Podcast Episode: Hack to the Future
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/podcast-episode-hack-future
March 22, 2022, 9:00 AM
Like many young people, Zach Latta went to a school that didn't teach any computer classes. But that didn’t stop him from learning everything he could about them and becoming a programmer at a young age. After moving to San Francisco, Zach founded Hack Club, a nonprofit network of high school coding clubs around the world, to help other students find the education and community that he wished he had as a teenager. 
This week on our podcast, we talk to Zach about the importance of student acce...
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Ban Online Behavioral Advertising
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/ban-online-behavioral-advertising
March 22, 2022, 1:24 AM
Tech companies earn staggering profits by targeting ads to us based on our online behavior. This incentivizes all online actors to collect as much of our behavioral information as possible, and then sell it to ad tech companies and the data brokers that service them. This pervasive online behavioral surveillance apparatus turns our lives into open books—every mouse click and screen swipe can be tracked and then disseminated throughout the vast ad tech ecosystem. Sometimes this system is called...
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The New Filter Mandate Bill Is An Unmitigated Disaster
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/new-filter-mandate-bill-unmitigated-disaster
March 21, 2022, 9:59 PM
After the defeat of SOPA/PIPA, Big Content has mostly focused on quiet, backroom deals for copyright legislation, like the unconstitutional CASE Act, which was so unpopular it had to be slipped into a must-pass bill in the dead of winter. But now, almost exactly a decade later, they’ve come screaming out of the gate with a proposal almost as bad as SOPA/PIPA. Let’s hope it doesn’t take an Internet Blackout to kill it this time.
The new proposal, cynically titled the SMART Copyright Act, gi...
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Anti-War Hacktivism is Leading to Digital Xenophobia and a More Hostile Internet
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/anti-war-hacktivism-leading-digital-xenophobia-and-more-hostile-internet
March 21, 2022, 9:47 PM
The horrific Russian military invasion of Ukraine has understandably led to a backlash against Russia. The temptation is to label anything Russian, from state media and students to cats, as bad and block it to signal outrage and ostracization. This type of thinking has infected the open source and internet security communities as well—a terrible idea with potentially harmful consequences.
Recently the maintainer of a popular open source Node JS package “node-ipc” released a new plugin call...
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Brazil’s “Remuneration Right” Strengthens Big Tech and Big Media, At the Cost of Free Expression and a Free Press
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/brazils-remuneration-right-strengthens-big-tech-and-big-media-cost-free-expression
March 21, 2022, 1:39 PM
Brazil’s “Fake News Bill” (PL 2630/2020) is the latest salvo in the global battle between Big Tech companies and the media industry—which is itself highly concentrated, controlled by a handful of dominant firms. The remuneration rule in the “Fake News Bill” is a made-in-Brazil installment that is poised to become law, despite the complaints of civil society and independent media associations. EFF has been analyzing and reporting on the bill since its earliest stages in the Brazilian...
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To Make Social Media Work Better, Make It Fail Better
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/make-social-media-work-better-make-it-fail-better-0
March 21, 2022, 12:32 PM
Pity the poor content moderator. Big Tech platforms expect their mods to correctly apply a set of rules to users in more than a hundred countries, in over a thousand languages. These users are clustered into literally millions of online communities, each with its own norms and taboos. 
What a task! Some groups will consider a word to be a slur, while others will use it as a term of affection. Actually, it’s even more confusing: some groups consider some words to be slurs when used by outsider...
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EFF Tells E.U. Commission: Don't Break Encryption
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/eff-tells-eu-commission-dont-break-encryption
March 17, 2022, 4:46 PM
An upcoming proposal from the European Union Commission could make government scanning of user messages and photos mandatory throughout the E.U. If that happens, it would be inconsistent with providing  true end-to-end encryption in Europe. That would be a disaster, not just for the privacy and security of citizens in the E.U., but worldwide. 
The excuse for this attack on basic human rights is the same one we have seen used repeatedly in the U.S. over the last few years: crimes against childr...
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Letter to Iran, Regarding the Regulatory System for Cyberspace Services Bill
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/letter-iran-regarding-regulatory-system-cyberspace-services-bill
March 16, 2022, 10:46 PM
Today, EFF joins Article 19 and more than 50 organizations in urging the Iranian government to rescind a bill with severe implications for the privacy, security and freedom of expression of Internet users in Iran. The text of our letter is below.
Iran: Human rights groups sound alarm against draconian Internet Bill We, the undersigned human rights and civil society organizations, are alarmed by Iranian parliament’s move to ratify the general outlines of the draconian "Regulatory System for Cy...
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You Should Not Trust Russia’s New “Trusted Root CA”
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/you-should-not-trust-russias-new-trusted-root-ca
March 15, 2022, 11:41 PM
Last week, Russian citizens began receiving instructions to either download a government-approved web browser, or change their basic browser settings, according to instructions issued by their government’s Ministry of Digital Development and Communications. On the one hand, these changes may be necessary for Russians to access government services and websites impacted by international sanctions. Nonetheless, it is a worrying development: the Russian state’s stopgap measure to keep its servi...
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Podcast Episode: Watching the Watchers
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/podcast-episode-watching-watchers
March 15, 2022, 10:00 AM
Imagine being detained by armed agents whenever you returned from traveling outside the country. That’s what life became like for Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, who was placed on a terrorist watch-list after she made a documentary critical of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Poitras was detained close to 100 times between 2006 and 2012, and border agents routinely copied her notebooks and threatened to take her electronics. 
It was only after Poitras teamed up with EF...
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EFF Asks Federal Appellate Court to Re-hear Important Patent Transparency Case
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/eff-asks-federal-appellate-court-re-hear-important-patent-transparency-case
March 14, 2022, 6:35 PM
After pushing for more than three years to access court records in a lawsuit brought by a notorious patent troll, Uniloc, against Apple, EFF is challenging a federal appellate court’s decision that imperils the public’s ability to understand what happens in patent litigation.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overruled the district court’s decision to grant public access to records documenting the legal fight last month. The court ruled that the public had no interest in ac...
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The Foilies 2022
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/foilies-2022
March 13, 2022, 4:41 PM
Recognizing the year's worst in government transparency.
The Foilies were compiled by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (Director of Investigations Dave Maass, Senior Staff Attorney Aaron Mackey, Frank Stanton Fellow Mukund Rathi, Investigative Researcher Beryl Lipton, Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia) and MuckRock (Co-Founder Michael Morisy, Senior Reporting Fellows Betsy Ladyzhets and Dillon Bergin, and Investigations Editor Derek Kravitz), with further review and editing by Shawn Musgrave. I...
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Big Tech Pay-Outs to European ISPs Would Just Concentrate Their Power

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