EFF represented Indybay, a San Francisco-based independent news outlet that was prohibited from speaking out about a search warrant served by the San Francisco Police Department. Indybay’s unique community-sourced newswire allows anyone to publish news on the website, and in early 2024 an unknown member of the public posted a story claiming credit for smashing windows at the San Francisco Police Credit Union. SFPD obtained a search warrant that required Indybay to turn over any text messages, online identifiers, or other unpublished information that would help reveal the author. They also ordered Indybay not speak about the warrant for 90 days. With the help of EFF, Indybay pushed back, responding that the search warrant was illegal, and requesting that the SFPD formally withdraw it. The warrant became void when it was not executed after 10 days under California law, but the gag order remained in place. In a win for speech, the police conceded the warrant was void, promised not to seek another, and agreed to lift the gag order.

EFF has been raising the alarm on the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) for years. In 2024, we noticed lawmakers and civil liberties advocates (including us) often weren’t hearing from the people whose behaviors would be legislated in these debates. We reached out directly to young people to ask, “How has access to social media improved your life?” “What do you gain from it?” “What would you lose if KOSA passed?” “How would your life be different if it was already law?”

The thousands of responses we received showed that thoughtful young people are deeply concerned about the proposed law’s fallout, and that many who would be affected think it will harm them. Privacy, censorship, and freedom of speech are not just theoretical concepts to young people. Their rights are often already restricted, and they see the internet as a place where they can begin to learn about, understand, and exercise those freedoms. They know why censorship is dangerous; they understand why forcing people to identify themselves online is dangerous; they know the value of free speech and privacy, and they know what they’ve gained from an internet that doesn’t have guardrails put up by subjective government censors. We hope their insights help balance the conversation, because if young people’s voices are suppressed with legislation like KOSA, it will be much more difficult for them to be heard in the future.

Closely following arguments EFF has made in numerous cases, the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that geofence warrants, which allow law enforcement to identify every digital device within a geographic boundary during a given time period, are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” The court noted, “The quintessential problem with these warrants is that they never include a specific user to be identified, only a temporal and geographic location where any given user may turn up post-search.” The court found that geofence warrants constitute the sort of “general, exploratory rummaging” that the drafters of the Fourth Amendment intended to outlaw. EFF applauded this decision. Everyone should be able to carry their phone without fearing they’ll become a criminal suspect due to indiscriminate location data collection.

In a major victory after almost five years of campaigning against Amazon Ring, the company announced that it would discontinue its “request for assistance” law enforcement tool–meaning police will no longer have an Amazon-created tool that allows them to request footage directly from Ring users. This builds on Ring ending its practice of allowing police to automatically send requests for footage to a user’s email inbox, opting instead for a system where police had to publicly post requests onto Ring’s Neighbors app. In the past, we also successfully pushed Ring to implement end-to-end encryption. This is a step in the right direction, and hopefully Ring will now be altogether out of the business of platforming casual and warrantless police requests for footage to its users.

Decentralized web technologies have the potential to make the internet more competitive and resilient, supporting a new wave of innovation. One way to achieve this is by storing and sharing files across multiple computers instead of relying on a central server, as with the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). We provided legal counsel to computer scientist Mike Damm, who offers a free IPFS gateway. The gateway makes files stored on the IPFS network viewable in an everyday web browser, and a company called JetBrains claimed that that Mr. Damm could be liable under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) because the company’s lawyers were allegedly able to use his gateway to find software keys for JetBrains software hosted elsewhere on the network. We were glad to have the opportunity to set them straight on behalf of our client in February 2024, pointing out that Mr. Damm doesn’t control how people use IPFS or what files they access. The DMCA has serious flaws, but one thing Congress got right was protecting infrastructure providers from being liable for the way that third parties choose to use them. Without this protection, the internet could have been extinguished in its infancy.

