SAN FRANCISCO—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce that Carolina Botero, Connecting Humanity, and 404 Media will receive the 2024 EFF Awards for their vital work in ensuring that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people.  

The EFF Awards recognize specific and substantial technical, social, economic, or cultural contributions in diverse fields including journalism, art, digital access, legislation, tech development, and law. 

The EFF Awards ceremony will start at 6:30 pm PT on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024 at the Golden Gate Club, 135 Fisher Loop in San Francisco’s Presidio. Guests can register at https://www.eff.org/event/eff-awards-2024. The ceremony will be livestreamed and recorded. 

For the past 30 years, the EFF Awards—previously known as the Pioneer Awards—have recognized and honored key leaders in the fight for freedom and innovation online. Started when the internet was new, the Awards now reflect the fact that the online world has become both a necessity in modern life and a continually evolving set of tools for communication, organizing, creativity, and increasing human potential. 

“Maintaining internet access in a conflict zone, conducting fearless investigative reporting on how tech impacts our lives, and bringing the fight for digital rights and social justice to significant portions of Latin America are all ways of ensuring technology advances us all,” EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn said. “This year’s EFF Award winners embody the internet’s highest ideals, building a better-connected and better-informed world that brings freedom, justice, and innovation for everyone. We hope that by recognizing them in this small way, we can shine a spotlight that helps them continue and even expand their important work.” 

Carolina Botero: Fostering Digital Human Rights in Latin America 

Carolina Botero is a researcher, lecturer, writer, and consultant who is among the foremost leaders in the fight for digital rights in Latin America. In more than a decade as executive director of the Colombia-based Karisma Foundation — founded in 2003 to ensure that digital technologies protect and advance fundamental human rights and promote social justice — she transformed the organization into an outspoken voice fostering freedom of expression, privacy, access to knowledge, justice, and self-determination in our digital world, with regional and international impact. She left that position this year, opening the door for a new generation while leaving a strong and inspiring legacy for those in Latin America and beyond who advocate for a digital world that enhances rights and empowers the powerless. Botero holds a master’s degree in international law and cooperation from Belgium’s Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a master’s degree in commercial and contracting law from Spain’s Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She frequently authors op-eds for Colombia’s El Espectador and La Silla Vacía, and serves on the advisory board of The Regional Center for Studies for the Development of the Information Society (Cetic.br), monitoring the adoption of information and communication technologies in Brazil. She previously served on the board of Creative Commons and as a member of the UNESCO Advisory Committee on Open Science.  

Connecting Humanity: Championing Internet Access in Gaza 

Connecting Humanity is a Cairo-based nonprofit organization that helps Palestinians in Gaza regain access to the internet – a crucial avenue for free speech and the free press. Founded in late 2023 by Egyptian journalist, writer, podcaster, and activist Mirna El Helbawi, Connecting Humanity collects and distributes embedded SIMs (eSIMs), a software version of the physical chip used to connect a phone to cellular networks and the internet. Connecting Humanity has collected hundreds of thousands of eSims from around the world and distributed them to people in Gaza, providing a lifeline for many caught up in Israel’s war on Hamas. People in crisis zones rely upon the free flow of information to survive, and restoring internet access in places where other communications infrastructure has been destroyed helps with dissemination of life-saving information and distribution of humanitarian aid, ensures that everyone’s stories can be heard, and enables continued educational and cultural contact. El Helbawi previously worked as an editor at 7 Ayam Magazine and as a radio host at Egypt’s NRJ Group; she was shortlisted for the Arab Journalism Award in 2016, and she created the podcast Helbing. 

404 Media: Fearless Journalism 

As the media landscape in general and tech media in particular keeps shrinking, 404 Media — launched in August 2023 — has tirelessly forged ahead with incisive investigative reports, deep-dive features, blogs, and scoops about topics such as hacking, cybersecurity, cybercrime, sex, artificial intelligence, consumer rights, government and law enforcement surveillance, privacy, and the democratization of the internet. Co-founders Jason Koebler, Sam Cole, Joseph Cox, and Emanuel Maiberg all worked together at Vice Media’s Motherboard, but after that site's parent company filed for bankruptcy in May 2023, the four journalists resolved to go out on their own and build what Maiberg has called "very much a website by humans, for humans about technology. It’s not about the business of technology — it’s about how it impacts real people in the real world.” Among many examples, 404 Media has uncovered a privacy issue in the New York subway system that let stalkers track peoples’ movements, causing the MTA to shut down the feature; investigated a platform being used to generate non-consensual pornography with AI, causing the platform to make changes limiting abuse; and reported on dangerously inaccurate AI-generated books that Amazon then removed from sale. 

 To register for this event: https://www.eff.org/event/eff-awards-2024 

For past honorees: https://www.eff.org/awards/past-winners 

BOSTON—A citizen journalists’ group represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a federal lawsuit today against a Massachusetts community-access television company for falsely convincing YouTube to take down video clips of city government meetings.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts by Channel 781, an association of citizen journalists founded in 2021 to report on Waltham, MA, municipal affairs via its YouTube channel. The Waltham Community Access Corp.’s misrepresentation of copyright claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) led YouTube to temporarily deactivate Channel 781, making its work disappear from the internet last September just five days before an important municipal election, the suit says. 

“WCAC knew it had no right to stop people from using video recordings of public meetings, but asked YouTube to shut us down anyway,” Channel 781 cofounder Josh Kastorf said. “Democracy relies on an informed public, and there must be consequences for anyone who abuses the DMCA to silence journalists and cut off people’s access to government.” 

Channel 781 is a nonprofit, volunteer-run effort, and all of its content is available for free. Its posts include videos of its members reporting on news affecting the city, editorial statements, discussions in a talk-show format, and interviews. It also posts short video excerpts of meetings of the Waltham city council and other local government bodies. 

Waltham Community Access Corp. (WCAC) operates two cable television channels:  WCAC-TV is a Community Access station that provides programming geared towards the interests of local residents, businesses, and organizations, and MAC-TV is a Government Access station that provides coverage of municipal meetings, events, and special government-related programming. 

