Eff Issues Deck

EFF believes that individuals in the disabled community, as those best placed to determine their own needs, should be free to transform copyrighted works into a form most suitable for their use, as well as to innovate new presentation forms which they can share with other members of the community

A technology that can be used to pinpoint the physical location of whatever item the tags are embedded in. While RFIDs are a convenient way to track items, they are also a convenient way to do something far less benign: track people and their activities through their belongings.

Unfortunately, information stored with a third-party is given much weaker legal protection than that on your own computer. It can be all too easy for the government or individual litigants to get access to your search history and connect it with your identity.

Here are some of the ways EFF is working to protect your privacy as the use of social networks grows:
EFF has gone toe-to-toe with the government to uncover hidden details about how they use social networking sites for investigations, data collection, and surveillance.
EFF works to expose issues with social networks as soon as they emerge, from the leaking of information to advertisers or the policies of the sites themselves.
EFF helps savvy users better understand how to strengthen their privacy online.

Bloggers can be journalists (and journalists can be bloggers)
Bloggers are entitled to free speech
Bloggers have the right to political speech
Bloggers have the right to stay anonymous.
Bloggers have freedom from liability for hosting speech the same way other web hosts do.

Digital video promises a high quality picture and fresh crop of innovative technologies that will give you new options for manipulating video.

EFF's Coders' Rights Project protects programmers and developers engaged in cutting-edge exploration of technology in our world.

Instead of using their true names to communicate, these people choose to speak using pseudonyms (assumed names) or anonymously (no name at all).

EFF has been asked to serve as a friend of the court in several of these applications, successfully showing judges how and why the government's arguments are baseless

EFF is working with lawmakers to close legal loopholes that enable unscrupulous tracking, with corporations to teach them how to manage data responsibly, and with the media to educate the public about corporate behavior and user rights.

These cases all involve defending people's right to remain anonymous when they post comments on message boards, as well as making sure that anonymous speakers' due process rights are respected. These cases, plus more, are also described at the Cyberslapp.org website http://www.cyberslapp.org/, a joint project of Public Citizen, EFF, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Whether you are quoting someone on your blog, inserting clips of CNN into your own video news report, or using a song sample in a musical parody, your free speech often depends on incorporating and referencing other people's creations as part of your own. The courts call this "fair use", and strong legal precedents exist to protect the limited use of copyrighted material in your work when you do so for expressive purposes.

Today, you can use any device you like with your television: VCR, TiVo, DVD recorder, home theater receiver, or a PC combining these functions and more. But if the broadcast flag mandate is passed, Hollywood and federal bureaucrats will get a veto over innovative devices and legitimate uses of recorded programming.

Satellite radio, like XM and Sirius, is already at your fingertips, and HD Radio may soon be ubiquitous. If innovators are allowed to build them, so too will devices that time-shift and space-shift radio for you—imagine something like a TiVo for radio. New digital radio technologies should set off a revolution in other technologies that help you get more from your radio—recording music off the radio, moving it to a portable player, streaming it to your other devices online, and much more

Major entertainment companies are using "digital rights management," or DRM (aka content or copy protection), to lock up your digital media. These DRM technologies do nothing to stop copyright pirates, but instead end up interfering with fans' lawful use of music, movies, and other copyrighted works. DRM can prevent you from making back ups of your DVDs and music downloaded from online stores, recording your favorite TV programs, using the portable media player of your choice, remixing clips of movies into your own home movies, and much more.

Anyone who watched John Hodgman's famous Daily Show rant knows what Net Neutrality means as an abstract idea. But what will it mean when it makes the transformation from idealistic principle into real-world regulations? 2010 will be the year we start to find out, as the Federal Communications Commission begins a Net Neutrality rulemaking process.

While patent rights were designed to promote investment, public disclosure, and most importantly, useful innovation, the patent system is often abused. In the past decade, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has been inundated with applications for so-called "inventions" that are neither innovative nor useful. When bogus patent applications are granted, they actually discourage progress and impede the growth of a public domain of knowledge.

