Top Features
EFF staff responds to the latest news about Twitter with suggestions on how to move towards more privacy, safety, and control for users. In order to treat free speech as anything more than a slogan, social media platforms need to take user privacy and control seriously, and take their hands off user data. Without an interoperability principle and end-to-end encryption, hot air about free speech is just a dead letter.
EFF Updates
We're piloting an audio version of EFFector's Newsletter. We hope you enjoy it!
This post details the steps involved to configure an Android device to audit the traffic of any app installed on it, requiring no other device to be physically present. We offer technical guidance for Android users hoping to secure their privacy.
Maryland's legislature has unanimously passed a bill that will require law enforcement agencies to learn, as part of their standard training, to recognize the common tactics of electronic surveillance and the laws around such activities. This victory will help provide survivors of domestic abuse, intimate partner violence, and other electronic stalking with much-needed support.
On this episode of How to Fix the Internet, Adam Savage—the maker extraordinaire best known from television shows MythBusters and Savage Builds—joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien to talk about the right to repair, tinker, and innovate. He says a fear-based approach to invention, in which everyone thinks secrecy is the path to a big payday, is exhausting and counterproductive. Savage challenges us to create a world in which we incrementally keep building on each others’ work, and keep making things better through collaboration.
After a series of volleys in the courts, a federal court has once again declared that the scraping of public websites is legal. The question at hand was whether access to a public website can ever be “without authorization” under the CFAA. The court noted that “access without authorization” implies a baseline requirement of authorization, and public websites like LinkedIn profiles do not require any permission to begin with. Therefore access to public information online is unlikely to be a violation of the law.
While Google is fighting court orders in Brazil that are demanding wide-ranging keyword search dragnets, we can’t be too quick to offer the company credit. That’s because it continues to collaborate with U.S. law enforcement in fishing expeditions. We aren’t aware of any cases in which Google has pushed back against keyword search warrants in the U.S. In fact, we have no idea how many keyword warrants Google receives or how it responds to them at all, because Google has kept that information entirely secret.
Announcements
EFF is pleased to let Bay Area residents know that we will be holding our annual trivia night in-person in San Francisco on May 5. This event will not be available online.
Join Alexis Hancock, Director of Engineering on Certbot at EFF, for a virtual presentation on using password managers and multi-factor authentication to keep your accounts secure. This will be a virtual event, so everyone’s invited to join at 11 am PT on Friday, May 13.
EFF is excited to be a part of this year’s HOPE conference! We’ll be in the expo hall and have various talks, so if you’re interested in attending, be sure to register soon. HOPE is donating 10 percent of all ticket sales to EFF through Friday, May 6, 2022!
Job Openings
EFF is looking for a full-time Associate Director of Institutional Support to join our Development team to develop and prospect institutional funders, organizational members, and donors. This includes traditional philanthropic foundations, corporations, and other institutional funders.
MiniLinks
MIT’s Tech Review has a new series around the role of AI in further dispossessing marginalized communities.
Tennessee’s state legislature is floating a bill to preempt municipal authorities from creating oversight over, or restricting law enforcement technology.
The USPS inspector general issued a report showing abuse of their social media surveillance program (featuring Clearview AI!), including searches for “protest” with no nexus to the Post Office.
Consumer Reports writes on their concerns about the audio recording of conversations up to 25 feet away by increasingly popular doorbell cameras.
Media Matters looks at the press response to the bank-financed Elon Musk purchase of parts of Twitter to see if they’re covering the news, or just offering up press relations and clickbait.
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