Some city meeting video clips that Channel 781 posted to YouTube were short excerpts from videos recorded by WCAC and first posted to WCAC’s website. Channel 781 posted them on YouTube to highlight newsworthy statements by city officials, to provoke discussion and debate, and to make the information more accessible to the public, including to people with disabilities. 

The DMCA notice and takedown process lets copyright holders ask websites to take down user-uploaded material that infringes their copyrights. Although Kastorf had explained to WCAC’s executive director that Channel 781’s use of the government meeting clips was a fair use under copyright law, WCAC sent three copyright infringement notices to YouTube referencing 15 specific Channel 781 videos, leading YouTube to deactivate the account and render all of its content inaccessible. YouTube didn’t restore access to the videos until two months later, after a lengthy intervention by EFF. 

The lawsuit—which seeks damages and injunctive relief—says WCAC knew, should have known, or failed to consider that the government meeting clips were a fair use of copyrighted material, and so it acted in bad faith when it sent the infringement notices to YouTube. 

“Nobody can use copyright to limit access to videos of public meetings, and those who make bogus claims in order to stifle critical reporting must be held accountable,” said EFF Intellectual Property Litigation Director Mitch Stoltz. “Phony copyright claims must never subvert the public’s right to know, and to report on, what government is doing.” 

For the complaint: https://www.eff.org/document/07-24-2024-channel-781-news-v-waltham-community-access-corporation-complaint

For more on the DMCA: https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca  

For EFF’s Takedown Hall of Shame: https://www.eff.org/takedowns

SAN FRANCISCO—On Wednesday, July 24, at 11:00 am Eastern Time (8:00 am Pacific Time, 5:00 pm CET), experts from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Access Now, Derechos Digitales, Human Rights Watch, and the International Fund for Public Interest Media will brief reporters about the imminent adoption of a global surveillance treaty that threatens human rights around the world, potentially paving the way for a new era of transnational repression.

The virtual briefing will update members of the media ahead of the United Nations’ concluding session of treaty negotiations, scheduled for July 29-August 9 in New York, to possibly finalize and adopt what started out as a treaty to combat cybercrime.

Despite repeated warnings and recommendations by human rights organizations, journalism and industry groups, cybersecurity experts, and digital rights defenders to add human rights safeguards and rein in the treaty’s broad scope and expansive surveillance powers, UN Member States are expected to adopt the Russian-backed, deeply flawed draft.

The experts will discuss the draft treaty in terms of shifts in geopolitical power, abuse of cybercrime laws, and challenges posed by the rising influence of Russia and China. A question-and-answer session will follow speaker presentations.  

WHAT:
Virtual media briefing on UN surveillance treaty

HOW:
To join the news conference remotely, please register from the following link to receive the webinar ID and password:
https://eff.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwkd-GsrzoiH9Jt3gsl2CJ55Xv0hBDguxW5

SPEAKERS:
Tirana Hassan, Executive Director, Human Rights Watch
Paloma Lara-Castro, Public Policy Coordinator, Derechos Digitales
Khadija Patel, Journalist in Residence, International Fund for Public Interest Media
Katitza Rodriguez, Policy Director for Global Policy, EFF
Moderator: Raman Jit Singh Chima, Global Cybersecurity Lead and Senior International Counsel, Access Now

WHEN:
Wednesday, July 24, at 11:00 am Eastern Time, 8:00 am Pacific Time, 5:00 pm CET

For EFF’s submissions and Coalition Letters to UN Ad Hoc Committee overseeing treaty negotiations:
https://www.eff.org/pages/submissions#main-content

SAN FRANCISCO — The federal ban on TikTok must be put under the finest judicial microscope to determine its constitutionality, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and others argued in a friend-of-the-court brief filed Wednesday to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. 

The amicus brief says the Court must review the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act — passed by Congress and signed by President Biden in April — with the most demanding legal scrutiny because it imposes a prior restraint that would make it impossible for users to speak, access information, and associate through TikTok. It also directly restricts protected speech and association, and deliberately singles out a particular medium for a blanket prohibition. This demanding First Amendment test must be used even when the government asserts national security concerns. 

The Court should see this law for what it is: “a sweeping ban on free expression that triggers the most exacting scrutiny under the First Amendment,” the brief argues, adding it will be extremely difficult for the government to justify this total ban. 

Joining EFF in this amicus brief are the Freedom of the Press Foundation, TechFreedom, Media Law Resource Center, Center for Democracy and Technology, First Amendment Coalition, and Freedom to Read Foundation. 

TikTok hosts a wide universe of expressive content from musical performances and comedy to politics and current events, the brief notes, and with more than 150 million users in the United States and 1.6 billion users worldwide, the platform hosts enormous national and international communities that most U.S. users cannot readily reach elsewhere. It plays an especially important and outsized role for minority communities seeking to foster solidarity online and to highlight issues vital to them. 

“The First Amendment protects not only TikTok’s US users, but TikTok itself, which posts its own content and makes editorial decisions about what user content to carry and how to curate it for each individual user,” the brief argues.  

Congress’s content-based justifications for the ban make it clear that the government is targeting TikTok because it finds speech that Americans receive from it to be harmful, and simply invoking national security without clearly demonstrating a threat doesn’t overcome the ban’s unconstitutionality, the brief argues. 

“Millions of Americans use TikTok every day to share and receive ideas, information, opinions, and entertainment from other users around the world lies, and that’s squarely within the protections of the First Amendment,” EFF Civil Liberties Director David Greene said. “By barring all speech on the platform before it can happen, the law effects the kind of prior restraint that the Supreme Court has rejected for the past century as unconstitutional in all but the rarest cases.” 

For the brief: https://www.eff.org/document/06-26-2024-eff-et-al-amicus-brief-tiktok-v-garland

For EFF’s stance on TikTok bans: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/03/government-hasnt-justified-tiktok-ban 

SAN FRANCISCO—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce today that Tarah Wheeler — a social scientist studying international conflict, an author, and a poker player who is CEO of the cybersecurity compliance company Red Queen Dynamics — has joined EFF’s Board of Directors. 

