Security News
Security News is an archive of curated EFF Deeplinks posts for trainers, technologists, and educators who teach digital security.
Issues that we track here include: country-specific policy updates on security and privacy, updates on malware and vulnerabilities, discussions on encryption and privacy-protecting tools, updates on surveillance (corporate surveillance, street-level surveillance, and mass surveillance), device searches by law and border enforcement, tracking via devices, and general digital security tips.
Communities from Coast to Coast Fight for Control Over Police Surveillance: 2017 in Review
Americans in 2017 lived under a threat of constant surveillance, both online and offline. While the battle to curtail unaccountable and unconstitutional NSA surveillance continued this year with only limited opportunities appearing in Congress, the struggle to secure community control over surveillance by local police has made dramatic and expanding strides across the country at the local level.
In July, Seattle passed a law making it the nation’s second jurisdiction to require...
Read MoreEFF’s Street-Level Surveillance Project Dissects Police Technology
Step onto any city street and you may find yourself subject to numerous forms of police surveillance—many imperceptible to the human eye.
A cruiser equipped with automated license plate readers (also known as ALPRs) may have just logged where you parked your car. A cell-site simulator may be capturing your cell-phone data incidentally while detectives track a suspect nearby. That speck in the sky may be a drone capturing video of your commute. Police might use face recognition...
Read MoreDHS Should Stop the Social Media Surveillance of Immigrants
UPDATE: EFF joined coalition comments on October 18, 2017 in opposition to the A-File notice.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last month issued a notice that it is storing social media information on immigrants, including lawful permanent residents and naturalized U.S. citizens, apparently indefinitely, in a government database that contains “Alien Files” (A-Files). This is an invasive new feature of DHS’s previously known programs on collecting social media...
Read MoreNo Hunting Undocumented Immigrants with Stingrays
In the latest sign of mission creep in domestic deployment of battlefield-strength surveillance technology, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) earlier this year used a cell site simulator (CSS) to locate and arrest an undocumented immigrant, according to a report yesterday by The Detroit News.
CSSs, often called IMSI catchers or Stingrays, masquerade as cell phone towers and trick our phones into connecting to them so police can track down a target. EFF has long...
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