Electronic Frontier Foundation - Transparency

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What is E-Voting Rights?

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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.

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What is FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government?

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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.

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What is Terms Of (Ab)Use?

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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

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Test Your ISP

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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.

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What is Anonymity?

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Many people don't want the things they say online to be connected with their offline identities. They may be concerned about political or economic retribution, harassment, or even threats to their lives. Whistleblowers report news that companies and governments would prefer to suppress; human rights workers struggle against repressive governments; parents try to create a safe way for children to explore; victims of domestic violence attempt to rebuild their lives where abusers cannot follow.

Instead of using their true names to communicate, these people choose to speak using pseudonyms (assumed names) or anonymously (no name at all). For these individuals and the organizations that support them, secure anonymity is critical. It may literally save lives.

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What is Bloggers' Rights?

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If you're a blogger, this page is for you.

One of EFF's goals is to give you a basic roadmap to the legal issues you may confront as a blogger, to let you know you have rights, and to encourage you to blog freely with the knowledge that your legitimate speech is protected.

To that end, we have created the Legal Guide for Bloggers, a collection of blogger-specific FAQs addressing everything from fair use to defamation law to workplace whistle-blowing.

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What is CyberSLAPP?

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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.

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What is No Downtime for Free Speech Campaign?

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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.

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What is Accessibility for the Reading Disabled?

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New technology has the potential to dramatically improve the lives of those with reading disabilities -- including the blind and profoundly dyslexic, and those with spinal injuries. Information in electronic formats can be made accessible using technologies like text-to-speech and refreshable Braille, opening up whole new worlds to people who have previously been unable to access information.

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What is Broadcast Flag?

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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.

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What is Coders' Rights Project?

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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. These challenges come from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and state computer crime laws, among others. The Coders Rights Project builds on EFF's longstanding work protecting researchers through education, legal defense, amicus briefs and involvement in the community with the goal of promoting innovation and safeguarding the rights of curious tinkerers and hackers on the digital frontier.

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What is Digital Rights Management?

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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.

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What is Net Neutrality?

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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.

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What is Patents?

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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.

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What is Trusted Computing?

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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.

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What is Broadcast Flag?

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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.

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What is Digital Radio?

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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.

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What is Digital Video?

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Digital video promises a high quality picture and fresh crop of innovative technologies that will give you new options for manipulating video. But Hollywood is scheming to put shackles on digital video, hoping that the next generation of products will be designed to suit its desires, not yours.

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What is DMCA?

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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.

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What is File Sharing?

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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.

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What is Patents?

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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.

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What is Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement?

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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”.

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What is Broadcasting Treaty?

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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.

If adopted, the WIPO treaty will give broadcasters 50 years of copyright-like control over the content of their broadcasts, even when they have no copyright in what they show. A TV channel broadcasting your Creative Commons-licensed movie could legally demand that no one record or redistribute it—and sue anyone who does. And TV companies could use their new rights to go after TiVo or MythTV for daring to let you skip advertisements or record programs in DRM-free formats.

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What is Development Agenda?

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In 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.

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What is EFF Europe?

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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.

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What is Free Trade Agreement of the Americas?

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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.

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What is The Global Network Initiative?

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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.

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What is WIPO?

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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. But all too often, governments are using international treaties negotiated through WIPO as well as other bilateral trade agreements to ratchet up IP rights at the behest of copyright holders. EFF defends your rights at WIPO, acting as a watchdog at its proceedings and advising member countries. Here's a look at some current issues we're focusing on:

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What is Anonymity?

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Many people don't want the things they say online to be connected with their offline identities. They may be concerned about political or economic retribution, harassment, or even threats to their lives. Whistleblowers report news that companies and governments would prefer to suppress; human rights workers struggle against repressive governments; parents try to create a safe way for children to explore; victims of domestic violence attempt to rebuild their lives where abusers cannot follow.

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What is CALEA?

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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.

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What is Cell Tracking?

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Can the government use your cell phone records to track your physical location without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause? Often with EFF input as a friend of the court, the vast majority of judges issuing public opinions on the matter are saying “no”, and rejecting government applications for cell site location tracking information made without showing sufficient need for this kind of sensitive information.

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What is Digital Books?

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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.

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What is Locational Privacy?

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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.

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What is NSA Spying?

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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.

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What is Online Behavioral Tracking?

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New web technology has created many unexpected ways for corporations to track your web activity without your knowledge. Countless advertising networks are able to secretly monitor you across multiple websites and build detailed profiles of your behavior and interests.

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What is Pen Trap?

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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).

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What is Real ID?

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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.

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What is RFID?

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Libraries, schools, the government, and private sector businesses are adopting radio frequency identification tags, or RFIDs — 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. EFF is working to prevent the embrace of this technology from eroding privacy and freedom.

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What is Search Engines?

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Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other search engines record your search queries and maintain massive databases that reach into the most intimate details of your life. When revealed to others, these details can be embarrassing and even cause great harm. Would you want strangers to know where you or your child work or go to school? How about everyone seeing searches that reference your medical history, financial information, sexual orientation, or religious affiliation?

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What is Search Incident to Arrest?

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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.

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What is Social Networks?

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Sites like Facebook and Twitter provide users with a place to share personal information with friends, family, and the public — an activity that's proven to be hugely compelling to Internet users. In response to the demand, technology is evolving to encourage the disclosure of information that was formerly discreet (like location), and to enable the sharing of information even when not sitting in front of a traditional computer (like from mobile phones).

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What is Travel Screening?

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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.

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.

EFF has been fighting these schemes every step of the way -- both in court and in Congress.