Wheeler has served on EFF’s advisory board since June 2020. She is the Senior Fellow for Global Cyber Policy at Council on Foreign Relations and was elected to Life Membership at CFR in 2023. She is an inaugural contributing cybersecurity expert for the Washington Post, and a Foreign Policy contributor on cyber warfare. She is the author of the best-selling “Women In Tech: Take Your Career to The Next Level With Practical Advice And Inspiring Stories” (2016). 

“I am very excited to have Tarah bring her judgment, her technical expertise and her enthusiasm to EFF’s Board,” EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn said. “She has supported us in many ways before now, including creating and hosting the ‘Betting on Your Digital Rights: EFF Benefit Poker Tournament at DEF CON,’ which will have its third year this summer. Now we get to have her in a governance role as well.” 

"I am deeply honored to join the Board of Directors at the Electronic Frontier Foundation,” Wheeler said. “EFF's mission to defend civil liberties in the digital world is more critical than ever, and I am humbled to be invited to serve in this work. EFF has been there for me and other information security researchers when we needed a champion the most. Together, we will continue to fight for the rights and freedoms that ensure a free and open internet for all." 

Wheeler has been a US/UK Fulbright Scholar in Cyber Security and Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at the University of Oxford, the Brookings Institution’s contributing cybersecurity editor, a Cyber Project Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University‘s Kennedy School of Government, and an International Security Fellow at New America leading a new international cybersecurity capacity building project with the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. She has been Head of Offensive Security & Technical Data Privacy at Splunk & Senior Director of Engineering and Principal Security Advocate at Symantec Website Security. She has led projects at Microsoft Game Studios (Halo and Lips) and architected systems at encrypted mobile communications firm Silent Circle. She has two cashes and $4,722 in lifetime earnings in the World Series of Poker. 

Members of the Board of Directors ensure EFF’s sustainability by adopting sound, ethical, and legal governance and financial management policies so that the organization has adequate resources to advance its mission.  

Shari Steele — who had been on EFF’s Board since 2015 when she ceased being EFF’s Executive Director — has rotated off the Board. Gigi Sohn has been elected Chair of the Board. 

For the full roster of EFF’s Board of Directors: https://www.eff.org/about/board

WASHINGTON, DC—Matthew Guariglia, a Senior Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), has been named a National Governing Institutions Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.  

This multi-month residential fellowship is designed to support scholars working on research that can impact policy making. Guariglia—who won this fellowship in his personal capacity, outside of his work with EFF—will work on a new book about the dramatic increase of the U.S. government's ability to collect and store information on individuals and how it has used that information for good and ill, from Civil War military pensions to National Security Agency mass surveillance. The book is tentatively titled “Burn the Files: Surveillance, Information, and Power in the United States.” Guariglia will continue in his role at EFF during the fellowship, although the project is separate. 

The Kluge Center was created to provide space to better understand and address the challenges facing democracies in the 21st century by bridging the gap between scholarship and the policymaking community. The center invites into residence top thinkers from around the world to distill wisdom from the rich resources of the Library of Congress and to foster mutually enriching relationships with lawmakers and other policy leaders. 

"Behind a number of destructive American institutions—like Chinese exclusion, ‘red scare’ hysteria, mass incarceration, and digital mass surveillance—have been people sifting through paperwork and organizing files,” Guariglia said.  

“Over the last 150 years, the U.S. government has constantly been increasing its capacity to collect information, either through bureaucratic procedure or surveillance, and then storing and organizing that information in ways that have often made marginalized groups more vulnerable to state intervention,” he said. “I hope more research and learning from the past can lead us to a future where the government's management of our information can be done in a responsible way to everyone's benefit and not used in a punitive way that erodes trust in key institutions." 

For Matthew Guariglia’s bio and photo: https://www.eff.org/about/staff/dr-matthew-guariglia-0 

For more about the Kluge Center: https://www.loc.gov/programs/john-w-kluge-center/about-this-program/about-the-kluge-center/ 

SAN FRANCISCO—Sensor towers controlled by AI, drones launched from truck-bed catapults, vehicle-tracking devices disguised as traffic cones—all are part of an arsenal of technologies that comprise the expanding U.S surveillance strategy along the U.S.-Mexico border, revealed in a new EFF zine for advocates, journalists, academics, researchers, humanitarian aid workers, and borderland residents.

Formally released today and available for download online in English and Spanish, “Surveillance Technology at the U.S.-Mexico Border” is a 36-page comprehensive guide to identifying the growing system of surveillance towers, aerial systems, and roadside camera networks deployed by U.S.-law enforcement agencies along the Southern border, allowing for the real-time tracking of people and vehicles.

The devices and towers—some hidden, camouflaged, or moveable—can be found in heavily populated urban areas, small towns, fields, farmland, highways, dirt roads, and deserts in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.

The zine grew out of work by EFF’s border surveillance team, which involved meetings with immigrant rights groups and journalists, research into government procurement documents, and trips to the border. The team located, studied, and documented spy tech deployed and monitored by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), National Guard, and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), often working in collaboration with local law enforcement agencies.

“Our team learned that while many people had an abstract understanding of the so-called ‘virtual wall,’ the actual physical infrastructure was largely unknown to them,” said EFF Director of Investigations Dave Maass. “In some cases, people had seen surveillance towers, but mistook them for cell phone towers, or they’d seen an aerostat flying in the sky and not known it was part of the U.S. border strategy.

“That's why we put together this zine; it serves as a field guide to spotting and identifying the large range of technologies that are becoming so ubiquitous that they are almost invisible,” said Maass.

The zine also includes a copy off EFF’s pocket guide to crossing the U.S. border and protecting information on smart phones, computers, and other digital devices.

The zine is available for republication and remixing under EFF’s Creative Commons Attribution License and features photography by Colter Thomas and Dugan Meyer, whose exhibit “Infrastructures of Control,”—which incorporates some of EFF’s border research—opened in April at the University of Arizona. EFF has previously released a gallery of images of border surveillance that are available for publications to reuse, as well as a living map of known surveillance towers that make up the so-called “virtual wall.”

