In an important victory for California immigrants, abortion seekers, protesters, and everyone else who drives a car, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a legal interpretation and guidance for law enforcement agencies around the state underscoring that it is illegal for police to share data from automated license plate readers (ALPRs) with out-of-state or federal agencies. Bonta acted after EFF, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California sent letters to 71 California police agencies in 22 counties demanding that they stop such data sharing. Not only did this practice violate the California Civil Code (S.B. 34), which plainly prohibits such sharing, but it also undermined California’s extensive efforts to protect reproductive health privacy through A.B. 1242, a law prohibiting state and local agencies from providing abortion-related information to out-of-state agencies. In our letters, we wrote, “Law enforcement officers in anti-abortion jurisdictions who receive the locations of drivers collected by California-based ALPRs may seek to use that information to monitor abortion clinics and the vehicles seen around them and closely track the movements of abortion seekers and providers. This threatens even those obtaining or providing abortions in California, since several anti-abortion states plan to criminalize and prosecute those who seek or assist in out-of-state abortions.” Every California police agency now must follow Bonta’s guidance, review their data sharing, and cut off every out-of-state and federal agency—a huge win for reproductive privacy.

EFF continued our work documenting the wide range of surveillance technologies being rapidly deployed along the U.S.-Mexico border, emphasizing the impacts on civil liberties and human rights of people living, working, or visiting the region. We met with residents, activists, humanitarian organizations, law enforcement officials, and journalists whose work is directly impacted by the expansion of surveillance technology in their communities. EFF released a new map and dataset of more than 390 surveillance towers installed by Customs and Border Protection along the border with Mexico. Compiled using public records, satellite imagery, road trips, and even exploration in virtual reality, EFF’s data serves as a living snapshot of the virtual wall, from the California coast to the lower tip of Texas. We also included locations of proposed new towers and automated license plate readers placed at Border Patrol checkpoints. EFF’s mapping project provides invaluable information for researchers and civil society organizations working to defend human rights and hold governments accountable.

Many of the internet’s ills have one thing in common: They grow out of the business model of widespread corporate surveillance online. EFF published a report, “Privacy First: A Better Way to Address Online Harms,” which outlines our solutions to dismantling this system and explains how doing so will help with harms that, on their face, seem very far afield from privacy. Every year, we encounter ill-conceived bills at the state, federal, and international levels aimed at addressing a wide range of digital topics, such as child safety or artificial intelligence. These scattershot proposals often are rooted in censorship and designed mostly to play to the latest headlines. Instead of this chaotic approach, EFF advocates for a strong, comprehensive data privacy law that would promote privacy, free expression, and security. Our recommendations include:

• No online behavioral ads. Companies must be prohibited from targeting ads to a person based on their online behavior.
• Real minimization. Companies must be prohibited from processing a person’s data, except as strictly necessary to provide what they asked for.
• Strong opt-in consent. Companies must be prohibited from processing a person’s data, except with their informed, voluntary, specific, opt-in consent.
• User rights. Users should have the right to access their data, to port it between platforms, to correct it, and to delete it.
• No preemption by a federal law. States must be free to enact privacy laws that are stronger than the federal baseline, and to meet the challenges of tomorrow that are not foreseeable today.
• Strong enforcement with meaningful impact. People must have a private right of action to sue corporations that violate their statutory privacy rights.
• No pay-for-privacy schemes. Just as you shouldn’t have to trade your privacy for the ability to use a service at all, you shouldn’t have to pay extra for the ability to use it without being surveilled.
• No deceptive design. Companies must be prohibited from presenting people with user interfaces that have the intent or substantial effect of impairing autonomy and choice, sometimes called “dark patterns.”

Our approach supports journalism, protects access to health care, fosters digital justice, limits private data collection to train generative AI, limits foreign government surveillance, and strengthens competition. Comprehensive privacy legislation won’t fix everything, but with this one big step, we can take a bite out of the online harms that threaten us all, and foster a more humane, user-friendly technological future for everyone.

