tag:act.eff.org,2005:/actionEFF Action Center<span class="translation_missing" title="translation missing: en.summary">Summary</span>2024-03-12T14:23:03-07:00tag:act.eff.org,2005:ActionPage/5552024-03-12T14:23:03-07:002024-03-12T17:14:41-07:00Tell Congress: Stop the TikTok Ban<p>Congress is fast-tracking a bill that would effectively ban TikTok in the US, but do little for its alleged goal of protecting our private information and the collection of our data by foreign governments. Tell Congress: Instead of giving the President the power to ban entire social media platforms based on their country of origin, our representatives should focus on what matters—protecting our data no matter who is collecting it.</p>
<p>The “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” would give the President the power to designate an application under the control of a country considered adversarial to the U.S. to be a national security threat. TikTok would be deemed a threat, meaning that the application would effectively be banned unless it cuts all ties with the foreign adversarial country within 180 days through a forced sale. The same could be true for other applications, like WeChat.</p>
<p>It’s a massive problem that current US law allows for all the big social media platforms to harvest and monetize our personal data, including TikTok. Without comprehensive data privacy legislation, this will continue, and this ban won’t solve any real or perceived problems. User data will still be collected by numerous platforms and sold to data brokers who sell it to the highest bidder—including governments of countries such as China—just as it is now.</p>
<p>TikTok raises special concerns, given the surveillance and censorship practices of the country that its parent company is based in, China. But it’s also used by hundreds of millions of people to express themselves online, and is an instrumental tool for community building and holding those in power accountable. The US government has not justified silencing the speech of Americans who use TikTok, nor has it justified the indirect speech punishment of a forced sale (which may prove difficult if not impossible to accomplish in the required timeframe). It can’t meet the high constitutional bar for a restriction on the platform, which would undermine the free speech and association rights of millions of people. This bill must be stopped.</p>
Electronic Frontier Foundationtag:act.eff.org,2005:ActionPage/5542024-03-12T14:07:22-07:002024-03-12T15:38:06-07:00Tell Congress: We Can't Afford More Bad Patents<p>Congress is pushing two bills that would bring back some of the worst patents and empower patent trolls.</p>
<p>The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA), S. 2140, would throw out crucial rules that ban patents on many abstract ideas. Courts will be ordered to approve patents on things like ordering food on a mobile phone or doing basic financial functions online. If PERA Passes, the floodgates will open for these vague software patents that will be used to sue small companies and individuals. This bill even allows for a type of patent on human genes that the Supreme Court rightly disallowed in 2013.</p>
<p>A second bill, PREVAIL, S. 2220, would sharply limit the public’s right to challenge patents that never should have been granted in the first place.</p>
<p>Patent trolls—companies that have no product or service of their own, but simply make patent infringement demands on others—are a big problem. They’ve cost our economy billions of dollars. For a small company, a patent troll demand letter can be ruinous.</p>
<p>We took a big step towards fighting off patent trolls in 2014, when a landmark Supreme Court ruling, the Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank case, established that you can’t get a patent by adding “on a computer” to an abstract idea. In 2012, Congress also expanded the ways that a patent can be challenged at the patent office.</p>
<p>These two bills, PERA and PREVAIL, would roll back both of those critical protections against patent trolls. We know that the bill sponsors, Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-DE) are pushing hard for these bills to move forward. We need your help to tell Congress that it’s the wrong move.</p>
Electronic Frontier Foundationtag:act.eff.org,2005:ActionPage/5532024-01-22T09:54:09-08:002024-02-02T10:49:01-08:00Tell Congress To Pass the PRESS Act Now<p>The Protect Reporters from Exploitive State Spying (PRESS) Act is a long overdue federal shield law that provides protections to journalists against government surveillance and forced disclosure of confidential sources.</p>
<p>Journalists shouldn’t be forced to choose between protecting their confidential sources or going to prison. But the reality is that both Democratic and Republican administrations have secretly subpoenaed reporters’ emails and phone records to hunt down their sources. That chills essential newsgathering and whistleblowing, and it needs to stop now.</p>
<p>The PRESS Act has an appropriately broad definition of journalism, protecting everyone practicing journalism, from small-time bloggers to the most famous news outlets.</p>
<p>The bill passed the House of Representatives on a voice vote on January 18. We need to send a strong message to the Senate that passing these protections must be an immediate priority.</p>
<p>Help us by sending a message to your Senators today, asking them to support the PRESS Act.</p>