To download the zine: https://www.eff.org/pages/zine-surveillance-technology-us-mexico-border

For more on border surveillance: https://www.eff.org/issues/border-surveillance-technology

For EFF’s searchable Atlas of Surveillance: https://atlasofsurveillance.org/ 

LAS VEGAS — The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of partners urged a court to protect default encrypted messaging and children’s privacy and security in a brief filed today.

The brief by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Nevada, the EFF, Stanford Internet Observatory Research Scholar Riana Pfefferkorn, and six other organizations asks the court to reject a request by Nevada’s attorney general to stop Meta from offering end-to-end encryption by default to Facebook Messenger users under 18 in the state. The brief was also signed by Access Now, Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), Fight for the Future, Internet Society, Mozilla, and Signal Messenger LLC.

Communications are safer when third parties can’t listen in on them. That’s why the EFF and others who care about privacy pushed Meta for years to make end-to-end encryption the default option in Messenger. Meta finally made the change, but Nevada wants to turn back the clock. As the brief notes, end-to-end encryption “means that even if someone intercepts the messages—whether they are a criminal, a domestic abuser, a foreign despot, or law enforcement—they will not be able to decipher or access the message.” The state of Nevada, however, bizarrely argues that young people would be better off without this protection.

“Encryption is the best tool we have for safeguarding our privacy and security online — and privacy and security are especially important for young people,” said EFF Surveillance Litigation Director Andrew Crocker. “Nevada’s argument that children need to be ‘protected’ from securely communicating isn’t just baffling; it’s dangerous.”

As explained in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the EFF and others today, encryption is one of the best ways to reclaim our privacy and security in a digital world full of cyberattacks and security breaches. It is increasingly being deployed across the internet as a way to protect users and data. For children and their families especially, encrypted communication is one of the strongest safeguards they have against malicious misuse of their private messages — a safeguard Nevada seeks to deny them.

“The European Court of Human Rights recently rejected a Russian law that would have imposed similar requirements on services that offer end-to-end message encryption – finding that it violated human rights and EU law to deny people the security and privacy that encryption provides,” said EFF’s Executive Director Cindy Cohn. “Nevada’s attempt should be similarly rejected.”

In its motion to the court, Nevada argues that it is necessary to block end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger because it can impede some criminal investigations involving children. This ignores that law enforcement can and does conduct investigations involving encrypted messages, which can be reported by users and accessed from either the sender or recipient’s devices. It also ignores law enforcement’s use of the tremendous amount of additional information about users that Meta routinely collects.

The brief notes that co-amicus Pfeffercorn recently authored a study that confirmed that Nevada does not, in fact, need to block encryption to do its investigations. The study found that “content-oblivious” investigation methods are “considered more useful than monitoring the contents of users’ communications when it comes to detecting nearly every kind of online abuse.” 

“The court should reject Nevada’s motion,” said EFF’s Crocker. “Making children more vulnerable in just to make law enforcement investigators’ jobs slightly easier is an uneceesary and dangerous trade off.”

For the brief: https://www.eff.org/document/nevada-v-meta-amicus-brief

SAN FRANCISCO—California Attorney General Rob Bonta should crack down on police agencies that still violate Californians’ privacy by sharing automated license plate reader information with out-of-state government agencies, putting abortion seekers and providers at particular risk, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the state’s American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) affiliates urged in a letter to Bonta today. 

In October 2023, Bonta issued a legal interpretation and guidance clarifying that a 2016 state law, SB 34, prohibits California’s local and state police from sharing information collected from automated license plate readers (ALPR) with out-of-state or federal agencies. However, despite the Attorney General’s definitive stance, dozens of law enforcement agencies have signaled their intent to continue defying the law. 

The EFF and ACLU letter lists 35 specific police agencies which either have informed the civil liberties organizations that they plan to keep sharing ALPR information with out-of-state law enforcement, or have failed to confirm their compliance with the law in response to inquiries by the organizations. 

“We urge your office to explore all potential avenues to ensure that state and local law enforcement agencies immediately comply,” the letter said. “We are deeply concerned that the information could be shared with agencies that do not respect California’s commitment to civil rights and liberties and are not covered by California’s privacy protections.” 

ALPR systems collect and store location information about drivers, including dates, times, and locations. This sensitive information can reveal where individuals work, live, associate, worship, or seek reproductive health services and other medical care. Sharing any ALPR information with out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies has been forbidden by the California Civil Code since enactment of SB 34 in 2016.  

And sharing this data with law enforcement in states that criminalize abortion also undermines California’s extensive efforts to protect reproductive health privacy, especially a 2022 law (AB 1242) prohibiting state and local agencies from providing abortion-related information to out-of-state agencies. The UCLA Center on Reproductive Health, Law and Policy estimates that between 8,000 and 16,100 people will travel to California each year for reproductive care. 

An EFF investigation involving hundreds of public records requests uncovered that many California police departments continued sharing records containing residents’ detailed driving profiles with out-of-state agencies. EFF and the ACLUs of Northern and Southern California in March 2023 wrote to more than 70 such agencies to demand they comply with state law. While many complied, many others have not. 

“We appreciate your office’s statement on SB 34 and your efforts to protect the privacy and civil rights of everyone in California,” today’s letter said. “Nevertheless, it is clear that many law enforcement agencies continue to ignore your interpretation of the law by continuing to share ALPR information with out-of-state and federal agencies. This violation of SB 34 will continue to imperil marginalized communities across the country, and abortion seekers, providers, and facilitators will be at greater risk of undue criminalization and prosecution.” 

For the letter to Bonta: https://www.eff.org/document/01-31-2024-letter-california-ag-rob-bonta-re-enforcing-sb34-alprs 

For the letters sent last year to noncompliant California police agencies: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/civil-liberties-groups-demand-california-police-stop-sharing-drivers-location-data 

For information on how ALPRs threaten abortion access: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/09/automated-license-plate-readers-threaten-abortion-access-heres-how-policymakers 

For general information about ALPRs: https://sls.eff.org/technologies/automated-license-plate-readers-alprs

SAN FRANCISCO—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today unveiled its new Street Level Surveillance hub, a standalone website featuring expanded and updated content on various technologies that law enforcement agencies commonly use to invade Americans’ privacy. 