Physical location trackers can be easily slipped surreptitiously into a bag or car, giving stalkers and abusers unprecedented access to a person’s location without their knowledge. EFF has been sounding the alarm about this threat for years, especially as it pertains to survivors of domestic abuse, and has called for an industry-wide standard for detection of this transient hardware to prevent stalking and other abuse. Such standards would greatly improve the ability of both Android and iPhone devices to detect unwanted trackers without additional apps. During the 2023 Google I/O Keynote, Google announced that Android will launch Bluetooth tracker detection for devices that may be “following” you without your knowledge. This is a big improvement beyond the subpar Tracker Detect app provided by Apple in response to Android users being susceptible to AirTag tracking without any tools to discover them. This also covers other devices such as Tile’s trackers. This was announced in tandem with news that Google’s Find My Device network is expanding in ways similar to Apple’s Find My network AirTags expansion, but this time with safety measures.

Better digital product testing along with regulatory oversight can go a long way in mitigating new risks to our security and privacy posed by the influx of “smart” and IOT devices into our everyday lives. EFF technologists found that Dragon Touch KidzPad Y88X 10, a kid’s Android tablet sold on Amazon, came preloaded with malware. For example, KIDOZ and other apps on the tablet collect and send data on usage and the device’s physical attributes to kidoz.net and other domains, including those belonging to apps that are no longer supported. The versions on the tablet were very out of date, meaning that device-specific information shared over primarily insecure web requests can be targeted by bad actors who want to siphon information either on that device or by obtaining the defunct domains the device is communicating with. EFF published our findings and created an easy guide for parents to help keep their kids’ devices and data safe: “How to Secure Your Kid’s Android Device” provides recommendations on parental monitoring, security, safety, and privacy.

EFF launched the Tor University Challenge, a campaign urging higher education institutions to support free, anonymous speech by running a Tor network relay. Made up of volunteer-run relays, the Tor network allows human rights defenders and organizations, at-risk communities, and people experiencing online censorship or government surveillance to browse the unrestricted internet with as much privacy and anonymity as possible. After the challenge’s first 4 months, more than 20 institutions worldwide were running relays.

The decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upholds the idea that we should be able to find, read, and share the text of laws free of registration requirements, fees, and other roadblocks. It’s a long-awaited victory for EFF’s client Public.Resource.org, a nonprofit organization founded in 2007 to make “government information more accessible.” As part of its mission of promoting public access to all kinds of government information, Public Resource acquires and posts online a wide variety of public documents, including standards incorporated into law by reference. These standards include electrical, fire safety, and consumer safety codes mandated by governments, but written by nongovernmental entities like The American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), National Fire Protection Association Inc. (NFPA), and American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE).

ASTM, NFPA, and ASHRAE sued Public Resource in 2013 for copyright and trademark infringement and unfair competition. Regulators at all levels of government frequently incorporate these codes and standards into regulations, making them law, but they are often difficult even to access, much less to share with others, obscuring from view areas of law that profoundly affect our daily life. Even courts have had trouble accessing the laws that they are supposed to apply. The internet lets more people understand and participate in government than ever before—that’s why Public Resource’s work, and this victory that protects access to law and participation in government, are so important. Standards like fire and electrical codes developed by private organizations but incorporated into public law can now be freely disseminated without any liability for copyright infringement.

People around the world have searched for ways to hold companies accountable for building tools used for government repression, ranging from massive surveillance systems to state-sponsored malware. Such technology too often is used to locate, track, and abuse members of vulnerable communities, journalists, and activists. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit cleared a path of legal accountability for American technology companies that facilitate human rights abuses by foreign governments. In a victory for the victims of this oppression, the court allowed victims to sue tech giant Cisco Systems in a long-running case seeking redress for the company’s role in building and deploying the “Golden Shield,” also referred to as “The Great Firewall of China.” It’s a vast surveillance system that Cisco began building in the late 1990s and that the Chinese government used to violate the human rights of disfavored minorities, including members of the Falun Gong religion, who are the plaintiffs in the case. EFF filed multiple amicus briefs in the case, and we applaud the Ninth Circuit appeals court in helping ensure that the key statute in the case—the Alien Tort Statute—remains an important mechanism for holding companies accountable when they choose profit over human lives.