Electronic Frontier Foundationtag:act.eff.org,2005:ActionPage/5522023-12-08T11:55:54-08:002024-02-22T10:46:23-08:00Tell Congress: They Must Defeat HPSCI’s Horrific Surveillance Bill <p>The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) has introduced the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act of 2023–an absolutely awful bill that ignores years of abuse and unconstitutional surveillance in order to renew a mass surveillance law with no real changes, reforms, or new oversight.</p>
<p>Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is set to expire on December 31, 2023, and there is currently a race to see what bill will renew Big Brother’s favorite surveillance law. Any reauthorizations must come with significant reforms in order to protect the privacy of people’s communications. To that end, the choice is clear - we urge all Members to vote NO on the Intelligence Committee’s bill, H.R.6611, the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act of 2023.</p>
<p>Section 702 allows the government to conduct surveillance inside the United States by vacuuming up digital communications so long as the surveillance is directed at foreigners currently located outside the United States. It also prohibits intentionally targeting Americans. Nevertheless, the NSA routinely (“incidentally”) acquires innocent Americans' communications without a probable cause warrant. Once collected, the FBI can search through this massive database of information by “querying” the communications of specific individuals.</p>
<p>On Nov. 16, HPSCI released a report calling for reauthorization of Section 702 with essentially superficial reforms. The bill that followed, H.R. 6611, was as bad as expected. It would renew the mass surveillance authority Section 702 for another eight years. It would create new authorities the intelligence community has sought for years, but been denied by the courts. It would continue the indiscriminate collection of U.S. persons’ communications when they talk with people abroad for use by domestic law enforcement. This was never the justification for this national security program, and people on U.S. soil should not have their communications collected without a warrant because of a loophole.</p>
<p>While it’s unclear what the future of Section 702 will be, one thing is for certain: H.R.6611, the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act of 2023 must NOT PASS.</p>
Electronic Frontier Foundationtag:act.eff.org,2005:ActionPage/5512023-11-10T10:19:26-08:002023-11-28T13:57:02-08:00Call Congress to Stop KOSA<p>The Senate may have a simple voice vote in the next week to move the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) quickly through the legislature, without debate, but any one senator can stop it with a hold. We need you to call your senator's office today to tell them to stop KOSA. KOSA would censor the internet and would make government officials the arbiters of what young people can see online, and would likely lead to age verification.</p>
<p>The government should not have the power to decide what topics are "safe" online for young people, and to force services to remove and block access to anything that might be considered unsafe for children. This isn’t safety—it’s censorship.</p>
<p>KOSA would seriously endanger teenagers’ ability to access information. The bill creates liability for platforms that fail to block young people from a list of content that it deems harmful. The natural result of this censorious scheme is that a large amount of material will likely be banned outright or put out of the reach of children, leaving huge holes in what information is accessible online. And online services are likely to implement this censorship with poorly working filters, which we know fail to properly distinguish “good” speech from “bad” speech.</p>
<p>This bill is a heavy-handed plan to prevent minors from accessing content that the state believes is not in their best interest, as defined by the Federal Trade Commission and 50 state attorneys general. Tell your Senator to stop this bill.</p>
Electronic Frontier Foundationtag:act.eff.org,2005:ActionPage/5492023-10-24T08:49:07-07:002024-03-14T11:15:10-07:00Tell Congress: Access To Laws Should Be Fully Open<p>Court after court has recognized that no one can own the text of the law. But the Pro Codes Act is a deceptive power grab that will help giant industry associations ration access to huge swaths of U.S. laws. Tell Congress not to fall for it.</p>
<p>A large portion of the regulations we all live by (such as fire safety codes, or the national electrical code) are initially written—by industry experts, government officials, and other volunteers—under the auspices of standards development organizations (SDOs). Federal, state, or municipal policymakers then review the codes and decide whether the standard is good broad rule. The Pro Codes Act effectively endorses the claim that SDOs can “retain” copyright in codes, even after they are made law, as long as they make the codes available through a “publicly accessible” website – which means read-only, and subject to licensing limits.</p>
<p>That's bad for all of us. Anyone wishing to make the law accessible in a better format would find themselves litigating whether or not they are sheltered by the fair use doctrine – a risk that many won’t want to take.</p>
<p>We have a constitutional right to read, share and discuss the law. SDOs have already lost this battle in court after court, which have recognized that no one can own the law. Tell Congress you agree the law should be open to us all and urge them to reject this bill.</p>