The hub has new or updated pages on automated license plate readers, biometric surveillance, body-worn cameras, camera networks, cell-site simulators, drones and robots, face recognition, electronic monitoring, gunshot detection, forensic extraction tools, police access to the Internet of Things, predictive policing, community surveillance apps, real-time location tracking, social media monitoring, and police databases.  

It also features links to the latest articles by EFF’s Street Level Surveillance working group, consisting of attorneys, policy analysts, technologists, and activists with extensive experience in this field. 

“People are surveilled by police at more times and in more ways than ever before, and understanding this panopticon is the first step in protecting our rights,” said EFF Senior Policy Analyst Dr. Matthew Guariglia. “Our new hub is a ‘Field Guide to Police Surveillance;’ providing a reference source on recognizing the most-used police spy technology. But more than that it is a vital, constantly updated news feed offering cutting-edge, detailed analysis of law enforcement’s uses and abuses of these devices.” 

The new hub also interfaces with several of EFF’s ongoing projects, including: 

• The Atlas of Surveillance, EFF’s collaboration with the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno to map more than 12,000 police surveillance technologies in use across America; and 
• Spot the Surveillance, an open-source educational virtual reality tool to help people identify street-level surveillance in their community. 

"We hope community groups, advocacy organizations, defense attorneys, and concerned individuals will use the hub to stay abreast of the latest legal cases and technological developments, and share their own stories with us,” Guariglia said. 

Visit EFF’s new Street Level Surveillance hub at https://sls.eff.org/ 

SAN FRANCISCO—Keyword warrants that let police indiscriminately sift through search engine databases are unconstitutional dragnets that target free speech, lack particularity and probable cause, and violate the privacy of countless innocent people, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other organizations argued in a brief filed today to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. 

Everyone deserves to search online without police looking over their shoulder, yet millions of innocent Americans’ privacy rights are at risk in Commonwealth v. Kurtz—only the second case of its kind to reach a state’s highest court. The brief filed by EFF, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), and the Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (PACDL) challenges the constitutionality of a keyword search warrant issued by the police to Google. The case involves a massive invasion of Google users’ privacy, and unless the lower court’s ruling is overturned, it could be applied to any user using any search engine. 

“Keyword search warrants are totally incompatible with constitutional protections for privacy and freedom of speech and expression,” said EFF Surveillance Litigation Director Andrew Crocker. “All keyword warrants—which target our speech when we seek information on a search engine—have the potential to implicate innocent people who just happen to be searching for something an officer believes is somehow linked to a crime. Dragnet warrants that target speech simply have no place in a democracy.” 

Users have come to rely on search engines to routinely seek answers to sensitive or unflattering questions that they might never feel comfortable asking a human confidant. Google keeps detailed information on every search query it receives, however, resulting in a vast record of users’ most private and personal thoughts, opinions, and associations that police seek to access by merely demanding the identities of all users who searched for specific keywords. 

Because this data is so broad and detailed, keyword search warrants are especially concerning: Unlike typical warrants for electronic information, these do not target specific people or accounts. Instead, they require a provider to search its entire reserve of user data to identify any and all users or devices who searched for words or phrases specified by police. As in this case, the police generally have no identified suspects when they seek such a warrant; instead, the sole basis is the officer’s hunch that the perpetrator might have searched for something related to the crime.  

This violates the Pennsylvania Constitution’s Article I, Section 8 and the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, EFF’s brief argued, both of which were inspired by 18th-century writs of assistance—general warrants that let police conduct exploratory rummaging through a person’s belongings. These keyword search warrants also are especially harmful because they target protected speech and the related right to receive information, the brief argued. 

"Keyword search warrants are digital dragnets giving the government permission to rummage through our most private information, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court should find them unconstitutional,” said NACDL Fourth Amendment Center Litigation Director Michael Price. 

“Search engines are an indispensable tool for finding information on the Internet, and the ability to use them—and use them anonymously—is critical to a free society,” said Crocker. “If providers can be forced to disclose users’ search queries in response to a dragnet warrant, it will chill users from seeking out information about anything that police officers might conceivably choose as a searchable keyword.” 

For the brief: https://www.eff.org/document/commonwealth-v-kurtz-amicus-brief-pennsylvania-supreme-court-1-5-2024

For a similar case in Colorado: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/10/colorado-supreme-court-upholds-keyword-search-warrant 

WASHINGTON, DC—The Supreme Court should clarify standards for determining if the government permissibly advised or convinced social media companies to censor content from 2020 to 2022, or impermissibly coerced or threatened sites in violation of the First Amendment, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in a brief filed today. 

“Government co-option of content moderation systems is a serious threat to freedom of speech,” said EFF Civil Liberties Director David Greene. “But there are clearly times when it is permissible, appropriate, and even good public policy for government agencies and officials to inform, communicate with, attempt to persuade, or even criticize sites—free of coercion—about the user speech they publish.”  

In Murthy v. Missouri, Louisiana, Missouri, and several individuals have accused federal agencies and officials of illegal “jawboning”—urging private persons and entities to censor another’s speech. The suit alleges agencies pushed the platforms to censor content about COVID safety measures and vaccines, elections, and Hunter Biden’s laptop, among other issues. 

In a brief filed today with the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), EFF urged the court to rely on the First Amendment test in its 1963 Bantam Books v. Sullivan ruling to determine whether the government contacts were permissible or impermissible. The test says the Constitution bans not only direct government demands for censorship, but also indirect means, like hinting at legal sanctions to intimidate or coerce a private party into censorship.   

In Bantam, book publishers sued a Rhode Island commission which—in an attempt to suppress “obscene” material—used threats of state prosecution to keep books considered “objectional” from being distributed. The commission’s actions amounted to informal censorship, the court found. But the test also recognizes that not every communication to an intermediary about users’ speech is unconstitutional.  

