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COVID-19 and Technology: Commonly Used Terms New technical proposals to track, contain, and fight COVID-19 are coming out nearly every day, and the distinction between public health strategies, technical approaches, and other terms can be confusing. On this page we attempt to define and disambiguate some of the most commonly used terms. Bookmark this glossary—we intend to update it with new terms and definitions regularly. For more information on COVID-19 and protecting your rights, as well as general information on technology, surveillance, and the pandemic, visit our collection of COVID-19-related writing . Contact tracing: This is the long-standing public health process of identifying who an infected person may have come into contact with while they were contagious. In traditional or manual contact tracing , healthcare workers interview an infected individual to learn about their movements and people with whom they have been in close contact. Healthcare workers then reach

The Constitution Does Not Allow Courts to Silence Criticism of Local Police Departments EFF has filed an amicus brief urging the Tennessee Supreme Court to overturn a court order that would otherwise ban a victim from disclosing that she was subject to domestic violence or from speaking out about the police department’s handling of the investigation. The court order was issued under a Tennessee law that authorizes preliminary injunctions against speech in divorce cases. Importantly, the order banned the statement without any judicial determination that the allegations were false or in any way legally actionable. Pamela Stark is in the midst of a divorce from her husband, Memphis Police Officer Joe Stark. The court prohibited her from making any public allegations against her husband on social media. Despite this, Pamela Stark then shared a Facebook post criticizing the Memphis Police Department’s investigation into her domestic violence allegations against Joe Stark, asking “who

Frontier’s Bankruptcy Reveals Why Big ISPs Choose to Deny Fiber to So Much of America Even before it announced that it would seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Frontier had a well-deserved reputation for mismanagement and abusive conduct. In an industry that routinely enrages its customers, Frontier was the literal poster-child for underinvestment and neglect , an industry leader in outages and poor quality of service, and the inventor of the industry's most outrageous and absurd billing practices . As Frontier’s bankruptcy has shown, there was no good reason they—and all old big Internet service providers—couldn’t provide blazing-fast fiber on par with services in South Korea and Japan. Frontier's bankruptcy announcement forced the company to explain in great detail its finances, past investment decisions, and ultimately why it has refused to upgrade so many of its DSL connections to fiber to the home. This gives us a window into why ISPs like Frontier—large, dominant, with

As Coronavirus Sweeps Through Jails and Prisons, Officials Crack Down on Inmate Speech Jails and prisons now account for many of the largest clusters of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States. Two prisons in Ohio now have more than 1,500 cases each; nearly a thousand cases are connected to the Cook County jail in Chicago; and a prison in Arkansas has recorded nearly 700 cases. Prisons are, in the words of one inmate, a “ death trap .”   As the virus continues to sweep across the country, and as jails and prisons seal themselves off from society (even more than usual), incarcerated people must be allowed to share their stories—of life on the inside during a pandemic, to raise awareness about or to protest conditions, or just simply to connect with friends and family. Many states have draconian rules that stand in the way of that: these rules unduly limit prisoners’ ability to express themselves and share their stories through the Internet. Nearly a month ago , we called

The Dangers of COVID-19 Surveillance Proposals to the Future of Protest Many of the new surveillance powers now sought by the government to address the COVID-19 crisis would harm our First Amendment rights for years to come. People will be chilled and deterred from speaking out, protesting in public places, and associating with like-minded advocates if they fear scrutiny from cameras, drones, face recognition, thermal imaging, and location trackers. It is all too easy for governments to redeploy the infrastructure of surveillance from pandemic containment to political spying. It won't be easy to get the government to suspend its newly acquired tech and surveillance powers. When this wave of the public health emergency is over and it becomes safe for most people to leave their homes, they may find a world with even more political debate than when they left it. A likely global recession, a new election season, and re-energized social movements will provide an overwhelming incent

The “Inventor Rights Act” is an Attack on True Invention Certain patent owners just can’t get enough of the monopoly power patents bestow. That’s why they keep trying to make it easier to get and sue over patents, despite Supreme Court rulings that point in the opposite direction. Their latest effort, the misleadingly-named “Inventors Rights Act,” also known as H.R. 5478 , hijacks the positive associations many of us have with “inventors” to radically tilt the patent system in favor of patent owners, including patent trolls. Patent trolls make money by threatening people over everyday activities, not by inventing, building, or selling anything of value. At EFF, we’ve been tracking and fighting them for years . Over the past two decades, the Patent Office has allowed tens of thousands of vaguely-worded software patents to proliferate. Patent trolls can use those patents for up to twenty years to sue regular people who use software for everyday activities—like making a picture me

Who’s A Patent Troll, and Who’s An Inventor? Two Congressmen recently introduced a bill that would create a special type of patent called an “Inventor-Owned Patent.” Having classified a group of “inventors,” the Inventor Rights Act ( H.R. 5478 ) goes on to give them a long list of special privileges that will help them sue other people for patent infringement. If the bill passes, patent owners whom the government deems “inventors” will be able to exploit a big list of legal loopholes—including the ability to shut down product lines, avoid Patent Office reviews, and blow off important venue reforms established by recent Supreme Court rulings. Then, those who have “inventor-owned patents” will be able to return to venues that have historically been widely abused by patent owners, such as the Eastern District of Texas. We’ll take a closer look at the Inventor Rights Act in a subsequent blog post, but first we need to answer a more basic question. Are most patent owners “inventors,” w

