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EFF to Supreme Court: Losing Your Phone Shouldn’t Mean You Lose Your Fourth Amendment Rights You probably know the feeling: you reach for your phone only to realize it’s not where you thought it was. Total panic quickly sets in. If you’re like me (us), you don’t stop in the moment to think about why losing a phone is so scary. But the answer is clear: In addition to being an expensive gadget, all your private stuff is on there .   Now imagine that the police find your phone. Should they be able to look through all that private stuff without a warrant? What if they believe you intentionally “abandoned” it? Last week, EFF filed an amicus brief  in Small v. United States asking the Supreme Court to take on these questions . In Small, police pursued a robbery suspect in a high-speed car chase near Baltimore, ending with a dramatic crash through the gates of the NSA’s campus in Fort Meade, Maryland. The suspect left his car, and officers searched the area. They quickly found some ap

Keeping Each Other Safe When Virtually Organizing Mutual Aid Communities across the country are stepping up to self-organize mutual aid groups, uniting virtually to offer and coordinate support to those who are in need. In solidarity with the need for physical distancing, many people are organizing online using Google spreadsheets, Google forms, public posts on Twitter and Facebook, and private messages on social media platforms.   There is great beauty and power in this support, but it also puts security concerns in the spotlight: overlooked privacy settings and overbroad collection of personal data can lead to the unintended disclosure of private information that can be used to harm the very people seeking help. Though these efforts may seem like they have equal benefit in helping connect people in need to people with resources, the privacy and security implications for these mediums vary widely.   At EFF, we’ve been approached by U.S.-based mutual aid organizers to provide gui

Speaking Freely: Sandra Ordoñez Sandra (Sandy) Ordoñez is dedicated to protecting women being harassed online. Sandra is an experienced community engagement specialist, a proud NYC Latina resident of Sunset Park Brooklyn, and a recipient of Fundación Carolina’s Hispanic Leadership Award. She is also a long-time diversity and inclusion advocate, with extensive experience incubating and creating FLOSS and Internet Freedom community tools. These commitments and principles drive Sandra’s work as the co-founder and Director of the Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) at Article19. Even before launching the Internet Freedom Festival, Sandra was helping to grow and diversify the global Internet Freedom community. As their inaugural Director of Community and Outreach, Sandra led the creation of Open Technology Fund’s (OTF) Community Lab. Before her time at OTF, Sandra was Head of Communications and Outreach at OpenITP where she supported the community behind FLOSS anti-surveillance and anti-

Vallejo Must Suspend Cell-Site Simulator Purchase As Bay Area residents sheltered at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Vallejo City Council assembled via teleconference last week to vote on the purchase of one of the most controversial pieces of surveillance equipment— a cell-site simulator . What’s worse is that the city council approved the purchase in violation of state law regulating the acquisition of such technology.  Any decision to acquire this technology must happen in broad daylight, not at a time when civic engagement faces the greatest barriers in modern history due to a global pandemic. EFF has submitted a letter to the Vallejo mayor and city council asking the city to suspend the purchase and hold a fresh hearing once the COVID-19 emergency has passed and state and local officials lift the shelter-at-home restrictions.  A cell-site simulator (also referred to as an IMSI catcher or “Stingray”) pretends to act as a cell tower in order to surveil and locate cel

EFF Joins Locast Defense Team to Fight for TV Viewers’ Right to Use Free, Legal Streaming Service Giant Broadcasters Abuse Copyright Laws to Go After Nonprofit San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today joined the legal team defending Sports Fans Coalition NY, Inc. (SFCNY), the nonprofit organization that runs Locast, a free, local TV streaming service facing bogus copyright infringement claims by broadcast giants ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. Locast enables TV viewers to receive local over-the-air programming—which broadcasters must by law make available for free—using set-top boxes, smartphones, or other devices of their choice. Locast is available in 17 metro areas and has more than one million users, including people who can’t get local channels through an antenna or can't afford a pay-TV subscription. The four broadcast giants filed suit against Locast last year, a year and a half after Locast launched, claiming it violates their copyrights in programm

Government Needs Critics—Now More Than Ever In late December, only a few hundred people knew of COVID-19. Now it’s March—just 90 days later—and much of the world has had to learn about and adapt and respond to the deadly disease. Though the highly contagious virus seems impossible to ignore today, it’s in part thanks to whistleblowers and critics around the world sharing warnings and information that some governments responded to the pandemic when they did. Even dissenting voices are critical when the literal health of millions is at stake. But even now, different governments are handling the crisis in a spectrum of ways : within the U.S., individual states have taken extraordinarily diverse approaches to controlling its spread, some nearly dismissing it, others implementing strict quarantine measures. And rather than highlighting the need for increased transparency, some governments are using this as an opportunity to curb freedom of the press , limiting what can

