Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

EFF and the ACLU of Northern California recently filed a brief asking the San Francisco Superior Court to rule that the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) violated the law when it obtained and used a remote, live link to a business district’s surveillance camera network to monitor protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May and June 2020.

New California program allows local cities and counties to access infrastructure dollars to solve problems in their own communities along with empowering local private entities, rather than depend on large, private multi-nationals who aren’t willing to make the needed generational investment into infrastructure in most areas of the state.

The twentieth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001 are a good time to reflect on the world we’ve built since then. By now it is clear that far too many things that were put into place in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, especially in the areas of surveillance and government secrecy, are deeply problematic for our democracy, privacy and fairness. It’s time to set things right.

While it’s welcome news that Apple is now listening to the concerns raised by rights defenders about the dangers posed by its phone scanning tools, the company must go further than just listening, and drop its plans to put a backdoor into its encryption entirely.

Vaccine mandates are becoming increasingly urgent from public health officials and various governments. As they roll out, we must protect users of vaccine passports and those who do not want to use – or cannot use – a digitally scannable means to prove vaccination.

The Chicago Office of the Inspector General has released a highly critical report on the Police’s use of ShotSpotter, a surveillance technology that relies on a combination of artificial intelligence and human “acoustic experts” to purportedly identify and locate gunshots based on a network of high-powered microphones located on some of the city’s streets.

Apple’s new feature assumes that parents are benevolent protectors, but for many children, that isn’t the case: parents can also be the abuser, or may have more traditional or restrictive ideas of acceptable exploration than their children.

Apple’s new program for scanning images sent on iMessage steps back from the company’s prior support for the privacy and security of encrypted messages.