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Jewel v. NSA: On to the Ninth Circuit: 2019 Year in Review Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s landmark case challenging NSA’s mass spying moved forward in 2019, setting up a crucial decision for the Ninth Circuit in 2020.  We’ve pursued this case for over a decade because we believe that mass surveillance, like all general search and seizure schemes, is both illegal and unconstitutional.  The case arises from general seizures and searches conducted through three NSA surveillance programs: the NSA’s current Upstream tapping of the Internet backbone, its past actions collecting Internet metadata and its discontinued mass telephone records collection, purportedly authorized by section 215 of the Patriot Act. Congress just shamefully kicked debate on reauthorization of section 215 until March, 2020, even though it was stopped in 2018 after concerns of massive overcollection by the secret FISA Court and has never helped catch a terrorist. In 2019, we had bad news and good news on the liti...

The Year in Corporate Speech Controls Content moderation and its effects remained at the forefront of the public imagination in 2019, with stories of takedowns from Sweden to Syria and everywhere in between gaining media attention. Inconsistent and unfair moderation from companies—often under great pressure from governments and other external actors—is still a serious problem, but one that EFF and our many allies are actively working to shine a light on, and improve. To that end, we were proud to see so many companies respond favorably to our Who Has Your Back? demands to provide more transparency to users. This year, we ranked companies based on six criteria, which only one company—Reddit—met in full. Still, we were particularly pleased that twelve companies chose to endorse the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation , and hope that their support propels them to implementation. Another key development this year came from Facebook, ...

The Year of the GDPR: 2018’s Most Famous Privacy Regulation in Review To the extent that 260-page regulations can ever be said to be “famous,” Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) certainly had its moment in limelight in 2018. When it came into force on May 25, it was heralded by a flurry of emails from tech companies, desperate to re-establish their absolutely bona-fide relationships with your email address before the regulations’ stricter rules around user consent came into force. The barely-concealed panic in some corners led to editorials , memes , and even a meditation app that marketed itself (presumably in compliance with the GDPR) by offering to lull its users to sleep with spoken excerpts from the law. Did the GDPR live up to the year’s hype, good or bad? As Premier Zhou Enlai didn’t quite say about the French Revolution, it’s too early to say. There are plenty of ways that the GDPR can help with defending privacy online , but the real proof of the GDPR’...

Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review This wasn’t a great year for those of us whose job it is to defend the use of encryption. In the United States, we heard law enforcement officials go on about the same “ going dark ” problem they’ve been citing since the late 90s, but even after all these years, they still can’t get basic facts straight. The National Academy of Sciences was entirely (and unsurprisingly) unhelpful. And in the courts, there was at least some action surrounding encryption, but we don’t know exactly what. The real movement happened on the other side of the Pacific, so we’ll start there.  The Land Down Under—Or the Upside Down? Long-time readers of this blog will know Australia’s fraught history with attempts to regulate encryption…and math. In mid-2017, then- Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull  said: “The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.” He made this laughable claim ...

Court Challenges to NSA Surveillance: 2017 in Review One of the government’s most powerful surveillance tools is scheduled to sunset in less than three weeks, and, for months, EFF has fought multiple legislative attempts to either extend or expand the NSA’s spying powers—warning the public, Representatives, and Senators about circling bills that threaten Americans’ privacy. But the frenetic, deadline-pressure environment on Capitol Hill betrays the slow, years-long progress that EFF has made elsewhere: the courts. 2017 was a year for slow, procedural breakthroughs. Here is an update on the lawsuits that EFF and other organizations have against broad NSA surveillance powers. Jewel v. NSA EFF began 2017 with significant leverage in our signature lawsuit against NSA surveillance, Jewel v. NSA . The year prior, U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White in Oakland, California, ordered the U.S. government to comply with EFF’s “discovery” requests—which are inquiries for evidence when l...

The Supreme Court Finally Takes on Law Enforcement Access to Cell Phone Location Data: 2017 in Review Protecting the highly personal location data stored on or generated by digital devices is one of the 21st century’s most important privacy issues. In 2017, the Supreme Court finally took on the question of how law enforcement can get ahold of this sensitive information. Whenever you use a cell phone, whether to make calls, send or receive texts, or browse the Internet, your phone automatically generates “cell site location information” (CSLI) through its interactions with cell towers. This means that cell providers like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have records of everywhere your phone has been, going back months and even years. And since almost everyone has a cell phone, cell providers have these records for nearly everyone. The government has long argued that it doesn’t need a warrant to obtain CSLI from cell providers because of two 1970’s Supreme Court cases, Smith v. Mary...