EFF Asks California AG to Close Loopholes, Respect "Do Not Track" With Regulations Today, EFF once again joined a coalition of privacy advocates filing comments with the California Attorney General (AG) on the latest proposed regulations for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) . The CCPA was passed in June 2018 and took effect on January 1, 2020. Later this year, the AG will finalize regulations that dictate how exactly the law will be enforced. While the first set of proposed regulations were (as we wrote at the time) a “good step forward” that could have gone further, the first revision to those regulations—published earlier this year—was largely a step backwards for privacy . Two weeks ago, the AG released a second set of revisions to the draft regulations, available here . [.pdf] With the enforcement deadline approaching, the public is running out of chances to weigh in on the rulemaking process. Some of the worst features of the regulations have been cut

Members of Congress Once Again Urge ICANN to Save Dot Org As the proposed sale of the .ORG domain registry to private equity firm Ethos Capital plays out, we see more and more why this sale was rushed through: the longer we have to look at it, the more questions we all have, and the fewer answers we get. For the second time, some of the people questioning the wisdom of this sale are members of the U.S. Congress. On March 18, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, Richard Blumenthal, Edward Markey, and Representative Anna Eshoo sent a new letter [.pdf]   to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), urging, for the second time, that ICANN reject the “private equity takeover of the .ORG registry.” The members of Congress pointed out that their previous questions have still not gotten satisfactory answers from ICANN, Public Interest Registry (PIR, the currently-a-nonprofit entity that runs .ORG that will be converted to a for-profit if this sale goes forward), a

Now More Than Ever, Prisoners Should Have Some Access to Social Media COVID-19 has trapped many of us in our homes, isolating us from family and friends and limiting our movements. But there are few people who feel the isolating impacts of COVID-19 more acutely than those who are actually incarcerated­ in jails and prisons across the country. As Jerry Metcalf, an inmate in Michigan, wrote for the Marshall Project’s “ Life on the Inside ” series: For those of you reading this who feel trapped or are going stir-crazy due to your coronavirus-induced confinement, the best advice I can give you—as someone used to suffering in long-term confinement—is to take a pause, inhale a few deep breaths, then look around at all the things you have to be grateful for. Metcalf’s is an important perspective to have, but, unfortunately, it is increasingly difficult to hear from inmates like him. That's because prison systems are making it harder for the public to hear from incarcerated people

EFF, ACLU & CDT Argue Five Months of Warrantless Covert 24/7 Video Surveillance Violates Fourth Amendment Should the fact that your neighbors can see the outside of your house mean the police can use a camera to record everything that happens there for more than five months? We don’t think so either. That’s why we joined ACLU, ACLU of Massachusetts, and the Center for Democracy & Technology in filing an amicus brief last week in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court arguing the Fourth Amendment and Massachusetts’s state equivalent protect us from warrantless video surveillance of our homes. In Commonwealth v. Mora , Massachusetts State Police secretly installed several cameras high up on utility poles in front of Nelson Mora and Randy Suarez’s homes. These “pole cameras” allowed officers to watch video feeds of the two homes (and by extension everyone going in and out of the homes) in real time, remotely control angle and zoom functions, and zoom in close enough to re

EFF Joins Coalition Urging Judicial Transparency During the COVID-19 Emergency EFF and a number of other organizations that advocate for government transparency have signed onto a letter written by the First Amendment Coalition asking the California state judiciary to ensure public access to court proceedings and records. Many clerk’s offices are restricting entry and many operations of the state court system have moved online in direct response to actions taken by Gov. Gavin Newsom, including the Statewide Order of March 23, 2020, which in effect restricted physical access to and the activities of California’s courts. In the letter, addressed to Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, coalition groups urge that while extraordinary measures are needed in the time of a public health emergency: “we need to recognize that important civil liberties and constitutional rights should not be unduly restricted. While courts are closing buildings, halting proceedings and holding some hearing

The Feds Can Stop Patent Trolls from Endangering COVID-19 Testing and Treatment It’s unthinkable that bad actors could take advantage of patent law and keep the public from getting access to COVID-19 tests and treatment, but they can and will—it already happened this month. Fortunately, an often-overlooked section of U.S. patent law allows the government to do something about it. Patent troll Labrador Diagnostics LLC recently used a portfolio of old patents to sue a company that makes and distributed COVID-19 tests . The story gets weirder: those patents were originally issued to Theranos, the notoriously fraudulent blood-testing company that closed up shop in 2018. It’s a particularly outrageous example of an all-too-common story: a company fails, yet its patents live on as fodder for legal bullying against practicing companies in the same field. The Labrador Diagnostics case is a clear example of a time when the incentives don’t line up right: in this case, exclusivity is stand