news apps by Quartz and the New York Times, foreign software services like Google Earth, and network applications like Tor and other VPN apps. Last year, Apple capitulated to state pressure to remove HKmap.live , a crowdsourced map application being used by Hong Kong protestors.  According to Apple’s tran

Court Report Provides New Details About How Federal Law Enforcement in Seattle Obtain Private Information Without Warrants Federal law enforcement in Seattle sought an average of one court order a day to disclose people’s sensitive information such as calling history in the first half of 2019, according to a report released this year. The report, the first of its kind by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, shows that officials sought 182 applications and orders for electronic surveillance between January and June 2019. These types of surveillance orders do not require law enforcement to get a warrant and are directed to third parties like phone companies, email providers, and other online services to demand private and revealing information about their users Although the report does not provide specifics on the services or individuals targeted by the surveillance orders, it does detail how federal law enforcement in the region are using various forms

EFF Seeks Disclosure of Secret Financing Details Behind $1.1 Billion .ORG Sale, Asks FTC To Scrutinize Deal Transaction Saddles .ORG Registry With $360 Million In Debt San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) Education Fund today called on ICANN and private equity firm Ethos Capital to make public secret details —hidden costs, loan servicing fees, and inducements to insiders—about financing the $1.1 billion sale of the .ORG domain registry. EFF and AFR today also urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to review the leveraged buyout, which will have profound effects on millions of charities, public interest organizations, and nonprofits—and the consumers who rely on them—around the world. The deal would turn the .ORG registry—run for 17 years by the nonprofit Public Interest Registry (PIR) organization—into a for-profit enterprise controlled by a private equity firm that is partially funding the deal with a $360 m

Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers' Fortresses When Apple's App Store launched in 2008, it was widely hailed as a breakthrough in computing, a "curated experience" that would transform the chaos of locating and assessing software and replace it with a reliable one-stop-shop where every app would come pre-tested and with a trusted seal of approval. But app stores are as old as consumer computing. From the moment that timeshare computers started to appear in research institutions, college campuses, and large corporations, the systems' administrators saw the "curation" of software choices as a key part of their duties. And from the very start, users chafed against these limitations, and sought out ways to express their desire for technological self-determination. That self-determination was hard to express in the locked-down days of the mainframe, but as personal computers started to appear in university labs, and

EFF to Ninth Circuit: Border Searches of Electronic Devices Require a Warrant Although the Ninth Circuit issued a strong opinion last year in favor of digital privacy rights at the border, EFF filed an amicus brief [PDF] in a new case urging the court to go a step further. The Ninth Circuit should finally hold that the Fourth Amendment requires a probable cause warrant for border searches of electronic devices. Our brief was filed in a case brought by Haisam Elsharkawi, a U.S. citizen who attempted to board a flight at Los Angeles International Airport to Saudi Arabia to attend a Muslim religious pilgrimage. Border agents removed him from the boarding line and began questioning him. Elsharkawi repeatedly asked for a lawyer and border agents took him to a holding cell and handcuffed him to a bench. They also searched his carry-on bag and person, and he witnessed border agents manually search his two cell phones. He believes that one phone was also forensically searched. Elsharka

California’s Broadband Fund Ignores Fiber and Favors Slow DSL The California Advanced Services Fund (CASF), a program launched in 2008 to connect all Californians to high-speed Internet, was an early success. It helped build middle mile open access fiber to hard-to-serve communities and delivered high-speed access to areas that never had Internet. It funded fiber-to-the-home to public housing , ensuring low income users had the same high-speed access that wealthy neighborhoods had. And it was rapidly closing the digital divide that low income urban and rural Californians faced, due to years of neglect from incumbent Internet Service Providers (ISPs). But CASF’s success inevitably led to its undoing—by drawing attention from lobbyists for AT&T, Frontier, and Comcast, who pushed through laws that effectively shut the program down.  After all, if the government has evidence that it can effectively tackle the lack of access to high-speed Internet as an infrastructure problem and

Ring Updates Device Security and Privacy—But Ignores Larger Concerns Amazon’s surveillance doorbell company Ring has announced extra layers of security and control for users after a wave of backlash from civil liberties and cyber security organizations like EFF and Mozilla . Organizations raised major concerns over Ring’s lack of effort in protecting the data and security of users, including permitting multiple log-in attempts that allowed bad actors to take control of people’s Ring cameras; not requiring two-factor authentication ; and allowing a number of undisclosed third-party trackers to harvest data from the Ring app.  Ring’s announcement declared that the company is making two-factor authentication mandatory for users—meaning that when a person logs in to their Ring account, they will have to enter a code emailed or texted to them to verify that they are the person attempting to log in. After EFF’s report on Ring’s use of the third-party trackers, the company a