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Certbot Usability Case Study: Making It Easier To Get HTTPS Certificates The movement to encrypt the web has reached milestone after milestone in recent years as major platforms and small websites alike have made the shift from insecure HTTP to more secure HTTPS. Let’s Encrypt and EFF’s Certbot have changed the game here, making what was once an expensive, technically demanding process into an easy and affordable task for webmasters across a range of resource and skill levels. Today we’re releasing a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to make a tool like Certbot easy to use. This case study walks readers through our designers’ and developers’ process for redesigning our interactive Certbot website: our methods, the challenges of doing user research on a tight budget, and strategies to make the most of the resources available to your team. We hope this case study can serve as a resource for other scrappy groups of designers and developers working to improve their o...

Hearing Thursday: EFF Urges Appeals Court to Curb Police Access to ALPR Databases License-Plate Tracking Technology Reveals Sensitive Location Information San Francisco – On Thursday, Oct. 23, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will urge the California Court of Appeal to reverse a lower court and hold that law enforcement use of data gathered from automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems is a search that requires a warrant. ALPRs are computer-controlled camera systems—generally mounted on vehicles or on fixed objects such as light poles—that automatically capture images of every license plate that comes into view. Used by many police agencies and other organizations across the country, ALPR systems collect and store data on every vehicle they encounter, regardless of whether individual drivers are suspected of criminal activity. This data is stored in massive databases that are accessible to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, even if agencies do no...

San Diego’s Face Recognition Program and Collaboration with ICE Needs to Stop Law enforcement officials across San Diego County, California have run more than 65,500 face recognition scans over the last three years, including thousands of queries by federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the U.S. Marshals. According to records obtained by EFF, the Tactical Identification System (TACIDS) has put 1,309 mobile face-recognition cameras—generally smart phones and tablets—in the hands of investigators, with very little oversight over how the technology is used.  And it’s time for it to stop. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed A.B. 1215 , a new law that creates a three-year moratorium on biometric surveillance, including face recognition, connected to cameras carried by law enforcement officers. It goes into effect starting Jan. 1, 2020. Now EFF has sent a letter to the body that oversees San Diego’s face recognition pro...

The House Votes in Favor of Disastrous Copyright Bill It’s Not Too Late: The Senate Can Still Stop the CASE Act The House of Representatives has just voted in favor of the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act (CASE Act) by 410-6 (with 16 members not voting), moving forward a bill that Congress has had no hearings and no debates on so far this session. That means that there has been no public consideration of the serious harm the bill could do to regular Internet users and their expression online. The CASE Act creates a new body in the Copyright Office which will receive copyright complaints, notify the person being sued, and then decide if money is owed and how much. This new Copyright Claims Board will be able to fine people up to $30,000 per proceeding. Worse, if you get one of these notices (maybe an email, maybe a letter—the law actually does not specify) and accidentally ignore it, you’re on the hook for the money with a very limited ability to appeal. $30...

EFF and Partners Urge U.S. Lawmakers to Support New DoH Protocol for a More Secure Internet DoH Can Prevent Censorship and ISP Tracking by Encrypting Users’ Web Browsing San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today called on Congress to support implementation of an Internet protocol that encrypts web traffic, a critical tool that will lead to dramatic improvements in user privacy and help impede the ability of governments to track and censor people. EFF, joined by Consumer Reports and National Consumers League, said in a letter today to 12 members of Congress that the protocol, DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), is a major step in enabling basic human rights—free speech and privacy—to become a natural and integral part of the Internet ecosystem. “We see DoH as an important trend toward the use of encryption on the Internet—remedying a situation in which sensitive user data are exposed to an enormous range of eavesdroppers,” the letter says. It was sent to the chairs and...

Apple’s Split Brain: Building Levers for Improved Security or Content Censorship? For many years, Chinese users of Apple devices have had a very different experience from non-Chinese users. Chinese users can’t type or see the Taiwanese flag emoji (which has even caused severe bugs in the past); iCloud backups and encryption keys for Chinese users are stored locally within China; content services like iTunes Movies and iBooks are either not available or asked to step carefully around damaging China’s image; and the “curated” App Store’s selection criteria is markedly different , forbidding tools like VPNs which are prevalent in the rest of the world. As the Chinese mainland government and Hong Kong population struggle over the extent to which their shared “one country, two systems” is applied , these differences have started to show in the special administrative region too. Last week, as part of an iOS update, Apple extended the Taiwanese flag emoji ban to Hong Kong and...

EFF to Amazon and Shaq: Stop Pushing Police Partnerships with Doorbell Camera Company EFF Urges Cancellation of Police Conference Event with Ring Spokesperson Shaquille O’Neal Chicago – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging Amazon, along with basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, to cancel an event promoting Ring home-surveillance cameras at a police chiefs’ conference in Chicago later this month. EFF and many other civil liberties and privacy organizations are growing increasingly concerned about privacy-invasive partnerships between Ring and law enforcement agencies across the country, which threaten the privacy of all of us as we walk and drive around our communities. Ring, a subsidiary of Amazon, sells networked cameras—often bundled with doorbells or lighting—that record video when they register movement and then send notifications to users’ cell phones. While Ring pitches the technology as a way to make your home safer, more than 500 police departments across...