Electronic Frontier Foundationtag:act.eff.org,2005:ActionPage/5462023-08-30T11:37:55-07:002024-02-22T10:46:54-08:00Tell Congress: Absent Major Changes, 702 Should Not be Renewed <p>We all deserve privacy in our communications, and part of that is trusting that the government will only access them within the limits of the law. But it's now clear that the government hasn’t respected any limits on the intelligence community or law enforcement. When it comes to Section 702, a law that continues to allow spying on Americans, they've ignored our rights.</p>
<p>This April, Section 702 is set to expire, and the current administration will try everything in their power to renew it. We think it’s time for 702 to end entirely and that any future programs must start from scratch in order to protect the privacy of digital communications. EFF will continue to fight to make sure that any bill that does renew Section 702 closes the government’s warrantless access to U.S. communications, minimizes the amount of data collected, and increases transparency. Anything less than that would signal a continued indifference, or contempt, to our right to privacy.</p>
<p>Tell Congress it’s time they protect our privacy!</p>
<p>Section 702 allows the government to conduct surveillance inside the United States by vacuuming up digital communications as long as the surveillance is directed at foreigners currently located outside the United States. It also prohibits intentionally targeting Americans. Nevertheless, the NSA routinely (“incidentally”) acquires innocent Americans' communications without a probable cause warrant. Once collected, the FBI can search through this massive database of information by “querying” the communications of specific individuals.</p>
<p>The FBI alone reported conducting up to 3.4 million warrantless searches of Section 702 data in 2021 using Americans’ identifiers. Congress and the FISA Court have imposed modest limitations on these backdoor searches, but according to several recent FISA Court opinions, the FBI has engaged in “widespread violations” of even these minimal privacy protections.</p>
<p>This loophole, and many other things, need to change before Congress acts to renew Section 702.</p>
Electronic Frontier Foundationtag:act.eff.org,2005:ActionPage/5442023-08-28T09:57:51-07:002023-08-28T15:36:49-07:00Stop the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act<p>The Protecting Kids on Social Media Act would lead to a second-class online experience for young people, mandated privacy-invasive age verification for all users, and in all likelihood, the creation of digital IDs for all U.S. citizens and residents. The bill will make it illegal for anyone under 13 to join a social media platform, and require parental consent, verified by the government, for anyone between the ages of 13 and 18 to do so. The world envisioned by the authors of this bill is one where everyone has less privacy and less power to speak out and access information online.</p>
<p>This bill is technically an alternative to the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act, but it is a bad one. No one should have to hand over their driver’s license just to access free websites. Having to hand over that driver’s license to a government program doesn’t solve the problem. The end result of this law would likely be that a huge number of young people—particularly the most vulnerable—would lose access to social media platforms, which can play a critical role for young people in accessing resources and support in a wide variety of circumstances. Tell your Senator you oppose it.</p>
Electronic Frontier Foundationtag:act.eff.org,2005:ActionPage/5432023-07-17T13:58:24-07:002023-07-18T10:42:02-07:00Tell Congress: Don't Turn Messaging Services Into DEA Informants<p>The Cooper Davis Act would turn some of the most popular online platforms into Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informants. The content-scanning tools that would likely be used have large error rates, and would sweep up innocent conversations, including discussions about past drug use or treatment. This bill contains no warrant requirement, no required notice, and limited user protections, and deserves to be defeated on the Senate floor.</p>
<p>Under the law, providers would be required to report to the DEA when they gain actual knowledge of facts about drug sales or when a user makes a reasonably believable report about those sales. Importantly, providers can be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for a failure to report. The law may also give internet companies incentive to conduct dragnet searches of private messages to find other protected speech, and would create a template for legislators to try to force internet companies to report their users to law enforcement for other unfavorable conduct or speech.</p>
<p>The law also makes a “request” that providers preserve the report and other relevant information (so law enforcement can potentially obtain it later). And it prevents providers from telling their users about the preservation, unless they first notify the DEA. This bill aims to cut down on the illegal sales of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and counterfeit narcotics. But what would prevent the next bill from targeting marijuana or the sale or purchase of abortion pills, if a new administration deemed those drugs unsafe or illegal for purely political reasons? As we've argued many times before, once the framework exists, it could easily be expanded. Tell your Senator and representative to vote NO on this bill.</p>
Electronic Frontier Foundation