In a victory for transparency in police use of face recognition, a New Jersey appellate court ruled that state prosecutors—who charged a man for armed robbery after the technology showed he was a “possible match” for the suspect—must turn over detailed information about the face scanning software used, including how it works, its source code, and its error rate. EFF, along with Electronic Privacy Information Center and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, filed an amicus brief on behalf of the defendant, arguing that the court should allow robust discovery regarding law enforcement’s use of face recognition technology.

Study after study shows that face recognition algorithms are not always reliable, and that error rates spike significantly when involving faces of people of color—especially Black women—as well as trans and nonbinary people. But despite heightened inaccuracy for members of vulnerable communities often targeted by the police, law enforcement has widely adopted and used this unreliable tool to identify suspects in criminal investigations. Calling face recognition “a novel and untested technology,” the appeals court in State of New Jersey v. Francisco Arteaga held that the defendant would be deprived of due process rights unless he could access the raw materials police used to identify him and test its reliability to build a defense. The inner workings of the face recognition software are vital to impeach witnesses’ identification of him, challenge the state’s investigation, and create reasonable doubt, the court said. The ruling is a clear win for justice, fairness, and transparency.

In a victory for the rights of immigrants and for government transparency, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) must be transparent and respect privacy by producing deidentified data on how it arrests, classifies, detains, and deports immigrants in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The court agreed with plaintiff American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that ICE must also replace Alien Identification Numbers (which would identify individual immigrants) with unique but random identifiers.

The court cited the EFF amicus brief’s many examples of other courts ordering the government to use “anonymization techniques,” including unique identifiers, blurring faces in videos, and scrambling identifying data. The Second Circuit also cited and agreed with EFF’s amicus brief that the E-FOIA Amendments required ICE to substitute unique identifiers because that is the “form or format” ACLU requested and it is “readily reproducible.” The court explained that Congress “expected agencies to take reasonable steps to effect retrieval in the requested form or format, even if that required some conversion of data.” As government agencies increasingly use digital tools to track citizens and immigrants, we need to use the FOIA to make that surveillance transparent. But while the government opens its databases to public scrutiny, it must also protect individual privacy.

First Amendment case law makes it clear that when a government agency opens a forum for public participation, such as the interactive spaces of the agency’s social media pages, it is prohibited from censoring a particular viewpoint in that forum. EFF and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a brief in support of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in a suit against the National Institutes of Health for blocking their comments against animal testing in scientific research on the agency’s Facebook and Instagram pages. EFF argued that any speech restrictions that a government agency applies must be viewpoint-neutral, meaning that the restrictions should apply equally to all viewpoints related to a topic, not just to the viewpoint that the agency disagrees with.

GoGuardian is a student monitoring tool that watches more than 27 million students across 10,000 U.S. schools, but what it does exactly, and how well it works, isn’t easy for students or the public to know. To learn more about its functionality, accuracy, and impact on students, EFF filed dozens of public records requests and analyzed tens of thousands of results from the software. We published our findings in “GoGuardian: A Red Flag Machine by Design.” Using data from multiple schools in districts located in states across the political spectrum, we uncovered that GoGuardian’s high rate of false positives outweighs its ability to accurately determine whether the content of a website is harmful: Tens of thousands of students were flagged for viewing content that is not only benign, but often educational or informative. Students primarily used the internet to do research for their homework, play games, and watch music videos. They indulged their curiosity, explored their identities, searched for part-time jobs, applied to colleges, and shopped for prom dresses; meanwhile, attempts to access explicit materials were relatively rare. To illustrate the shocking absurdity of GoGuardian’s flagging algorithm, EFF created an interactive Red Flag Machine quiz available on EFF.org. Derived from real GoGuardian data, visitors are presented with websites that were flagged and asked to guess what keywords triggered the alert.

For more than 25 years, Section 230—part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996—has protected small blogs and websites, big platforms, and individual users alike. “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” These “26 words that created the internet” have repeatedly come under fire from opponents to free speech, but with its decisions in Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh—for which EFF authored amicus briefs—the U.S. Supreme Court did not weaken Section 230.

