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Coin Center’s Report Explores Privacy Coins, Decentralized Exchanges, and the First Amendment Coin Center’s Peter Van Valkenburgh published a report exploring the potential Constitutional concerns should aggressive regulators attempt to crack down on the coders developing ideas for cryptocurrencies and decentralized exchanges. For long-time readers of the EFF blog, some of these ideas will seem familiar. EFF has been asserting that publishing code for cryptocurrency is a form of protected speech since 2014 , when we argued to the New York State Department of Financial Services that “government action triggers First Amendment protections when it regulates computer programs such as digital currency protocols—a fact that is especially true given the open source nature of these programs, which allows users to view, share, and develop ideas based upon the code itself.” We also sent a stern letter to the SEC in February over their action against a decentralized exchange, reminding...

Alavaro Bedoya Highlights the Critical Connection between Civil Liberties and Civil Rights Earlier this month, Georgetown Law Professor Alvaro Bedoya delivered the U.S. Senator Dennis Chavez Memorial Lecture in Law & Civil Rights at The University of New Mexico School of Law, titled “ Privacy and Civil Rights in the Age of Facebook, ICE, and the NSA .” His remarks neatly encapsulated many of the reasons why we at EFF work to challenge state surveillance. Put simply, privacy is a public value that enables freedom of expression. Without it, our democracy stands at risk, as do communities that have long confronted bias and discrimination. Professor Bedoya’s comments trace the historical arc of the resistance to the McCarthy era in Congress, which he suggests started with the support of free speech shown by Senator Dennis Chavez (D-NM) in the face of McCarthy’s crackdown on freedom of expression. The very first U.S.-born Latino member of the Senate, Chavez argued in defense of di...