Teleconference About .ORG Sale: Thursday, April 30, 9 am ET/12 pm PT: EFF and Partners Discuss Future of .ORG as ICANN Decision Nears Nonprofits Oppose Sale, Which Is Under Scrutiny by State Attorneys General San Francisco—The sale of the .ORG domain registry to private equity firm Ethos Capital threatens to bring censorship and higher operating costs to nonprofit organizations and international NGOs working in the public interest around the globe. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) may decide as early as April 30 whether the transaction can move forward. Experts at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Access Now , NTEN, and Human Rights Watch will brief the media about the overwhelming opposition to the transaction within the nonprofit world, Ethos Capital’s lack of transparency and sham promises of stakeholder involvement, and what happens after ICANN votes. The teleconference is Thursday, April 30, at 9 am ET/12 pm PT. To join the brief

Apple and Google’s COVID-19 Exposure Notification API: Questions and Answers Apple and Google are undertaking an unprecedented team effort to build a system for Androids and iPhones to interoperate in the name of technology-assisted COVID-19 contact tracing. The companies’ plan is part of a torrent of proposals to use Bluetooth signal strength to enhance manual contact tracing with proximity-based mobile apps . As Apple and Google are an effective duopoly in the mobile operating system space, their plan carries special weight. Apple and Google’s tech would be largely decentralized, keeping most of the data on users’ phones and away from central databases. This kind of app has some unavoidable privacy tradeoffs, as we’ll discuss below, and Apple and Google could do more to prevent privacy leaks. Still, their model is engineered to reduce the privacy risks of Bluetooth proximity tracking, and it’s preferable to other strategies that depend on a central server. Proximity trackin

Supreme Court Affirms That No One Owns the Law In a major victory for open government and fundamental due process, the Supreme Court ruled today that the annotations in a state’s official legal code—summaries of court decisions and other sources that explain the state’s laws—cannot be copyrighted. That is, that there cannot be a better-explained version of the law available only to those who can afford to pay for it. The law, in any form, must be accessible to all. “Officials empowered to speak with the force of law,” wrote the Court [pdf] , “cannot be the authors of—and therefore cannot copyright—the works they create in the course of their official duties.” This decision means the state of Georgia will not be able to stop the open government nonprofit Public.Resource.Org, or any other member of the public, from copying, sharing, speaking, or quoting the state’s official code. Public Resource, run by Carl Malamud, works to make government documents, especially legal materials, a

Not a Hoax: The Very Real Threat of Political 'Deepfakes' Laws “The coronavirus, this is their new hoax.” That’s what Donald Trump says—or at least appears to say—in a new political ad airing in states across the country. The ad, created by a Democratic super PAC, strings together audio from various Trump speeches discussing the coronavirus. The spliced-together audio plays while a graph, representing the number of coronavirus cases in the U.S., grows exponentially in the background. The ad ends with audio and video of Trump declaring, “No, I don’t take responsibility at all.”      According to the Trump campaign, the sequence at the beginning of the ad—the “hoax” part— is “false, misleading, and deceptive,” because the audio used in the ad was edited to “fraudulently and maliciously imply” that Trump called the coronavirus a “hoax.” The audio for that snippet was apparently taken from a single speech, given at a February rally in South Carolina; but several sentences—o

Hearing Tuesday: EFF, ACLU, and Cybersecurity Expert Ask Court to Unseal Ruling Denying DOJ Effort to Break Encryption Government Sought Facebook Messenger Voice Calls Seattle, Washington—On Tuesday, April 28, at 9 am, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Stanford cybersecurity scholar Riana Pfefferkorn will ask a federal appeals court to embrace the public’s First Amendment right to access judicial records and unseal a lower court’s ruling denying a government effort to force Facebook to break the encryption of its Messenger service. Media widely reported in 2018 that a federal court in Fresno, California, denied a  government request that would have required Facebook to compromise the security and privacy promised to users of its Messenger application. But the court’s order and details about the legal dispute have been kept secret, preventing people from learning about how DOJ sought to break Facebook’s encryption, and why

Judge Dismisses Twitter’s Lawsuit Over Its Rights to Publish Information About Government Surveillance Orders A federal judge dismissed Twitter’s long-pending lawsuit last week over its right to share information about secret government surveillance orders for its users’ information. We hope that Twitter will continue its fight for transparency by appealing this decision. Background: The Government’s Limits on National Security Transparency Using surveillance authorities such as national security letters (NSLs) and FISA court orders, the government can not only demand that companies turn over information about their customers’ accounts, but can also gag the company from disclosing any information about the demand—even the fact that the company received it. Thanks to public pressure in the wake of the 2013 Snowden revelations, companies began to seek more freedom to discuss these national security orders and to publish regular transparency reports. In January 2014, the governme