In Gonzalez, the Supreme Court protected Section 230 by avoiding interpreting it in its decision. The Court ruled that the plaintiffs failed to establish that YouTube could be held liable for aiding and abetting ISIS members and supporters under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act simply because they generally provided services that those organizations used. The Supreme Court’s Taamneh decision was also good news, ensuring that internet users can speak about and have access to information about controversial topics, including speech about terrorism. Although the Court’s opinion rests on historical understandings of the legal concept of aiding and abetting liability, the upshot is that online platforms are generally not culpable for having a service open to users that some people used to engage in illegal acts. Both decisions are great news for a free and vibrant internet. Section 230 is an essential part of the legal architecture that enables everyone to connect, share ideas, and advocate for change without needing immense resources or technical expertise.

California often sets the bar for technology legislation across the country, and the state enacted several laws in 2023 that strengthen consumer digital rights.

EFF was proud to support S.B. 362, the California Delete Act, which makes it easier for people to exert greater control over their digital privacy. The law, which will take effect in 2026, will require data brokers to report more information about what data they collect on consumers. It also strengthens enforcement mechanisms against data brokers who fail to comply with the reporting requirement. Overcoming serious pushback from advertisers, this law prevailed as an important, common-sense measure that makes it easier to exercise rights established by the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018.

Californians now enjoy the right to repair: S.B. 244 makes it easier for individuals and independent repair shops to access materials and parts needed for maintenance on electronics and appliances. California’s law differs from other right-to-repair laws in a few ways: For one, by building on categories set in the state’s warranty laws, S.B. 244 establishes that you’ll be able to get documentation, tools, and parts for devices for three years for products costing between $50 and $99.99, or for seven years for products costing $100 or more. Although some electronics such as video game consoles are not included, the law still raises the bar for other right-to-repair bills. It’s one of the country’s strongest, and caps off several strong years of progress on this issue thanks to a dedicated coalition led by the California Public Interest Research Group. EFF lobbied lawmakers, raised public awareness through blog posts and actions, and participated in a press event demonstrating how much e-waste the bill would reduce. This is a huge victory for consumers, and we’re excited to keep pushing to ensure that people have the freedom to tinker.

Fed up with the concentration of power, violations of privacy, and threats to free expression, many users are fleeing to smaller, independently operated projects and platforms. EFF believes that a decentralized internet is a vital component of achieving our mission to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world. EFF was invited to testify in June 2023 before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee on Innovation, Data, and Commerce. We welcomed this as an opportunity to highlight non-financial uses of decentralized blockchain technology. EFF spoke in favor of the technologies, cutting through the noise to help members of Congress understand what blockchain is outside of a financial context, how and when it can be helpful, and provide clarity on its potential downsides. In our testimony, we also reiterated that people who simply contribute open-source code to blockchain projects should not be held responsible for what others do with the code they write, absent some other factor.

We published “Saving the News from Big Tech,” an investigation into anti-competitive practices that threaten an independent press, offering actionable solutions to save and improve journalism.

The default solutions proposed by media conglomerates— fees for linking and similar measures—are not the answer. EFF offers four solutions that will do as much for independent journalists and local outlets as it will for giant companies:

• Break up the ad-tech sector: Ad buyers need more options than just Google and Meta, and giant platforms like these shouldn’t represent both buyers and sellers in the advertising marketplace.

• Pass a comprehensive privacy law that would ban surveillance advertising and allow for more context-based advertising.

• Open up app stores, eliminating the Apple-Google duopoly.

• Bring the principle of end-to-end—the idea that intermediaries should make the best effort to deliver data from willing senders to willing recipients—to social media and webmail.

Latin American and Spanish telecommunications companies have made important advances in their privacy policies and practices, but persistent gaps and worrying trends pose potential risks for internet and mobile phone users. EFF published “Who Defends Your Data in Latin America and Spain?" comparing the performance of regional and/or global telecom companies in 10 countries; revealing problematic trends and challenges in the region vis-à-vis the much-needed application of human rights standards to government access to data; and exploring companies’ advances and weaknesses in data protection frameworks. Our report is comprised of series of reports by local digital rights organizations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, México, Nicaragua, Panamá, Paraguay, Perú, and Spain that evaluated telecommunications companies’ commitments to transparency and user privacy. “Who Defends Your Data in Latin America and Spain?” outlines the main findings of our partners’ studies through a broad regional lens and includes recommendations for companies and countries to tackle both ongoing and new challenges in Latin America and Spain in the face of warrantless surveillance and weak safeguards for privacy and data protection.