The FCC’s final adopted order on net neutrality issued in May of 2024 restored bright line rules against all forms of throttling, once again creating strong federal protections against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. The order explicitly banned internet service providers (ISPs) creating, “fast lanes”, finding that the “decision to speed up ‘on the basis of Internet content, applications, or services’ would ‘impair or degrade’ other content, applications, or services which are not given the same treatment.” This is a huge win for internet users, but net neutrality is more than just bright line rules against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization: It is the principle that ISPs should treat all traffic coming over their networks without discrimination. Users, not ISPs, should decide for themselves how they would like to experience the internet. EFF—standing with users, innovators, creators, public interest advocates, libraries, educators and everyone else who relies on the open internet—will continue to champion this principle.

A California appellate court ruled video footage captured by police drones sent in response to 911 calls cannot be kept entirely secret from the public. The decision by the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth District came after Arturo Castañares, a journalist writing for the Spanish language news nonprofit La Prensa, sought access to videos created by Chula Vista Police Department’s “Drones as First Responders” (DFR) program, which sends drones to respond to emergency calls. EFF, along with the First Amendment Coalition and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Mr. Castañares, arguing that categorically excluding all drone footage from public disclosure could have troubling consequences on the public’s ability to understand and oversee the police drone program. The appellate court agreed that drone footage is not categorically exempt from public disclosure. Because it’s possible that some of Chula Vista’s drone footage involves scenarios in which no crime is committed or suspected, the police department cannot categorically withhold every moment of video footage from the public. This victory sends a message to other agencies in California adopting copycat programs that they can’t abuse public records laws to shield every second of drone footage from public scrutiny.

In a landmark ruling for fundamental freedoms in Colombia, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found that for over two decades the state government harassed, surveilled, and persecuted members of a lawyers group that defends human rights defenders, activists, and indigenous people. The case involved the unlawful and arbitrary surveillance of members of the Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective (CAJAR), a Colombian human rights organization defending victims of political persecution and community activists for over 40 years. EFF, Article 19, Fundación Karisma, and Privacy International, represented by Berkeley Law’s International Human Rights Law Clinic, filed an amicus brief in the case, urging the court to rule that Colombia’s legal framework regulating intelligence activity and the surveillance of CAJAR and their families violated their human rights and forced them to limit their activities, change homes, and go into exile to avoid violence, threats, and harassment. The historic decision was the first by the Inter-American Court to find a State responsible for violating the right to defend human rights.

EFF’s mission to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world continues to expand in Europe. European lawmakers have been highly active in proposing laws to regulate online services and emerging technologies that have the potential to impact the whole world, and EFF built up a policy team with key expertise in the region to respond. In our EU policy work, we have advocated for fundamental principles like transparency, openness, and information self-determination. We emphasized that legislative acts should never come at the expense of protections that have served the internet well: Preserve what works. Fix what is broken. EFF makes a real difference in Europe: We continued collaborations with the European Digital Rights Initiative (EDRi) as well as other coalitions including IFEX, Reclaim Your Face, and Protect Not Surveil. We ensured that internet regulation bills don’t turn social networks into censorship tools and safeguarded users’ right to private conversations. We also helped guide new fairness rules in digital markets to focus on what is really important: breaking the chokehold of major platforms over the internet. In addition to all the behind-the-scenes work that we do, EFF regularly showcases our work on European stages to share our mission and message. You can find us at conferences like re:publica, CPDP, Chaos Communication Congress, or Freedom not Fear, and at local events like regional Internet Governance Forums.

Governments increasingly rely on algorithmic systems to support consequential assessments and determinations about people’s lives, from judging eligibility for social assistance to trying to predict crime. Latin America is no exception. With the use of artificial intelligence (AI) posing human rights challenges in the region, EFF released Inter-American Standards and State Use of AI for Rights-Affecting Determinations in Latin America: Human Rights Implications and Operational Framework, a report that draws on international human rights law to provide guidance on what state institutions must look out for when assessing whether and how to adopt AI and automated decision-making (ADM) systems for determinations that can affect people’s rights. As AI continues to play an increasingly significant role in public life, the findings and recommendations of this report are a timely and compelling contribution for a human rights-centric approach to the use of AI/ADM in public decision-making.