Courts must look at all factors, including whether the contacts are from law enforcement, convey coercion or threats of adverse consequences, or were solicited to gain the government’s input or expertise, EFF and CDT said in their brief. The Supreme Court should provide adequate guidance to help courts, agencies, and private parties distinguish between attempts to convince and attempts to coerce. 

In the Murthy case, a federal judge sided with the states and issued an injunction limiting government contacts with social media platforms. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit partially upheld the injunction. Neither court adequately distinguished between improper and proper communications, EFF and CDT said in their brief.  

“This court must independently review the record and make the searching distinctions that the lower courts did not,” said Greene.  

Kate Ruane, Director of CDT's Free Expression Project, agreed that “lower courts' sweeping opinions in Murthy have made the line between permissible government attempts to persuade social media platforms and unconstitutional coercion less clear than ever.” 

“We're asking the Supreme Court to clarify when and how the government can appropriately communicate with platforms while protecting speech, which would allow useful information-sharing to resume, and encourage accountability and transparency in government-platform interactions," said Ruane. 

For the brief: https://www.eff.org/document/murthy-v-missouri-amicus-brief

For EFF’s earlier brief to the Fifth Circuit appeals court: https://www.eff.org/document/missouri-v-biden-amicus-brief 

For more on Murthy v. Missouri: https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/murthy-v-missouri-2/

SAN FRANCISCO—A cartel of major publishing companies must not be allowed to criminalize fair-use library lending, the Internet Archive argued in an appellate brief filed today. 

The Internet Archive is a San Francisco-based 501(c)(3) non-profit library which preserves and provides access to cultural artifacts of all kinds in electronic form. The brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Morrison Foerster on the Archive’s behalf explains that the Archive’s Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program is a lawful fair use that preserves traditional library lending in the digital world. 

"Why should everyone care about this lawsuit? Because it is about preserving the integrity of our published record, where the great books of our past meet the demands of our digital future,” said Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive. “This is not merely an individual struggle; it is a collective endeavor for society and democracy struggling with our digital transition. We need secure access to the historical record. We need every tool that libraries have given us over the centuries to combat the manipulation and misinformation that has now become even easier.”

“This appeal underscores the role of libraries in supporting universal access to information—a right that transcends geographic location, socioeconomic status, disability, or any other barriers,” Kahle added. “Our digital lending program is not just about lending responsibly; it’s about strengthening democracy by creating informed global citizens."

Through CDL, the Internet Archive and other libraries make and lend out digital scans of print books in their collections, subject to strict technical controls. Each book loaned via CDL has already been bought and paid for, so authors and publishers have already been fully compensated for those books; in fact, concrete evidence shows that the Archive’s digital lending—which is limited to the Archive’s members—does not and will not harm the market for books. 

Nonetheless, publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House sued the Archive in 2020, claiming incorrectly that CDL violates their copyrights. A judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in March granted the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment, leading to this appeal. 

The district court’s “rejection of IA’s fair use defense was wrongly premised on the supposition that controlled digital lending is equivalent to indiscriminately posting scanned books online,” the brief argues. “That error caused it to misapply each of the fair use factors, give improper weight to speculative claims of harm, and discount the tremendous public benefits controlled digital lending offers. Given those benefits and the lack of harm to rightsholders, allowing IA’s use would promote the creation and sharing of knowledge—core copyright purposes—far better than forbidding it.”

The brief explains how the Archive’s digital library has facilitated education, research, and scholarship in numerous ways. In 2019, for example, the Archive received federal funding to digitize and lend books about internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. In 2022, volunteer librarians curated a collection of books that have been banned by many school districts but are available through the Archive’s library. Teachers have used the Archive to provide students access to books for research that were not available locally. And the Archive’s digital library has made online resources like Wikipedia more reliable by allowing articles to link directly to the particular page in a book that supports an asserted fact and by allowing readers to immediately borrow the book to verify it. 

For the brief: https://www.eff.org/document/internet-archive-opening-brief-us-court-appeals-second-circuit

For more on the case: https://www.eff.org/cases/hachette-v-internet-archive 

For the Internet Archive's blog post: https://blog.archive.org/2023/12/15/internet-archive-defends-digital-rights-for-libraries/

WASHINGTON D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and five organizations defending free speech today urged the Supreme Court to strike down laws in Florida and Texas that let the states dictate certain speech social media sites must carry, violating the sites’ First Amendment rights to curate content they publish—a protection that benefits users by creating speech forums accommodating their diverse interests, viewpoints, and beliefs.

The court’s decisions about the constitutionality of the Florida and Texas laws—the first laws to inject government mandates into social media content moderation—will have a profound impact on the future of free speech. At stake is whether Americans’ speech on social media must adhere to government rules or be free of government interference.

Social media content moderation is highly problematic, and users are rightly often frustrated by the process and concerned about private censorship. But retaliatory laws allowing the government to interject itself into the process, in any form, raises serious First Amendment, and broader human rights, concerns, said EFF in a brief filed with the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, Authors Alliance, Fight for The Future, and First Amendment Coalition.

“Users are far better off when publishers make editorial decisions free from government mandates,” said EFF Civil Liberties Director David Greene. “These laws would force social media sites to publish user posts that are at best, irrelevant, and, at worst, false, abusive, or harassing.

“The Supreme Court needs to send a strong message that the government can’t force online publishers to give their favored speech special treatment,” said Greene.

Social media sites should do a better job at being transparent about content moderation and self-regulate by adhering to the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation. But the Principles are not a template for government mandates.

The Texas law broadly mandates that online publishers can’t decline to publish others’ speech based on anyone’s viewpoint expressed on or off the platform, even when that speech violates the sites' rules. Content moderation practices that can be construed as viewpoint-based, which is virtually all of them, are barred by the law. Under it, sites that bar racist material, knowing their users object to it, would be forced to carry it. Sites catering to conservatives couldn’t block posts pushing liberal agendas.