EFF was at the forefront of civil society input on the proposed U.N. Cybercrime Convention, which could shatter security, and harm political and social activists, journalists, security researchers, whistleblowers, and millions more around the world for decades to come. EFF attended draft negotiation sessions alongside our coalition partners, providing context-based analysis in our communications and presenting on panels at cybersecurity conferences. The draft treaty could rewrite criminal laws worldwide, adding over 30 criminal offenses and expansive police powers for domestic and international criminal investigations. These widened parameters have grave implications for billions of people—particularly the potential for stifling free speech, increasing government surveillance, and expanding state investigative techniques. Security and encryption researchers help build a safer future for all of us using digital technologies, but too many legitimate researchers face serious legal challenges under this treaty that would inhibit their work or prevent it entirely.

EFF and AccessNow published “Settled Human Rights Standards as Building Blocks for Platform Accountability and Regulation: A Contribution to the Brazilian Debate,” an in-depth report on platform regulation in Brazil. This included the draft bill known as PL 2630** or the “Fake News Bill” and constitutional cases pending in the country’s Supreme Court. The right to seek, receive, and communicate information enables the exercise of other human rights and strengthens the internet ecosystem, but not without backlashes and critical challenges. Proper responses are not simple to craft, but we argued that any proposed speech restrictions must follow the “three-part test”—they must be clearly set by law, strictly necessary, and proportionate to achieve a legitimate aim in a democratic society. Any laws seeking to strengthen users’ rights in the face of dominant internet applications must build on these principles and existing human rights safeguards. Empowering users before dominant internet platforms’ huge corporate power also involves more structural and economic measures that are mainly missing from the current debate, such as fostering interoperability of social networks.

Diverse grassroots organizations across the country share strong connections to EFF. We created and continue to support the Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA), an information-sharing network which has grown to 76 member groups in 26 U.S. states and Puerto Rico. Some member organizations are fully volunteer-run, some are affiliated with a broader institution (such as student groups), and some are independent non-profit organizations. What EFA groups all share is an investment in local organizing, a not-for-profit model, and a passion for five guiding principles:

• Free Expression: People should be able to speak their minds to whomever will listen.
• Security: Technology should be trustworthy and accountable to its users.
• Privacy: Technology should allow private and anonymous speech and let users set their own parameters about what to share with whom.
• Creativity: Technology should promote progress by allowing people to build on the ideas, creations, and inventions of others.
• Access to Knowledge: Curiosity should be rewarded, not stifled.

EFF’s organizing team conducted interviews with some of EFA’s most active members. Portland’s TA3M—an informal meet-up designed to connect software creators and activists who are interested in issues like censorship, surveillance, and open technology—spoke with EFF about its newly expanded scope including privacy and security. CCTV Cambridge, a longtime member, shared some of their exciting upcoming and ongoing projects like regranting American Rescue Plan funds to local artists and creators, and continuing their advocacy for digital equity. Finally, we connected with the New York-based Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) to learn about their education and advocacy work, and how people from across the country—New Yorkers or not—can plug in and support.

EFF’s attorneys, activists, and technologists were tapped for their expertise more than ever in 2023, with an average of 84 press mentions per day globally. Reproductive rights, free speech cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, proposed social media bans, age verification bills in state legislatures, and car privacy made up some of the most important new stories of the year. EFF staff were cited in international, national, and local print publications, as well as on television, radio, and podcasts, including Scientific American, Newsweek, Ms. Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, ABC News’ Good Morning America, and many other outlets.

EFF’s investigative team also had a banner year. We collaborated with the Thomson Reuters Foundation on an investigation of Fusus, a company offering software that lets police unify multiple surveillance streams (body cams, ShotSpotter, private doorbell cams, and much more) into a single panopticon of mass surveillance. We also fought the bureaucracy and won records about predictive policing in General Escobedo, Mexico. Working with our peers at MuckRock, our 2023 Foilies highlighted agencies representing the worst in government transparency, from the FBI to the Los Angeles Police Department.