Computer security is undeniably important, and as new vulnerabilities are discovered and exploited, the perceived need for new security solutions grows. "Trusted computing" initiatives propose to solve some of today's security problems through hardware changes to the personal computer. Changing hardware design isn't inherently suspicious, but the leading trusted computing proposals have a high cost: they provide security to users while giving third parties the power to enforce policies on users' computers against the users' wishes -- they let others pressure you to hand some control over your PC to someone else. This is a "feature" ready-made for abuse by software authors who want to anticompetitively choke off rival software.

Since they were enacted in 1998, the "anti-circumvention" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") have not been used as Congress envisioned. Congress meant to stop copyright pirates from defeating DRM restrictions (aka content or copy protections) added to copyrighted works and to ban the "black box" devices intended for that purpose.

Tired of the entertainment industry treating you like a criminal for wanting to share music and movies online? We are too -- EFF is fighting for a constructive solution that gets artists paid while making file sharing legal.

One cannot go online today without eventually being asked to accept a set of so-called Terms of Service (or TOS). These "terms" are actually purported legal contracts between the user and the online service provider (websites, MMORPGs, communication services, etc.), despite the fact that users never get a chance to negotiate their contents and can often be entirely unaware of their existence.

In October 2007 the United States, the European Community, Switzerland and Japan simultaneously announced that they would negotiate a new intellectual property enforcement treaty, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Canada have joined the negotiations. Although the proposed treaty’s title might suggest that the agreement deals only with counterfeit physical goods (such as medicines), what little information has been made available publicly by negotiating governments about the content of the treaty makes it clear that it will have a far broader scope, and in particular, will deal with new tools targetting “Internet distribution and information technology”.

The World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) "Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations" is protection, all right: a protection racket for middlemen in the TV and Internet worlds.

n October 2004, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) took the historic step of agreeing to consider the impact of its decisions on developing nations—including assessing the impact of intellectual property law and policy on technological innovation, access to knowledge, and even human health. What's at stake is much more significant than the harmony or disharmony of IP regulations. WIPO decisions affect everything from the availability and price of AIDS drugs, to the patterns of international development, to the communications architecture of the Internet.

WIPO held three meetings in 2005 to discuss Brazil and Argentina's Proposal

EFF has hundreds of donors and thousands of active supporters throughout Europe. As part of our expanded international work, EFF has been increasing its participation in European issues, providing publicity and logistical support for combatting bad European tech policy in co-operation with the many digital rights groups across Europe to fight effectively for consumers' and technologists' interests

The U.S. government is employing a new strategy to effect the global entrenchment of overly restrictive copyright law: incorporating DMCA-like copyright provisions in its free trade agreements. Having failed to persuade nations worldwide to adopt U.S.-style copyright regulations via the WIPO Copyright and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaties, the government has included anti-circumvention obligations in its bilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with Jordan (Article 4(13)), Singapore (Article 16.4(7)), Chile (Article 17.7(5)), Morocco (Article 15.5(8)), Australia (Article 17.4(7)), CAFTA (Article 15.5(7)), Bahrain (Article 14.4(7)) and Oman (Article 15.4(7)). It now seeks to include similar provisions in its current multilateral free trade negotiations with 33 countries in the Americas.

The Global Network Initiative is a coalition of information and communications companies, major human rights organizations, academics, investors and technology leaders to produce guidance and oversight for companies facing civil liberties challenges in the ICT industries. EFF has participated in the process since its inception, providing technical and policy advice together with other NGO in the human rights sector.

EFF and a coalition of public interest, industry, and academic groups filed suit in 2005 challenging the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) unjustified expansion of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). By forcing broadband Internet and interconnected voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services to become wiretap-friendly, the FCC ignored CALEA's plain language and threatened privacy, security, and innovation.

Like music and movies before them, books are going digital, and each new development is a source of excitement and concern for avid, tech-savvy readers. Book fans should indeed be excited, because digital books could revolutionize reading, making more books more findable and more accessible to more people in a diversity of ways.

