Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

No Privacy Without Encryption: The second episode of the little podcast series based on my book just dropped:. It's not often that you get to talk with the Justice Department lawyer who led the case on the other side, and I'm grateful that Tony Coppolino was game to do so. https://lnkd.in/gTJUQ7wK The amazing Joanne Jennings and Jarrod Sport have brought so much life into this story of our fight in the 1990s to free encryption.

EFF has joined the ACLU of Wisconsin in filing a petition to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, asking it to rule that the state’s constitution requires a warrant for retrospective searches of ALPR databases used by law enforcement in four cities: Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, and Green Bay. We represent a religious organization, the Wisconsin Council of Churches, as well as an individual pastor in Green Bay. We all deserve to be free of warrantless mass surveillance. We all deserve to live in a country where surveillance vendors cannot help police upend our system of individualized suspicion. Religious organizations and officials like our clients have a heightened interest in protecting their location privacy because of the range of expressive associations their work entails, including facilitating gatherings for religious worship, as well as offering pastoral care, confidential counseling, and community support. Likewise, the people who visit houses of worship have a strong right to privacy against police monitoring of when they pray, seek addiction counseling, or attend a domestic violence survivor meeting. This is our second lawsuit challenging warrantless ALPR searches, following SIREN v. San Jose. Earlier this month, a federal court in Oklahoma became the first to rule that ALPRs are a “type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” and suppress evidence from a warrantless ALPR search. We hope the Wisconsin Supreme Court will agree. Read more about this at the link in the comments.

We will appeal a California trial court’s recent ruling that dismissed SIREN v. San Jose, our case challenging San Jose, Calif.’s warrantless searches of its vast stores of automated license plate reader (ALPR) data. EFF and the ACLU of Northern California represent SIREN Services Immigrant Rights and Education Network and CAIR-CA, two non-profits that serve San Jose residents, in this case. The ruling ignores the importance of landmark rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the invasiveness of aggregating collected data on an individual over time, including one issued just months ago. It also severely underestimates the harm that ALPRs cause, in San Jose and around the country.    Fortunately, there are signs that the tide is turning against ALPRs in the courts. Just a day before the ruling in our case, a federal district court in Oklahoma called ALPRs “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” and decided that a law enforcement officer’s warrantless search of ALPR data violated the Fourth Amendment.    Read more about the (unsurveilled) road ahead at the link in the comments.

Victory! A lawsuit filed by three labor unions against the Departments of State and Homeland Security for their viewpoint-based surveillance and suppression of protected expression online can move forward, a federal judge ruled yesterday. On Oct. 1, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York rejected the government’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The case was filed in October 2025 on behalf of the United Automobile Workers, Communications Workers of America, and AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS AFL-CIO. EFF, Muslim Advocates, and the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic represent the labor unions. The Court held that claims that the government’s social media surveillance program is harming the unions’ members, as well as hampering the ability of the unions to associate with their members and potential members, can move forward. Read more about this important decision at the link in the comments.

The Marin County Sheriff’s Office is the latest California law enforcement agency to get caught sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data from their Flock Safety system with out-of-state and federal agencies. EFF and the ACLU of Northern California are calling them out for this direct violation of California law, which has put every driver in the county at risk and is especially dangerous for immigrants, abortion seekers, and other targets of the federal government. On Thursday, we sent the Marin County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) a demand letter and request for records under the California Public Records Act following the Point Reyes Light’s recent report that MCSO provided non-California agencies access to its ALPR database. This directly violates California law and the terms of the 2022 settlement agreement in our Lagleva v. Marin County Sheriff case. Get all the context and background at the link in the comments. 

Big tech companies are hell-bent on taking away our agency and forcing us to use their surveillance-based services, apps, and devices. It’s hard to fight against, and it often feels much easier to give in, accept their walled gardens, and move on with our lives. But we don’t have to stand in the middle of the information superhighway and let companies run us over. With a little work, we can stand our ground and take control over what happens with our data. This month — Opt Out October— we’re walking through some of the steps to do just that.   Follow the link in the comments for information on how to tell AI tools they can’t train on your data, as well as tips to find alternative software, social media, and even new operating systems that provide stronger privacy and better ways to control how your data is used.

I'm raising money for the Electronic Frontier Foundation around my book release! Donate to EFF and get a signed "Spirit of a Cyborg" bookplate from me! https://lnkd.in/gpAT-spc

People are increasingly concerned about the ways in which mass surveillance is tracking our every move: from Flock license plate readers to face recognition to creepy ads that – based on what we see and do online – seem to know everything we’re thinking and planning. It didn’t have to be this way, and since the early days of the internet, a dedicated band of activists, lawyers and technologists have fought for a better, more secure and private digital future – a future that’s still attainable. Cindy Cohn, who just finished a 26-year run with the Electronic Frontier Foundation including 11 years as its executive director, has lived this fight. She says privacy isn’t just about secrecy: It's ultimately about power – who has it, and who has the ability to protect themselves from it.    Welcome to the first episode of “Privacy’s Defenders,” a podcast about the people – lawyers, journalists, hackers, and others – who’ve fought to secure your digital liberties since before most people even knew what the internet was. In this episode, "Cowboys, Cypherpunks and Visionaries," Cindy talks with EFF cofounder John Gilmore about how he – an early employee at Sun Microsystems – came together with Lotus Development cofounder Mitch Kapor and cattle rancher, philosopher and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow to create EFF as a bulwark against government investigation and prosecution of early internet users. It’s a story of the Secret Service’s “Operation Sundevil,” jet-setting tech titans, tie-dyed cypherpunks, and a fateful house party in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district amid the earliest days of online communications, setting the stage for the battles that created the internet as we know it and issues we still grapple with today. Give it a listen at the link in the comments, and let us know what you think.

Online sports betting company DraftKings is using AI to target customers who are most likely to place losing bets and respond to gambling promotions. This kind of targeting is a form of online behavioral advertising, which is when companies personalize the ads they show you based on the data they’ve collected about you.     The more data a company has, the more personalized the ad can be. While DraftKings is using AI to supercharge the harmful effects of online behavioral advertising, EFF has long argued that all behavioral advertising should be banned.   Read more of EFF’s analysis at the link in the comments.