Security News

UPDATE Feb. 14, 2018: Today, President Trump endorsed Sen. Grassley's bill on border and immigration issues (H.R. 2579). EFF opposes it. Like many of its predecessors, this bill would expand invasive surveillance on Americans and foreigners alike, with biometric screening, social media snooping, drones, and automatic license plates readers.

If Congress votes this month on legislation to protect Dreamers from deportation, any bill it considers should not...

Last month, Congress reauthorized Section 702, the controversial law the NSA uses to conduct some of its most invasive electronic surveillance. With Section 702 set to expire, Congress had a golden opportunity to fix the worst flaws in the NSA’s surveillance programs and protect Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights to privacy. Instead, it reupped Section 702 for six more years.

But the bill passed by Congress and signed by the president, labeled S. 139, didn’t just extend Section...

Sharing your personal fitness goals—lowered heart rates, accurate calorie counts, jogging times, and GPS paths—sounds like a fun, competitive feature offered by today’s digital fitness trackers, but a recent report from The Washington Post highlights how this same feature might end up revealing not just where you are, where you’ve been, and how often you’ve traveled there, but sensitive national security information.

According to The Washington Post report, the fitness tracking...

Dear friends,

Today, the United States Congress struck a significant blow against the basic human right to read, write, learn, and associate free of government’s prying eyes. 

Goaded by those who let fear override democratic principles, some members of Congress shuttered public debate in order to pass a bill that extends the National Security Agency’s unconstitutional Internet surveillance for six years. 

This means six more years of warrantless surveillance under...

Multiple nonprofit organizations and policy think tanks, and one company have recently joined ranks to limit broad NSA surveillance. Though our groups work for many causes— freedom of the press, shared software development, universal access to knowledge, equal justice for all—our voices are responding to the same threat: the possible expansion of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act.

On January 5, the Rules Committee for the House of Representatives introduced S. 139. The...

The Supreme Court announced today that it will not review a lower court’s ruling in United States v. Mohamud, which upheld warrantless surveillance of an American citizen under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. EFF had urged the Court to take up Mohamud because this surveillance violates core Fourth Amendment protections. The Supreme Court’s refusal to get involved here is disappointing.

Using Section 702, the government warrantlessly collects...

One of the government’s most powerful surveillance tools is scheduled to sunset in less than three weeks, and, for months, EFF has fought multiple legislative attempts to either extend or expand the NSA’s spying powers—warning the public, Representatives, and Senators about circling bills that threaten Americans’ privacy. But the frenetic, deadline-pressure environment on Capitol Hill betrays the slow, years-long progress that EFF has made elsewhere: the courts.

2017 was a year...

Protecting the highly personal location data stored on or generated by digital devices is one of the 21st century’s most important privacy issues. In 2017, the Supreme Court finally took on the question of how law enforcement can get ahold of this sensitive information.

Whenever you use a cell phone, whether to make calls, send or receive texts, or browse the Internet, your phone automatically generates “cell site location information” (CSLI) through its interactions with cell...

According to reports published Tuesday evening by Politico, a group of surveillance hawks  in the House of Representatives is trying to ram through a bill that would extend mass surveillance by the National Security Agency. We expect a vote to happen on the House floor as early as tomorrow, which means there are only a few hours to rally opposition.  

The backers of this bill are attempting to rush a vote on a bill that we’ve criticized for failing to secure Americans’ privacy. If...

Last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray faced questions from the House Judiciary Committee about how his department is implementing one of the government’s most powerful surveillance tools. Despite repeated bipartisan requests, Director Wray refused to tell the Members of the Committee how many Americans have been impacted by Section 702, enacted as part of the FISA Amendments Act. This isn’t the first time the FBI has refused to answer to Congress.

EFF has long held that Section...

Several journalists and experts have recently focused on the fact that a scanned document published by The Intercept contained tiny yellow dots produced by a Xerox DocuColor printer. Those dots allow the document's origin and date of printing to be ascertained, which could have played a role in the arrest of Reality Leigh Winner, accused of leaking the document. EFF has previously researched this tracking technology at some length; our work on it has helped bring it to public...

Republicans in Congress recently voted to repeal the FCC’s broadband privacy rules. As a result, your Internet provider may be able to sell sensitive information like your browsing history or app usage to advertisers, insurance companies, and more, all without your consent. In response, Internet users have been asking what they can do to protect their own data from this creepy, non-consensual tracking by Internet providers—for example, directing their Internet traffic through a VPN or...