The Florida law requires that social media sites grant special treatment to electoral candidates and “journalistic enterprises” and not apply their regular editorial practices to them, even if they violate the platforms' rules. The law gives preferential treatment to political candidates, preventing publishers at any point before an election from canceling their accounts or downgrading their posts or posts about them, giving them free rein to spread misinformation or post about content outside the site’s subject matter focus. Users not running for office, meanwhile, enjoy no similar privilege.

What’s more, the Florida law requires sites to disable algorithms with respect to political candidates, so their posts appear chronologically in users’ feeds, even if a user prefers a curated feed. And, in addition to dictating what speech social media sites must publish, the laws also place limits on sites' ability to amplify content, use algorithmic ranking, and add commentary to posts.

“The First Amendment generally prohibits government restrictions on speech based on content and viewpoint and protects private publisher ability to select what they want to say,” said Greene. “The Supreme Court should not grant states the power to force their preferred speech on users who would choose not to see it.”

“As a coalition that represents creators, readers, and audiences who rely on a diverse, vibrant, and free social media ecosystem for art, expression, and knowledge, the National Coalition Against Censorship hopes the Court will reaffirm that government control of media platforms is inherently at odds with an open internet, free expression, and the First Amendment,” said Lee Rowland, Executive Director of National Coalition Against Censorship.

“Woodhull is proud to lend its voice in support of online freedom and against government censorship of social media platforms,” said Ricci Joy Levy, President and CEO at Woodhull Freedom Foundation. “We understand the important freedoms that are at stake in this case and implore the Court to make the correct ruling, consistent with First Amendment jurisprudence.”

"Just as the press has the First Amendment right to exercise editorial discretion, social media platforms have the right to curate or moderate content as they choose. The government has no business telling private entities what speech they may or may not host or on what terms," said David Loy, Legal Director of the First Amendment Coalition.

For the brief:
https://www.eff.org/document/eff-brief-moodyvnetchoice

WASHINGTON, DC—A 1998 federal law that criminalizes access to digital works for lawful purposes—chilling free expression and impeding scientific research—is unenforceable because it’s too broad and violates the First Amendment, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and co-counsel Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati argued in an appeals court brief filed today. 

The brief, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in the case of Green v. Department of Justice, argued Section 1201(a) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is constitutionally invalid on its face. The case arises after 25 years of people having to petition the Copyright Office for permission to exercise their fair use and other rights in copyrighted works that have been put under digital locks.  

“It has burdened Americans’ First Amendment-protected right to access and learn from digital works, including works they already own or embedded in physical objects they own,” the brief argued. “It has also burdened their rights to create their own protected expression, whether that expression includes fair-use copying of portions of others’ works, or reflects the uncopyrightable facts and ideas in those works.” 

EFF and co-counsel filed this lawsuit in 2016 against the U.S. government on behalf of security researcher Matthew Green and technologist Andrew “bunnie” Huang, both of whom pursue projects that benefit the public and are perfectly lawful except for DMCA’s anti-speech provisions, which block their ability to develop and publish their work based upon fair use and other copyright exemptions.  

The appeals court issued a narrow ruling in December 2022 on whether the First Amendment protected the plaintiffs’ rights to publish code that included instructions for circumventing encryption in order to read and build upon lawfully-acquired software and video. But no court has yet considered whether the law overall creates an unconstitutional speech-licensing regime, nor considered the 25 years of accumulated evidence that the law—passed in 1998 before the web became as ubiquitous as it is now—is overbroad because its impact falls predominantly on legitimate and important speech.  

Section 1201’s anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions make it illegal for people to access even lawfully-purchased copyrighted material such as films, songs, and the computer code that controls vehicles, devices, and appliances, whenever such access requires bypassing encryption or another access-control technology. Enacted out of a belief that it was necessary to combat copyright infringement, this ban applies even where people want to make non-infringing fair uses of such materials or engage in speech that has nothing to do with copyright. Since infringers already face steep civil and criminal penalties, the primary impact of this law has been to stifle lawful speech. 

Congress knew that the ban would impact legitimate speech, reaching far beyond copyright infringement. But instead of narrowing the provision, it created a process that required people wishing to exercise their rights to petition the Librarian of Congress for an exemption—a process accessible only once every three years. EFF argues that this provision is also unconstitutional, since it allows the Copyright Office to decide that some completely legal speech is still not allowed. 

“This supposed ‘safety valve’ is not only onerous, slow, and biased, it is an unconstitutional speech-licensing regime,” the brief argued. “And because it lacks clear, definite standards and the procedural safeguards required by the First Amendment, it has generated rules that improperly discriminate against certain types of expression and certain speakers.” 

Green, a professor of computer science and applied cryptography at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, studies the security of computer systems and teaches others how to do the same; his work requires finding weaknesses in code, which requires that he read the code in question. Huang, a prominent computer scientist and inventor, and his company Alphamax LLC, are developing devices for editing and analyzing digital video streams that would let people make innovative, real-time uses of their paid video content, such as automatically identifying video subjects, improving accessibility, or captioning a presidential debate with a running comment field from social media—all of which are easy to do if you are able to read the video data into a computer but impossible to do at the same quality otherwise.  

For the brief:  https://www.eff.org/document/green-v-doj-opening-brief-11-29-2023

For more about this case: https://www.eff.org/cases/green-v-us-department-justice

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today asked the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling undermining Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination and find that constitutional safeguards prevent police from forcing people to provide or use passcodes for their cell phones so officers can access the tremendous amount of private information on phones.

At stake is the fundamental principle that the government can’t force people to testify against themselves, including by revealing or using their passcodes.

“When the government demands someone turn over or enter their passcode, it is forcing that person to disclose the contents of their mind and provide a link in a chain of possibly incriminating evidence,” said EFF Surveillance Litigation Director Andrew Crocker. “Whenever the government calls on someone to use memorized information to aid in their own prosecution—whether it be a cellphone passcode, a combination to a safe, or even their birthdate—the Fifth Amendment applies.”