Modern communications mean most Americans today walk around with a beacon that transmits their location. Mobile phones register to a nearby tower as the owner moves through space and the phone company can collect that data in real time or retrospectively to physically place the phone with varying degrees of accuracy. Companies can also determine the owner of every handset within range of a particular tower. GPS enabled phones enable far more precise location placement. Many cars now have GPS devices installed, some of which transmit the vehicle’s location to a centralized service. As the devices get cheaper and smaller, law enforcement agencies can more easily attach GPS trackers to cars and individuals, enabling precise round-the-clock surveillance without ever leaving the precinct. Location-based services, including maps of nearby restaurants, friend finders and other social networks collect location data as part of providing the service, or for contextual advertising.

The U.S. government, with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T, has engaged in a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001.

In the first ruling of its kind, a federal magistrate judge held that the government must obtain a search warrant to collect the content of a telephone call, even when that content is dialed digits like bank account numbers, social security numbers or prescription refills. The decision from Magistrate Judge Smith in Houston closely followed the reasoning outlined in an amicus brief from EFF and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT).

The federal government is trying to force states to turn your drivers license into a national ID. Unless you tell your state legislator to push back, the Real ID Act will create grave dangers to privacy and impose massive financial burdens without improving national security in the least.

The Fourth Amendment generally requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant based on probable cause before searching a person, her home, or her belongings. For nearly a century, however, courts have recognized a limited exception when the search is "incident to an arrest." The original justification for this exception was to enable police officers to find weapons on the arrestee or prevent the destruction of evidence, thus allowing the officers to search the arrestee's person and the area within her immediate control. The exception has expanded over the years to allow police under some circumstances to search the contents of containers found on or near the arrestee

Before you get on an airplane, the government wants to sift through the personal details of your life. If the data analysis says you're a security risk, too bad -- you may have no way of challenging the error. Worse still, that black mark could follow you for the rest of your life, and there may be little stopping the government from using your data for purposes far outside of travel screening.

Many states are hastily implementing flawed electronic voting machines and related election procedures. EFF is protecting your right to vote in the courts while working with legislators and election officials across the country to ensure fair, transparent elections

EFF's FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government (FLAG) Project aims to expose the government's expanding use of new technologies that invade Americans' privacy. Through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the project helps to protect individual liberties and hold the government accountable.

In May 2007, Comcast began engaging in protocol-specific interference with the activities of its subscribers. When confronted by users and by EFF, Comcast responded with denials and answers that told less than the whole story. In October 2007, however, after independent testing by the Associated Press and EFF, it became clear that Comcast was, in fact, interfering with BitTorrent, Gnutella, and potentially other common file sharing protocols employed by millions of Internet users. In specific, Comcast was injecting forged RST packets into TCP communications, in an effort to disrupt certain protocols commonly used for file-sharing. The interference efforts were triggered by the protocol that the subscriber used, not by the number of connections made or amount of bandwidth used by the subscriber.

Email allows groups to grow from a dozen friends to a hundred hobbyists to a huge, national organization. Meanwhile, blogging is transforming journalism, and websites like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are part of a new Library of Alexandria being built online

New ideas challenge the status quo. That's why people who make cool tools get so much heat from the old guard -- and their lawyers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) thinks that innovation is inextricably tied to freedom of speech, and innovators need to be protected from established businesses that use the law to stifle creativity and kill competition.

You'd like to move the tracks you bought from Rhapsody to a personal stereo like Apple's iPod, but the copy protection prevents you. Creating or using the software necessary to make the switch could put you behind bars

The Internet is global and so are threats to online freedom. Learn about how EFF is fighting for your digital rights around the world and support our efforts by donating or becoming a member.

Emerging technologies have the potential to create a more democratic relationship between public institutions and the citizens they serve. Today, a broad range of new tools are allowing the public to more closely examine government and corporate entities, and to hold them accountable for deception, censorship and corruption. Part of EFF's mission is to foster and promote the creation and use of these tools