Jamie Williams
EFF
Texas, United States
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Past articles by Jamie:
Unchecked Smart Cities are Surveillance Cities. What We Need are Smart Enough Cities.
We can have beautiful cities without turning our cities into surveillance cities.Cities across the U.S. are forcing operators of shared bikes and scooters to use dangerous and privacy invasive APIs developed by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. These APIs—collectively called the “... → Read More
Clearview’s Face Surveillance Shows Why We Need a Strong Federal Consumer Privacy Law
The New York Times’ recent story on Clearview AI, maker of a secretive facial recognition app that markets its product to law enforcement, has raised critical questions about what can be done to protect our privacy online. Clearview claims to have amassed a dataset of over three billion face images... → Read More
Recidivism Risk Assessments Won’t Fix the Criminal Justice System
The First Step Act of 2018 (S. 3649) is now federal law.The criminal justice reform law has been widely hailed as long overdue, and rightly so. But as we turn to its implementation, we urge policymakers to take care with the central provision of the bill that calls for the development of a risk... → Read More
Amazon, Stop Powering Government Surveillance
EFF has joined the ACLU and a coalition of civil liberties organizations demanding that Amazon stop powering a government surveillance infrastructure. Last week, we signed onto a letter to Amazon condemning the company for developing a new face recognition product that enables real-time government... → Read More
Math Can’t Solve Everything: Questions We Need To Be Asking Before Deciding an Algorithm is the Answer
Across the globe, algorithms are quietly but increasingly being relied upon to make important decisions that impact our lives. This includes determining the number of hours of in-home medical care patients will receive, whether a child is so at risk that child protective services should investigate... → Read More
‘Scraping’ Is Just Automated Access, and Everyone Does It
For tech lawyers, one of the hottest questions this year is: can companies use the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—an imprecise and outdated criminal anti-“hacking” statute intended to target computer break-ins—to block their competitors from accessing publicly available information on their... → Read More
D.C. Court: Accessing Public Information is Not a Computer Crime
Good news for anyone who uses the Internet as a source of information: A district court in Washington, D.C. has ruled that using automated tools to access publicly available information on the open web is not a computer crime—even when a website bans automated access in its terms of service. The... → Read More
Ninth Circuit Doubles Down: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime
Good news out of the Ninth Circuit: the federal court of appeals heeded EFF’s advice and rejected an attempt by Oracle to hold a company criminally liable for accessing Oracle’s website in a manner it didn’t like. The court ruled back in 2012 that merely violating a website’s terms of use is... → Read More
The Worst Law in Technology Strikes Again: 2017 in Review
The latest on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act? It’s still terrible. And this year, the detrimental impacts of the notoriously vague and outdated criminal computer crime statute showed themselves loud and clear. The statute lies at the heart of the Equifax breach, which might have been averted if... → Read More
Medical Privacy Under Attack: 2017 in Review
If you care about maintaining privacy over medical records and prescriptions, this was not a good year. Both the California Supreme Court and the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued disappointing decisions that declined to recognize a significant privacy interest in prescription records.... → Read More
EFF to Court: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime
EFF is fighting another attempt by a giant corporation to take advantage of our poorly drafted federal computer crime statute for commercial advantage—without any regard for the impact on the rest of us. This time the culprit is LinkedIn. The social networking giant wants violations of its... → Read More
Government Documents Show FBI Cleared Filmmaker Laura Poitras After Six-Year Fishing Expedition
The government recently revealed for the first time that federal agents maintained an open investigation of our client, Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, for six years despite never finding any evidence that she committed a crime or was a threat to ... → Read More
This Weekend: Celebrate the Life and Work of Aaron Swartz at the Internet Archive
On November 4 and 5, the Internet Archive will host the Fifth Annual Aaron Swartz Day and Hackathon. Aaron would have turned 31 on November 8. The late activist, political organizer, programmer, and entrepreneur was a dear friend of EFF’s who made a lasting imprint on the Internet and the digital... → Read More
Judge Cracks Down on LinkedIn’s Shameful Abuse of Computer Break-In Law
Good news out of a court in San Francisco: a judge just issued an early ruling against LinkedIn’s abuse of the notorious Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to block a competing service from perfectly legal uses of publicly available data on its website. LinkedIn’s behavior is just the sort of bad... → Read More
McMansion Hell Take-Down Controversy Illustrates Why the Supreme Court Should Clarify the Limits of the CFAA
When McMansion Hell blogger Kate Wagner received Zillow’s letter last month demanding that she take down her architecture parody blog, she was scared. So scared that she temporarily disabled access to her blog via McMansionHell.com until she could find an attorney. We’re happy she found us at EFF... → Read More
Court Orders Government To Provide More Information About Withheld Information in Laura Poitras’ FOIA Lawsuit
Laura Poitras—the Academy and Pulitzer Prize Award → Read More
Danger Ahead: The Government’s Plan for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication Threatens Privacy, Security, and Common Sense
Imagine if your car could send messages about its speed and movements to other cars on the road around it. That’s the dream of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which thinks of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication technology as the leading solution for reducing accident rates in the United States. But there’s a huge problem: it’s extremely difficult to have cars… → Read More
EFF to California Supreme Court: Website Owners Have a First Amendment Right to Defend Content on Their Platform
A bad review on Yelp is an anathema to a business. No one wants to get trashed online. But the First Amendment protects both the reviewer’s opinion and Yelp’s right to publish it. A California appeals court ran roughshod over the First Amendment when it ordered Yelp to comply with an injunction to take down speech without giving the website any opportunity to challenge the injunction’s factual… → Read More
EFF Applauds Amazon For Pushing Back on Request for Echo Data
The number of Internet-enabled sensors in homes across the country is steadily increasing. These sensors are collecting personal information about what’s going on inside the home, and they are doing so in a volume and detail never before possible. The law, of course, has not kept up. There are no rules specifically designed for law enforcement access to data collected from in-home personal… → Read More
EFF to Court: Forcing Someone to Unlock and Decrypt Their Phone Violates the Constitution
The police cannot force you to tell them the passcode for your phone. Forcing you to turn over or type in your passcode violates the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination—the privilege that allows people to “plead the Fifth” to avoid handing the government evidence it could use against them. And if you have a phone that’s encrypted by default (which we hope you do), forcing you to… → Read More