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Electronic Frontier Foundation
Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance

Our Work

Our Work

Legal Case

Endpoint Surveillance Tools (CIPAV)

In 2007 after Wired reported on evidence that the FBI was able to use “secret spyware” to track the source of e-mailed bomb threats against a Washington state high school EFF submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for information on the technology. The documents we received discuss endpoint surveillance...

Legal Case

Expanding CALEA and Electronic Surveillance Laws

EFF filed suit against three agencies of the Department of Justice (DOJ) demanding records about problems or limitations that hamper electronic surveillance and potentially justify or undermine the Administration's new calls for expanded surveillance powers.

Legal Case

FBI's Domestic Investigative Operational Guidelines

EFF filed suit against the Department of Justice in June of 2009 demanding the public release of the surveillance guidelines that govern investigations of Americans by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The FBI's Domestic Investigative Operational Guidelines went into effect in December of 2008 and detail the Bureau's...

Legal Case

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Orders

On January 17 2007 the Bush Administration announced that it had let the shadowy Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) review the NSA's domestic spying program which was previously operated without any judicial authorization whatsoever. This Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case seeks disclosure of the FISC's secret orders.
While...

Legal Case

Intelligence Agencies' Misconduct Reports

EFF filed suit against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a half-dozen other federal agencies involved in intelligence gathering, demanding the immediate release of reports about potential misconduct. These agencies are required to submit periodic reports of "any intelligence activities of their organizations that they have reason to believe may...
Legal Case

National Security Letters (NSLs)

The investigative technique known as National Security Letters (NSLs) was greatly expanded under the USA PATRIOT Act, allowing the FBI to obtain telephone, Internet, financial, credit, and other personal records of anyone associated with an authorized terrorism or espionage investigation. These orders, issued without a court's approval, come with a...
Legal Case

Net Neutrality Lobbying

In July 2010 EFF filed a FOIA request with the Federal Communications Commission seeking records of meetings or discussions between FCC officials and representatives of telecommunications cable and Internet companies and organizations concerning potential net neutrality regulations.
Specifically EFF's request sought records concerning:
(1) potential legislation of broadband...

Legal Case

Pen Registers

Federal law requires the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to http://www.uscourts.gov/library/wiretap.html">report each year on law enforcement wiretapping activities which gives the public a sense of how often the government intercepts phone calls emails and other communications. Unfortunately there's no similar public reporting for the government's use of pen registers...

Legal Case

Personal Information Gathered on International Travelers

EFF has filed suit on behalf of a member of the European Parliament demanding that the U.S. government release records about her "risk assessment" score and other information gathered about her during her international travels. The lawsuit came just days after the disclosure that the U.S. and the European Union...

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Legal Case

Printer Dots

EFF submitted FOIA requests to several government agencies seeking information related to the agencies' use of "printer dots" -- tracking codes embedded in pages printed from certain printers.
In a purported effort to identify counterfeiters the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode...

Legal Case

Secret Surveillance Law Memo

EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) demanding the release of a secret legal memo used to justify FBI access to Americans' telephone records without any legal process or oversight.

Legal Case

Skype Surveillance

In February 2008 EFF requested documents from the FBI related to its surveillance of Skype communications a common Voice-over-IP (VoIP) program. The request came after an article in Computerworld Magazine suggesting that German law enforcement had commissioned a private company to create "Skype-hacking Trojan." EFF sought to discover whether...

Legal Case

Smart Dust

In September 2006 EFF requested copies of and National Science Foundation (NSF) grant awards to fund the development of wireless microelectromechanical sensor technology for law enforcement intelligence gathering or military purposes so-called "smart dust."
In October 2006 the NSF released three separate grant awards to George Washington University the...

Legal Case

Social Networking Monitoring

EFF and the Samuelson Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law filed suit against a half-dozen government agencies for refusing to disclose their policies for using social networking sites for investigations, data-collection, and surveillance. In response to our lawsuit, we received training materials, manuals, powerpoint presentations, memos, and an...

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