The fourth season of EFF’s “How to Fix the Internet” podcast earned a Silver Award in the 3rd Annual Anthem Awards, which honors the purpose and mission-driven work of people, companies and organizations around the world. The podcast’s 10 new episodes featured writers, activists, technologists, and even a federal trade commissioner, each joining us for conversations that explored legal and technical concepts with nuance, complexity, and optimism; we averaged about 14,000 downloads per episode. Highlights included “People with Disabilities Are the Original Hackers,” with disability policy expert Henry Claypool, “Don’t Be Afraid to Poke the Tigers,” with researcher and hacker Andrew “bunnie” Huang, and “When Tech Comes to Town,” with Catherine Bracy, co-founder and CEO of the Oakland-based TechEquity Collaborative.

Privacy Badger

Privacy Badger is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web. Originally launched in 2014, EFF has continued to maintain and improve the tool, including the release of a new version that updates how we fight “link tracking” across several Google products including documents, email, maps, and images results. Privacy Badger now also removes tracking from links added after scrolling through Google Search results. Available to the public for free, Privacy Badger was the first add-on to specifically focus on blocking tracking in advertisements, instead of just the ads themselves. EFF’s open-source technology has also inspired other widely used privacy tools, including the Brave browser and Safari’s tracker blocking.

Surveillance Self-Defense Guide

Created by EFF, this online guide provides vital information on how to use secure technology and develop careful practices. It includes tutorials for installing and using security-friendly software, and information on making a security plan, strong passwords, protecting metadata, and much more. SSD is available in 12 languages, in whole or in part. We began a major overhaul of the guide in 2023, including 15 updates published by the end of the year; this included a brand-new guide on password managers. Several other guides were merged into one, making them easier to update, translate, and share.

Certbot and Sunsetting HTTPS Everywhere

Certbot—EFF’s free, open-source software tool to help websites encrypt their traffic and keep their sites secure—aims to build a web that is more structurally private, safe, and protected against censorship. Overall, there are 3.3 million Certbot installations maintaining 20 million certificates for 29.6 million domains. At the start of 2023, EFF sunsetted the HTTPS Everywhere web extension, which encrypted browser communications with websites and made sure users benefited from the protection of HTTPS wherever possible. HTTPS Everywhere ended because all major browsers now offer the functionality to make HTTPS the default. This is due to the grand efforts of the many technologists and advocates involved with Let’s Encrypt, HTTPS Everywhere, and Certbot over the last 10 years. The immense impact of this “Encrypt the Web” initiative has translated into default “security for everybody.”

Coded Resistance, the Comic!

From the days of chattel slavery through the modern Black Lives Matter movement, Black communities have developed innovative ways to fight back against oppression. Alexis Hancock, EFF’s Director of Engineering, documented this important history of codes, ciphers, underground telecommunications and dance in a blog post that became one of our favorite articles of 2021. In collaboration with The Nib and illustrator Chelsea Saunders, we adapted “Coded Resistance” into comic form in 2023 to further explore these stories, from the coded songs of Harriet Tubman to Darnella Frazier recording the murder of George Floyd.

EFF’s legal team shapes a wide range of decision-making through submission of amicus briefs. Through these “friend of the court” briefs, we provide expert advice or other relevant information and have been cited by judges in their rulings.

1. EFF Tells Supreme Court: Trademark Law Doesn’t Trump the First Amendment (3/7/23) Federal
2. EFF Urges Supreme Court to Make Clear That Government Officials Have First Amendment Obligations When They Use Their Social Media Accounts for Governmental Purposes (6/30/23) Federal
3. EFF Files Amicus Briefs in Two Important Geofence Search Warrant Cases (1/31/23) Federal and State
4. Courts Must Not Allow Litigants to Plead Around The First Amendment’s Speech Protections (2/3/23) Federal
5. EFF Files Amicus Brief to Protect the Speech Rights of Immigrants and Immigrant Rights Advocates (2/24/23) Federal
6. EFF and Student Press Law Center Urge Supreme Court to Require Government to Show Subjective Intent in Threat Cases (3/2/23) Federal
7. Appeals Court Upholds Restriction on Twitter’s First Amendment Right to Publish National Security Transparency Report (3/10/23) Federal
8. Court Accepts EFF’s Amicus Brief on the Right to Publish Code in Tornado Cash Case (5/10/23) Federal
9. Government Needs Both the Ability to Talk to Social Media Platforms and Clear Limits, EFF Argues in Brief to Appellate Court (7/28/23) Federal
10. EFF to 9th Circuit: App Stores Shouldn’t Be Liable for Processing Payments for User Content (8/4/23) Federal
11. EFF Defends Free Speech in PETA v. Tabak (9/15/23) Federal
12. EFF Urges Second Circuit to Affirm Injunction of New York’s Dangerous Online “Hateful Conduct” Law (10/5/23) Federal
13. Free Speech Coalition v. Colmenero (9/26/23) Federal
14. EFF to Ninth Circuit: Activists’ Personal Information Unconstitutionally Collected by DHS Must Be Expunged (11/6/23) Federal
15. X’s Anti-Speech Lawsuit Against Watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate (11/27/23) Federal
16. Warner Chappell Music v. Nealy re: Statute of Limitations for Copyright Cases (12/4/23) Federal
17. NetChoice v. Griffin re: Free Speech and Proposed Social Media Safety Act (7/24/23) State, Arkansas
18. EFF to Michigan Court: Governments Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Use a Drone to Spy on You Without a Warrant (9/13/23) State

