Andrew Crocker
EFF
San Francisco, CA, United States
Contact Andrew
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Past articles by Andrew:
DOJ’s New CFAA Policy is a Good Start But Does Not Go Far Enough to Protect Security Researchers
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the notoriously vague anti-hacking law, is long overdue for major reform. Among many problems, the CFAA has been used to target security researchers whose work uncovering software vulnerabilities frequently irritates corporations (and U.S. Attorneys). The... → Read More
The EU Digital Markets Act Places New Obligations on “Gatekeeper” Platforms
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a proposal for bringing competition and fairness back to online platform markets. It just cleared a major hurdle on the way to becoming law in the EU as the European Parliament and the Council, representing the member states, reached a political... → Read More
The EU Digital Markets Act’s Interoperability Rule Addresses An Important Need, But Raises Difficult Security Problems for Encrypted Messaging
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) allows new messaging services to demand interoperability (the ability to exchange messages) from the internet's largest messaging services (like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage). Interoperability is an important tool to promote competition... → Read More
Scraping Public Websites (Still) Isn’t a Crime, Court of Appeals Declares
Reiterating its prior common-sense opinion, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in hiQ v. LinkedIn that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act likely does not bar scraping data from a public website against the wishes of the website owner. Last year, after the Supreme Court decided its first CFAA... → Read More
Police Can’t Demand You Reveal Your Phone Passcode and Then Tell a Jury You Refused
The Utah Supreme Court is the latest stop in EFF’s roving campaign to establish your Fifth Amendment right to refuse to provide your password to law enforcement. Yesterday, along with the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in State v. Valdez, arguing that the constitutional privilege against self-... → Read More
In the WeChat Case, the U.S. Government Doesn’t Care If It Breaks the Internet
Today, EFF—along with the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Internet Society—filed an amicus brief in support of U.S.-based users of the Chinese app WeChat, as they fight President Trump’s unconstitutional ban of the application. In its rush to eradicate WeChat from U.S. shores, we explain, the administration has taken an extraordinary step that weakens user security, intentionally… → Read More
Facebook’s Election-Week War on Accountability is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong
A legacy of the 2016 U.S. election is the controversy about the role played by paid, targeted political ads, particularly ads that contain disinformation or misinformation. Political scientists and psychologists disagree about how these ads work, and what effect they have. It's a pressing political... → Read More
Yes, Section 215 Expired. Now What?
On March 15, 2020, Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act—a surveillance law with a rich history of government overreach and abuse—expired. Along with two other PATRIOT Act provisions, Section 215 lapsed after lawmakers failed to reach an agreement on a broader set of reforms to the Foreign Intelligence... → Read More
How to Protect Privacy When Aggregating Location Data to Fight COVID-19
As governments, the private sector, NGOs, and others mobilize to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen calls to use location information—typically drawn from GPS and cell tower data—to inform public health efforts. Among the proposed uses of location data, one of the most widely discussed is... → Read More
EFF to Supreme Court: Losing Your Phone Shouldn’t Mean You Lose Your Fourth Amendment Rights
You probably know the feeling: you reach for your phone only to realize it’s not where you thought it was. Total panic quickly sets in. If you’re like me (us), you don’t stop in the moment to think about why losing a phone is so scary. But the answer is clear: In addition to being an expensive... → Read More
Governments Haven’t Shown Location Surveillance Would Help Contain COVID-19
Governments around the world are demanding new dragnet location surveillance powers to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. But before the public allows their governments to implement such systems, governments must explain to the public how these systems would be effective in stopping the spread of COVID... → Read More
DOJ and FBI Show No Signs of Correcting Past Untruths in Their New Attacks on Encryption
Last week, Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray chose to spend some of their time giving speeches demonizing encryption and calling for the creation of backdoors to allow the government access to encrypted data. You should not spend any of your time listening to them.... → Read More
To Search Through Millions of License Plates, Police Should Get a Warrant
Earlier this week, EFF filed a brief in one of the first cases to consider whether the use of automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology implicates the Fourth Amendment. Our amicus brief, filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in United States v. Yang, argues that when a U.S. Postal... → Read More
Congress Has a Chance to Finally End the NSA’s Mass Telephone Records Program
Earlier this month, the New York Times published a major story reporting that the NSA has stopped using the authority to run its massive, ongoing surveillance of Americans’ telephone records. After years of fighting mass surveillance of telephone records, the story may make our jobs easier:... → Read More
The Long Fight to Stop Mass Surveillance: 2018 in Review
EFF is in it for the long run, especially in the important, hard fights for your rights. One of the longest running fights in online civil liberties is over your right to have a private conversation over a digital network. Whether it’s for our intimate relationships, our healthcare, our... → Read More
Don’t Shoot Messenger
Late last week, Reuters reported that Facebook is being asked to “break the encryption” in its Messenger application to assist the Justice Department in wiretapping a suspect's voice calls, and that Facebook is refusing to cooperate. The report alarmed us in light of the government’s ongoing... → Read More
FBI Admits It Inflated Number of Supposedly Unhackable Devices
We’ve learned that the FBI has been misinforming Congress and the public as part of its call for backdoor access to encrypted devices. For months, the Bureau has claimed that encryption prevented it from legally searching the contents of nearly 7,800 devices in 2017, but today the Washington... → Read More
The Supreme Court Says Your Expectation of Privacy Probably Shouldn’t Depend on Fine Print
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled yesterday in Byrd v. United States that the driver of a rental car could have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the car even though the rental agreement did not authorize him to drive it. We’re pleased that that the Court refused to let a private... → Read More
Bring in the Nerds: EFF Introduces Actual Encryption Experts to U.S. Senate Staff
Earlier today in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, EFF convened a closed-door briefing for Senate staff about the realities of device encryption. While policymakers hear frequently from the FBI and the Department of Justice about the dangers of encryption and the so-called Going Dark problem, they... → Read More
The FBI Could Have Gotten Into the San Bernardino Shooter’s iPhone, But Leadership Didn’t Say That
The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) last week released a new report that supports what EFF has long suspected: that the FBI’s legal fight with Apple in 2016 to create backdoor access to a San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone was more focused on creating legal precedent than... → Read More