Favorite In a letter sent to Microsoft at the end of last month, EFF and five other civil society organizations—Access Now, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Fight for the Future, and 7amleh—called on the company to cease any further involvement in providing AI and cloud computing technologies for use in Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians…
All posts tagged Surveillance and Human Rights
Safeguarding Human Rights Must Be Integral to the ICC Office of the Prosecutor’s Approach to Tech-Enabled Crimes
Favorite This is Part I of a two-part series on EFF’s comments to the International Criminal Court Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) about its draft policy on cyber-enabled crimes. As human rights atrocities around the world unfold in the digital age, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are as heinous and wrongful as they…
Mexican Allies Raise Alarms About New Mass Surveillance Laws, Call for International Support
Favorite The Mexican government passed a package of outrageously privacy-invasive laws in July that gives both civil and military law enforcement forces access to troves of personal data and forces every individual to turn over biometric information regardless of any suspicion of crime. The laws create a new interconnected intelligence system dubbed the Central…
IRS-ICE Immigrant Data Sharing Agreement Betrays Data Privacy and Taxpayers’ Trust
Favorite In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Department of Treasury and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently reached an agreement allowing the IRS to share with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taxpayer information of certain immigrants. The redacted 15-page memorandum of understanding (MOU) was exposed in a court case, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos…
Anchorage Police Department: AI-Generated Police Reports Don’t Save Time
Favorite The Anchorage Police Department (APD) has concluded its three-month trial of Axon’s Draft One, an AI system that uses audio from body-worn cameras to write narrative police reports for officers—and has decided not to retain the technology. Axon touts this technology as “force multiplying,” claiming it cuts in half the amount of time officers…
Why the so-called AI Action Summit falls short
Favorite Ever since Chat-GPT’s debut, artificial intelligence (AI) has been the center of worldwide discussions on the promises and perils of new technologies. This has spawned a flurry of debates on the governance and regulation of large language models and “generative” AI, which have, among others, resulted in the Biden administration’s executive order on AI…
Still Flawed and Lacking Safeguards, UN Cybercrime Treaty Goes Before the UN General Assembly, then States for Adoption
Favorite Most UN Member States, including the U.S., are expected to support adoption of the flawed UN Cybercrime Treaty when it’s scheduled to go before the UN General Assembly this week for a vote, despite warnings that it poses dangerous risks to human rights. EFF and its civil society partners–along with cybersecurity and internet companies,…
Amazon and Google Must Keep Their Promises on Project Nimbus
Favorite When a company makes a promise, the public should be able to rely on it. Today, nearly every person in the U.S. is a customer of either Amazon or Google—and many of us are customers of both technology giants. Both of these companies have made public promises that they will ensure their technologies are…
Germany Rushes to Expand Biometric Surveillance
Favorite Germany is a leader in privacy and data protection, with many Germans being particularly sensitive to the processing of their personal data – owing to the country’s totalitarian history and the role of surveillance in both Nazi Germany and East Germany. So, it is disappointing that the German government is trying to push through…
Human Rights Claims Against Cisco Can Move Forward (Again)
Favorite Google and Amazon – You Should Take Note of Your Own Aiding and Abetting Risk EFF has long pushed companies that provide powerful surveillance tools to governments to take affirmative steps to avoid aiding and abetting human rights abuses. We have also worked to ensure they face consequences when they do not. Last week,…