The Illinois Supreme Court in the case People v. Sneed erroneously ruled that the Fifth Amendment doesn’t apply to compelled entry of passcodes because they are just a string of numbers memorized by the phone’s owner with minimal independent value—and therefore not a form of testimony. The Illinois court erred further by ruling that the passcode at issue fell under the dubious “forgone conclusion exception” to the Fifth Amendment because the government agents already knew it existed and the defendant knew the code.

Federal and state courts are split on whether the Fifth Amendment prohibits police from compelling individuals to unlock their cell phones so prosecutors can look for incriminating evidence, and when and how the “forgone conclusion exception” applies. Only the Supreme Court can resolve this split, EFF said in a brief today.

“The Supreme Court should find that Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination extends to the digital age and applies to turning over or entering a passcode,” said EFF Staff Attorney Lisa Femia.* “Cell phones hold an unprecedented amount of our private information and device searches have become routine in law enforcement investigations. It’s imperative that the court make clear that the Fifth Amendment doesn’t allow the government to require people to hand over their passcodes and assist in their own prosecution.”

*Admitted in New York and Washington, D.C., only; not admitted in California

For the brief: https://www.eff.org/document/sneed-v-illinois-eff-brief

SAN FRANCISCO—The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) must act to halt sales by Amazon, AliExpress, and other resellers of Android television set-top boxes and mobile devices manufactured by AllWinner and RockChip that have been pre-infected with malware before ever reaching consumers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged Tuesday in a letter to FTC commissioners. 

“We believe that the sale of these devices presents a clear instance of deceptive conduct: the devices are advertised without disclosure of the harms they present. They also expose the buyers to an unfair risk which starts after simply powering the device on and connecting it to the internet,” EFF’s letter says. “Here, where products are sold containing real malware at the point of sale, issuing sanctions to the resellers will provide a powerful incentive for them to pull these products from the market and protect their customers.” 

When first connected to the internet, these infected devices immediately start communicating with botnet command and control servers, the letter explains. Then they connect to a vast click-fraud network—in which bots juice advertising revenue by producing bogus ad clicks—which a recent report by HUMAN Security dubbed BADBOX. This operates in the background of the device, unseen by the buyers; even if buyers do find out about it, they can’t do much to regain control of their devices without extensive technical know-how. 

The malware also lets its makers, or those to whom they sell access, use buyers’ internet connections as proxies—meaning that any nefarious deeds will look as though they came from the buyers, possibly exposing them to significant legal risk. 

Despite widespread reporting on these compromised devices, they are still being sold by Amazon, AliExpress, and other vendors. 

“We believe the resellers of these devices bear some responsibility for the broad scope of this attack and for failing to create a reliable pathway for researchers to notify them of these issues,” the letter reads. “While it would be impractical for resellers to run comprehensive security audits on every device they make available, they should pull these devices from the market once they are revealed and confirmed to include harmful malware.” 

The HUMAN Security report found the malware is a variant of the Triada trojan, installed between the time when a Chinese company manufactured the devices and when they are provided to resellers. This constitutes a supply-chain attack on consumer-based Internet of Things devices, so EFF also sent its letter to Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly. 

“This is the very essence of consumer protection: ensuring that the products we bring into our homes aren’t preset to be hijacked for malicious purposes,” said EFF Senior Staff Technologist William Budington. “We urge the Federal Trade Commission to take swift action.” 

For EFF's letter to the FTC: https://www.eff.org/document/11-14-2023-eff-letter-ftc-re-malware-android-tv-set-top-boxes

For the HUMAN Security report: https://www.humansecurity.com/learn/blog/badbox-peachpit-and-the-fraudulent-device-in-your-delivery-box  

For more background on the problem: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/android-tv-boxes-sold-amazon-come-pre-loaded-malware 

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the Supreme Court today to review and reverse a dangerous ruling allowing the Justice Department to censor X’s ability to publish information about government requests for the platform’s private user data, a decision that undermines at least a hundred years of First Amendment case law on when the government can bar private speech before it is published.

The government has been fighting X, formerly known as Twitter, for nearly a decade to stop it from publishing a 2013 transparency report that would give its users a more complete picture of how many times the government—armed with orders from a secret court and the FBI—demanded customer information for national security surveillance.

Transparency reports have been a bedrock for shining a light on the secretive world of FBI national security letters and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) orders compelling platforms to turn over their users’ private information. The reports disclose aggregate numbers of data requests—not the underlying targets of government requests or other such details—often by country and type of request, allowing users and researchers to see trends in surveillance activity.

Blocking such data prior to publication—a "prior restraint” in legal terms—has long been subject to the most demanding First Amendment protections to ensure that the government is not allowed to be an unreviewable censor stifling individuals’ right to free speech.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in upholding dismissal of X’s lawsuit challenging DOJ’s decision to block the 2013 transparency report, found that a large body of prior restraint law didn’t apply. The court said that gagging companies from publishing numerical data provided “confidentially” as part of a “legitimate government process” doesn’t “present the grave dangers of a censorship system.”

While the case X v. Garland involves a 2013 report, its potential consequences are immediate and far-reaching. Applying the Ninth Circuit standards, virtually anyone who interacts with a government agency could be gagged from speaking publicly about it.

Individuals who had interactions with law enforcement or border officials—such as someone being interviewed as a witness to a crime or someone subjected to police misconduct—could be barred from telling their family or going to the press. This is wrong, and EFF is urging the Supreme Court to set things right.

“The Ninth Circuit decision marked a new low in judicial deference to government demands for secrecy because of national security,” said EFF Surveillance Litigation Director Andrew Crocker. “The undisputed understanding of prior restraint in First Amendment law is that it’s the least tolerable infringement of free speech rights.”

“If allowed to stand, the appeals court ruling opens the door to government unilaterally blocking speech about matters of public interest, while restricting speakers like X to test such gag orders in court,” said EFF Civil Liberties Director David Greene. “The Supreme Court should step in to salvage the prior restraint doctrine and prevent an unacceptable expansion of the government’s power to censor speech.”

For EFF's brief:
https://www.eff.org/document/eff-brief-twitter-vs-garland