On March 3rd, 2009, we launched Surveillance Self-Defense Project (SSD), geared toward teaching American citizens “about the law and technology of communications surveillance and computer searches and seizures,” and providing “the information and tools necessary to keep their private data out of the government’s hands.” Since then, SSD’s scope expanded to include tech users across the globe, and broadened security scenarios to protect more kinds of online communications. We marked the 15-year milestone by continuing a major overhaul of SSD’s guides to reflect the changing security landscape. We refined our guides to make them more accessible and useful for a wider audience with a variety of skill levels. We updated basics such as “How do I Protect Myself Against Malware?” and “Keeping Your Data Safe.” We also created new guides, including one for detecting Bluetooth trackers, and another for using iPhone’s Lockdown mode. Our updated Tool Guides detailed how to set up two-factor authentication, use the encrypted messaging app Signal, and avoid phishing attacks. In 15 years of Surveillance Self-Defense, hundreds of people have contributed, over 20 million people have read SSD, and the content has nearly doubled in length from 40,000 words to almost 80,000.

The Atlas of Surveillance is a project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, comprising research compiled by more than 1,000 students and volunteers, and incorporating datasets from a variety of public and non-profit sources. The Atlas remains the most comprehensive database of its kind, capturing more than 11,700 deployments of surveillance tech as of 2024. As the police surveillance industry shifted, expanded, and doubled down on its efforts to win new cop customers, EFF added new spyware and equipment to this database. This included a growing category of police technology: the third-party investigative platform, a designation we created for the growing group of software platforms that pull data from other sources and share it with law enforcement, facilitating analysis of police and other data via artificial intelligence and other tools.

In 2024, EFF launched Digital Rights Bytes, a place to get clear answers to the frequently asked questions about technology in short, easily digestible bites. It provides trustworthy information and an entry point to digital rights beginners who want to learn more about digital privacy, freedom of expression, and other civil liberties in our digital world. Our first series included:

• Why is it so expensive to repair my devices?
• Can the government read my text messages?
• Is my phone listening to me?
• Do I really own the digital media I bought?
• Why is printer ink so expensive?

EFFecting Change is EFF’s livestream series that takes you on a deep dive into the privacy and free speech issues shaping the future of technology. In EFFecting Change’s 2024 season, we invited panelists from all over the globe to answer your questions about reproductive justice in the digital age, the U.S. Supreme Court’s hearings on technology, and protecting your privacy while protesting.

The Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA) is a grassroots network made up of independent community organizations. Allies across the United States work to support digital rights and empower their local communities. The EFA brings these like-minded organizations together to build mutual support and to help each other improve.

In 2024, we welcomed nine new EFA members from across the United States:

• Stop Surveillance City, Seattle, WA
• Cyber Security Club @FSU, Tallahassee, FL
• UF Student Infosec Team (UFSIT), Gainesville, FL
• NICC, Newark, NJ
• DC919, Raleigh, NC
• Community Broadband PDX, Portland, OR
• DC215, Philadelphia, PA
• Open Austin, Austin, TX
• Encode Justice Georgia, Atlanta, GA

The Electronic Frontier Foundation podcast How to Fix the Internet delves into solutions to build an equitable, engaged, and open digital world. We inspire a broad audience of technologists, policy wonks, social media creators, gamers, fan communities, and everyone else who relies on digital tools to see that better world as achievable. Season 5 featured conversations on AI’s present and future, building a more accessible internet, protecting democracy with open source technology, and more. How to Fix the Internet was recognized with multiple awards for its 2024 season:

• 4th Annual Anthem Awards, Responsible Technology/Podcast or Audio: Bronze
• 2024 Signal Awards, Technology Shows: Gold & Listeners Choice
• w3 Awards, General Series-Science & Technology: Silver
• 30th Annual Communicator Awards, Technology Podcast Series: Award of Excellence

Certbot—EFF’s free, open-source 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. At the end of 2024, there are 4.5 million Certbot installations maintaining 24 million certificates for 33 million domains.

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 updates in 2024 that replaces embedded tweets with click-to-activate placeholders, and opts users out of Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” by default. 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.