Privacy & Governance

Proofpoint Recognizes 2026 Global Partner Award Winners at Flagship Event

EFF Statement on California Governor's Executive Order on AI

California Gov. Gavin Newsom's executive order is an opportunity for a needed, thoughtful conversation about artificial intelligen…

How to Limit What Apple’s New Siri AI Can Access in iOS 27

Apple’s new operating system is here, and along with it comes a new version of Siri, dubbed with two very familiar letters: AI. As…

Secure Messaging and AI Remain In Conflict Despite the Promise of TEEs

Secure messaging platforms, like Signal, WhatsApp, and recently, encrypted RCS, operate on a straightforward assumption: the conte…

Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Egg Sacs

Short essay about squid egg sacs. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I…

Are AIs Still Struggling with CAPTCHAs?

Anthropic’s recent security-incident document contains a bit about how CAPTCHAs are still frustrating Claude. In the transcript, t…

EFF to Lawmakers: Ground AI Cybersecurity Rules in Best Practices

With doomsday AI scenarios dominating the news, lawmakers are rightly concerned about reports concerning security breaches at majo…

California’s “Addictive Feeds” Law Violates Teens’ First Amendment Rights

A California law that prohibits teens from receiving recommended social media content from other social media users violates their…

How Candidates Could Use AI for Good

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian. There are plenty of signs that AI will mak…

Victory! Appeals Court Rejects Expansive New Copyright Claim

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit handed internet users and programmers a big win today, by rejecting an attempt to…

Victory: Court, Using a New Test, Rules Embedding Links is Legal

Courts have for two decades found that linking and embedding someone else’s web content, be it a photo, music, or an article, does…

EFF Welcomes Alexander Macgillivray to its Board of Directors

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce today that Alexander "amac" Macgillivray — a former White House of…

👮 Flock Searches for the LOLs | EFFector 38.16

Mass surveillance isn't a joke. But police are treating it like one when using automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks. In…

How the Meta Settlement Silences Youth Activism

Since its integration into our digital world, social media has played a pivotal role in youth organizing and social mobilization.…

Fake CAPTCHA Scams

New variant of an old scam: Use the framing of a CAPTCHA to get an unsuspecting user to download and run a malicious program.

25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough

This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare. One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of S…

On the NSA’s Supercomputer from the 1960s

Really interesting story about Harvest, a specialized code breaking computer built in the 1960s by IBM for the NSA.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking online (via Zoom) at a League of Women Voters event…

Using AI for Weapons Development

Last week, Anthropic released a long and detailed document describing current misuses of their Claude models. I’m still reading it…

The High Crime of “LMAO”: How Cops Are Treating Mass Surveillance As a Joke

Here's a riddle: Why did a Goshen Police Department officer search 6,474 automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks, represent…

Microsoft’s Patching

Once a month, Microsoft pushes a security update to all Windows users. Tomorrow’s is a new record: Microsoft’s patch for September…

California: Tell the Governor to Stand Up for Net Neutrality, Affordability, and Public Safety

The federal government has inserted a provision into a funding deal with the state of California that would make the state abandon…

Friday Squid Blogging: Rotting Squid on a Beached California Boat

Smells awful: But an estimated 30 to 50 tons of dead squid remain inside the boat’s catch tank, where they have been decomposing…

Governor Newsom Signs Student-Backed Digital Literacy Bills Alongside Misguided Bans

Governor Newsom signed a package of 12 bills yesterday aimed at “protecting children” online. One of them was AB 1709, which EFF h…

My Talk at DEF CON

Last month, I gave a talk at DEF CON on AI hacking: what happens when AIs become hackers. It’s a combination of the potentialities…

Cold TAKE: Amazon's New Encryption Method Still Doesn't Deliver Real Privacy

Amazon recently debuted a new feature for its Ring cameras that the company is calling Throw Away the Key Encryption (TAKE). The i…

Cliff Stoll’s DEF CON Talk

In August, Cliff Stoll gave a talk at DEF CON, remembering the wily hacker he stalked forty years ago. Great fun.

We All Deserve a Better Internet, Not A Smaller One

Bans Like California’s Don’t Fix What’s Wrong With Social Media Companies SAN FRANCISCO - Technology and the laws that regulat…

Proofpoint Expands AI-Powered Investigations to Microsoft 365 and Deepens Insider Risk Visibility into AI Activity

AIs Compress Exploit Timeline

Give an AI agent a mere rumor of an exploit, and it’s enough for them to find it. What’s worse, I found I could use my own agents…