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Encrypting DNS: Year in Review 2019 This February, with Venezuela rocked by economic collapse and a presidential succession crisis, an opposition party put out a call for volunteers. Juan Guaidó, a political leader with the Popular Will party, called on supporters to register at the site “Volunteers for Venezuela”. Guaidó announced that the call was successful , with over 100,000 supporters submitting their contact information to the site. But according to researchers with Venezuela Inteligente , CrowdStrike , and Kaspersky Lab , bad actors used DNS response injection to route these visitors to a fake version of the site. The fake version of the site looked identical to the real one, but researchers believe that the information collected was sent to the attackers instead of to Guaidó’s party. On February 17th, the identities of the activists were leaked by a media outlet supporting Guaidó’s rival Nicolás Maduro, which the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab be...

Courts Grapple with a Sea Change in Fourth Amendment Law After Carpenter v US: Year in Review 2019 Last year, the Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion in a case we’ve written about a lot, called Carpenter v. United States , ruling that the Fourth Amendment protects data generated by our phones called historical cell-site location information or CSLI. The Court recognized that CSLI creates a “detailed chronicle of a person’s physical presence compiled every day, every moment over years.” As a result, police must now get a warrant to access it.   In the year and a half since the Supreme Court’s ruling, Carpenter has been cited in more than 450 criminal and civil cases across the country. Carpenter caused a sea change in Fourth Amendment law because it expressly recognized that, under the right circumstances, we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in information we share with third parties and in our actions while we’re in public. The question courts began to grapp...

From Encrypting the Web to Encrypting the Net: 2018 Year in Review We saw 2017 tip the scales for HTTPS . In 2018, web encryption continues to improve. EFF has begun to shift its focus towards email security, and the security community is shifting its focus towards further hardening TLS, the protocol that drives encryption on the Internet. By default, all Internet traffic is unencrypted and subject to tampering, including HTTP. A technology called TLS (Transport Layer Security) can provide authenticated encryption and message integrity so no one can mess with or listen in on your Internet traffic. Since 2010 , EFF has been actively campaigning to encrypt the entire web —that is, for websites to adopt HTTPS, which is TLS added to HTTP. Due to the success we’ve seen on web, EFF is zooming out and tracking encryption of the entire Internet, starting with email. Let’s take a closer look at what has happened this year in encrypting not just the web, but the entire Internet! Contin...

Congress Censors the Internet, But EFF Continues to Fight FOSTA: 2018 in Review EFF fought FOSTA in 2018. We fought the bill in Congress and, when the president signed it into law, immediately set our sights on challenging it in court. The Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865 ) was ostensibly passed to fight sex trafficking. The reality, however, is that the law makes sex trafficking victims less safe while also criminalizing the protected speech of those who advocate for, and provide resources to, adult consensual sex workers. It’s the broadest Internet censorship law in more than two decades . Numerous free speech organizations raised concerns about the bill. So did a litany of sex trafficking experts, who pointed out that it would directly put trafficking victims in more danger. From the time that FOSTA was introduced in Congress (along with its sibling bill SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act), tens of thousands of you wrot...

The Worst Law in Technology Strikes Again: 2017 in Review The latest on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ? It’s still terrible. And this year, the detrimental impacts of the notoriously vague and outdated criminal computer crime statute showed themselves loud and clear. The statute lies at the heart of the Equifax breach, which might have been averted if our laws didn’t criminalize security research. And it’s at the center of a court case pending in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, hiQ v. LinkedIn , which threatens a hallmark of today’s Internet: free and open access to publicly available information. At EFF, we’ve spent 2017 working to make sure that courts and policy makers understand the role the CFAA has played in undermining security research, and that the Ninth Circuit rejects LinkedIn’s attempt to transform a criminal law meant to target serious computer break-ins into a tool for enforcing corporate computer use policies. We’ve also continued our work to protect programm...

New Places, New Faces in Patents: 2017 in Review This year was once again active in terms of patent law and policy. Throughout it all, EFF worked to protect end user and innovator rights. We pushed for a rule that would end the Eastern District of Texas’ unwarranted dominance as a forum for patent litigation. We also defended processes at the Patent Office that give it the opportunity to correct mistakes (many, many mistakes) made in issuing patents. And we fought to prevent new patent owner tactics that would increase consumer costs. New Places First, because of recent developments both at the Supreme Court and at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, this year we finally saw a shift away from the dominance of the Eastern District of Texas as the primary forum for patent litigation. The Supreme Court issued its highly anticipated decision in TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods , finding that patent cases are subject to a special statute when determining where they can be f...