1. The Internet Dodges Censorship by the Supreme Court EFF filed an amicus brief (5/18/23) Federal
2. Fourth Circuit: Individuals Have a First Amendment Right to Livestream Their Own Traffic Stops EFF filed an amicus brief in 2021. (2/23/23) Federal
3. Victory at the Ninth Circuit: Twitter’s Content Moderation is Not “State Action” EFF filed an amicus brief (3/24/23) Federal
4. In SAS v. WPL, the Federal Circuit Finally Gets Something Right on Computer Copyright (4/10/23) Federal
5. Federal Appeals Court Gets It: Fair Use Protects Security Research Tools (5/10/23) Federal
6. Court Rejects Efforts to Identify Anonymous Webhost (7/23/23) Federal
7. Appeals Court Upholds Public.Resource.Org’s Right to Post Public Laws and Regulations Online (9/12/23) Federal
8. Victory! Montana’s Unprecedented TikTok Ban is Unconstitutional EFF filed an amicus brief with ACLU of Montana (12/1/23) Federal
9. Safeguarding End-to-End Encryption in EU CSAR Compromise (10/23) International
10. First Appellate Court Finds Geofence Warrant Unconstitutional (4/24/23) State
11. Don’t Mess With Texas’ Anti-SLAPP Law (6/1/23) State
12. Victory in California! Police Instructors Can’t Claim Copyright Protections to Block Release of Use-of-Force and Other Training Materials (5/25/23) State
13. Victory! New Jersey Court Rules Police Must Give Defendant the Facial Recognition Algorithms Used to Identify Him EFF filed an amicus brief with EPIC and NACDL (6/7/23) State
14. Facebook v. New Jersey EFF filed amicus brief with EPIC, CDT, and Davis Wright Tremaine (6/29/23) State
15. Maryland Supreme Court: Police Can’t Search Digital Data When Users Revoke Consent EFF filed an amicus brief with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (7/27/23) State
16. Arizona Broadcasters Association v. Brnovich EFF filed an amicus brief with National Lawyers Guild, Poder in Action, and Mass Liberation AZ (7/21/23) State
17. California Takes Some Big Steps for Digital Rights (10/13/23) State
18. VICTORY! California Department of Justice Declares Out-of-State Sharing of License Plate Data Unlawful (10/31/23) State
19. Victory: Utah Supreme Court Upholds Right to Refuse to Tell Cops Your Passcode EFF filed an amicus brief with ACLU (12/18/23) State

1. Why We’re Suing to Protect the Right of Incarcerated People to Receive Physical Mail (3/13/23) State

1. Government Hasn’t Justified a TikTok Ban (3/16/23) Federal
2. EFF Comments on Privacy and Civil Rights to Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) (3/7/23) Federal
3. AI Art Generators and the Online Image Market (4/3/23) Federal
4. Enough is Enough. Tell Congress to Ban Federal Use of Face Recognition (4/4/23) Federal
5. From Past Lessons to Future Protections: EFF’s Advice to the EU Commission on Extended Reality Governance (5/22/23) International
6. Internet Access Shouldn’t Be a Bargaining Chip In Geopolitical Battles (10/20/23) International