Eff Issues

Anonymity is derived from the Greek word ἀνωνυμία, anonymia, meaning "without a name" or "namelessness". In colloquial use, anonymous typically refers to a person, and often means that the personal identity, or personally identifiable information of that person is not known.

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 political speech

EFF's Coders' Rights Project protects programmers and developers engaged in cutting-edge exploration of technology in our world. Security and encryption researchers help build a safer future for all of us using digital technologies, yet too many legitimate researchers face serious legal challenges that prevent or inhibit their work.

Digital rights management (DRM) is a generic term for access control technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices.

A patent (pronounced /ˈpætənt/ or /ˈpeɪtənt/) is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state (national government) to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for a public disclosure of an invention.

Network neutrality (also net neutrality, Internet neutrality) is a principle proposed for user access networks participating in the Internet that advocates no restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed, as well as communication that is not unreasonably degraded by other traffic.

Broadcasting is the distribution of audio and/or video signals which transmit programs to an audience. The audience may be the general public or a relatively large subset of the whole, such as children or young adults.

Digital radio describes radio technologies which carry information as a digital signal, by means of a digital modulation method.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a proposed plurilateral trade agreement for establishing international standards on intellectual-property-rights enforcement throughout the participating countries.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is the UN agency responsible for treaties involving copyright, patent, and trademark laws. WIPO can be a force for progressive change, helping the world take into account public interest and development needs.

aims to ensure that development considerations form an integral part of WIPO’s work. As such, it is a cross-cutting issue which touches upon all sectors of the Organization.

provides 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.

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

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

is the UN agency responsible for treaties involving copyright, patent, and trademark laws.

is to enhance the ability of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to conduct electronic surveillance by requiring that telecommunications carriers and manufacturers of telecommunications equipment modify and design their equipment, facilities, and services to ensure that they have built-in surveillance capabilities, allowing federal agencies to monitor all telephone, broadband internet, and VoIP traffic in real-time.

NSA is receiving wholesale copies of their telephone and other communications records. All of these surveillance activities are in violation of the privacy safeguards established by Congress and the U.S. Constitution

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

is the use of an object (typically referred to as an RFID tag) applied to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification and tracking using radio waves

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

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

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 set of status bits (or a "flag") sent in the data stream of a digital television program that indicates whether or not the data stream can be recorded, or if there are any restrictions on recorded content.

the computer will consistently behave in expected ways, and those behaviors will be enforced by hardware and software

type of video recording system that works by using a digital rather than an analog video signal

the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multi-media (audio, video), documents, or electronic books

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.

This newly drafted treaty gives broadcasters (not creators or copyright holders) the right to tie up the use of audiovisual material for 50 years after broadcasting it, even if the programs are in the public domain, Creative Commons licensed, or not copyrightable.

aims to ensure that development considerations form an integral part of WIPO’s work. As such, it is a cross-cutting issue which touches upon all sectors of the Organization.

Countless advertising networks are able to secretly monitor you across multiple websites and build detailed profiles of your behavior and interests

EFF is fighting to protect the privacy and prevent the misuse of this data that users of phones, GPS transmitters and location-based services leak to providers and to the government

could revolutionize reading, making more books more findable and more accessible to more people in a diversity of ways.

tracks the current position of a mobile phone even on the move

enhance the ability of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to conduct electronic surveillance by requiring that telecommunications carriers and manufacturers of telecommunications equipment modify and design their equipment, facilities, and services to ensure that they have built-in surveillance capabilities, allowing federal agencies to monitor all telephone, broadband internet, and VoIP traffic in real-time.

UN agency responsible for treaties involving copyright, patent, and trademark laws.

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

Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL

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.

Facebook, Friendster, Multiply, Plurk and Twitter

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.

The privacy invasions don't stop there. When you cross the U.S. border to come home, you could be singled out for a random, invasive search. A recent court decision allows border agents to search your laptop or other digital device and copy the contents without limitation.

CAPPS II was a planned profiling system that would have required airlines to provide personal details about passengers before they boarded their flights. These details would then be combined with government and commercial databases to create a color-coded "score" indicating each person's security risk level. In 2004, American Airlines admitted to providing 1.2 million passenger records to contractors developing prototypes for the program, even though the Transportation Security Administration had denied such a transfer for months.

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.

FOIA

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 Texas judge invited EFF to file the brief in response to requests from government investigators to use a "pen register" or "trap and trace device" to collect all numbers dialed on a phone keypad after a call has been connected. Investigators can typically get "pen/trap" orders under a legal standard much lower than the "probable cause" required for a typical phone-tapping warrant, because only phone numbers used to connect the call are collected, not the content of the phone call itself.

Center for Democracy and Technology