David Ruiz
Infosecurity
San Francisco, CA, United States
Contact David
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
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Past articles by David:
California's Child Privacy Protections Could Be Thorn in Stalkerware's Side
California's attempt to better protect children’s privacy could represent an entirely separate cyber-threat → Read More
UK Surveillance Regime Violated Human Rights
On September 13, after a five-year legal battle, the European Court of Human Rights said that the UK government’s surveillance regime—which includes the country’s mass surveillance programs, methods, laws, and judges—violated the human rights to privacy and to freedom of expression. The court’s... → Read More
EFF Helps Launch Anti-SLAPP Task Force ‘Protect the Protest’
Aboard the Arctic Sunrise, a working icebreaker that has sailed to the Arctic Circle, the Congo, and the Amazon Rivers under Greenpeace’s stead, EFF joined several civil liberties and environmental rights groups to send a message: no longer will we be bullied by malicious lawsuits that threaten our... → Read More
The NSA Continues to Blame Technology for Breaking the Law
UPDATE September 14, 2018: This blog has been updated at the bottom to include information about two Senators’ reactions to the NSA’s call detail record deletion.In late June, the NSA announced a magic trick—hundreds of millions of collected call records would disappear. Its lovely assistant?... → Read More
Eight AT&T Buildings and Ten Years of Litigation: Shining a Light on NSA Surveillance
Two reporters recently identified eight AT&T locations in the United States—towering, multi-story buildings—where NSA surveillance occurs on the backbone of the Internet. Their article showed how the agency taps into cables, routers, and switches that handle vast quantities of Internet traffic... → Read More
Border Spy Tech Shouldn’t Be a Requirement for a Path to Citizenship
The Border Security and Immigration Reform Act (H.R. 6136), introduced before Congress last week, would offer immigrants a new path to citizenship in exchange for increased high tech government surveillance of citizens and immigrants alike. The bill calls for increased DNA and other biometric... → Read More
The ENCRYPT Act Protects Encryption from U.S. State Prying
It’s not just the Department of Justice and the FBI that want to undermine your right to private communications and secure devices—some state lawmakers want to weaken encryption, too. In recent years, a couple of state legislatures introduced bills to restrict or outright ban encryption on... → Read More
The Secure Data Act Would Stop Backdoors
A new bill introduced in Congress gets encryption right. The bipartisan Secure Data Act would stop any government agency or court order from forcing a company to build backdoors into encrypted devices and communications. This welcome piece of legislation reflects much of what the community of... → Read More
There is No Middle Ground on Encryption
Encryption is back in the headlines again, with government officials insisting that they still need to compromise our security via a backdoor for law enforcement. Opponents of encryption imagine that there is a “middle ground” approach that allows for strong encryption but with “... → Read More
A New Backdoor Around the Fourth Amendment: The CLOUD Act
There’s a new, proposed backdoor to our data, which would bypass our Fourth Amendment protections to communications privacy. It is built into a dangerous bill called the CLOUD Act, which would allow police at home and abroad to seize cross-border data without following the privacy rules where the... → Read More
The Problems With FISA, Secrecy, and Automatically Classified Information
We need to talk about national security secrecy. Right now, there are two memos on everyone’s mind, each with its own version of reality. But the memos are just one piece. How the memos came to be—and why they continue to roil the waters in Congress—is more important... → Read More
Twilio Demonstrates Why Courts Should Review Every National Security Letter
The list of companies who exercise their right to ask for judicial review when handed national security letter gag orders from the FBI is growing. Last week, the communications platform Twilio posted two NSLs after the FBI backed down from its gag orders. As Twilio’s accompanying blog post... → Read More
The State of the Union: What Wasn’t Said
President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address last night was remarkable for two reasons: for what he said, and for what he didn’t say. The president took enormous pride last night in claiming to have helped “extinguish ISIS from the face of the Earth.” But he failed to mention... → Read More
House Fails to Protect Americans from Unconstitutional NSA Surveillance
The House of Representatives cast a deeply disappointing vote today to extend NSA spying powers for the next six years by a 256-164 margin. In a related vote, the House also failed to adopt meaningful reforms on how the government sweeps up large swaths of data that predictably include Americans’... → Read More
Court Challenges to NSA Surveillance: 2017 in Review
One of the government’s most powerful surveillance tools is scheduled to sunset in less than three weeks, and, for months, EFF has fought multiple legislative attempts to either extend or expand the NSA’s spying powers—warning the public, Representatives, and Senators about circling bills that... → Read More
Efforts to Expand NSA Spying Trip Up
Since last night, the debate over how to reauthorize certain NSA surveillance authorities has seen a whirlwind of activity, culminating in the major news that the House Rules Committee postponed a vote today to potentially expand NSA spying powers. As we wrote yesterday: "According to reports... → Read More
House Intelligence Committee Advances a Deeply Flawed NSA Surveillance Bill
A bill to extend one of the NSA’s most powerful surveillance tools, and further peel back American civil liberties, was approved today by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in a strict party line vote (12-8), with Republican members voting in the majority. The committee and the... → Read More
House Intelligence Committee’s NSA Surveillance Bill Includes New Threats and Old
Thrown last-minute into a torrent of competing legislation, a new bill meant to expand the NSA’s broad surveillance powers is the most recent threat to American privacy. It increases who is subject to surveillance, allows warrantless search of American communications, expands how collected data can... → Read More
Tenta Browser Now Includes HTTPS Everywhere
Securely browsing the Internet—even when you know what you’re doing—is tough. That’s partly why, nearly seven years ago, EFF worked together with The Tor Project to develop a privacy tool called HTTPS Everywhere, which automatically provides users with secure, encrypted connections to websites when... → Read More
The FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act Restricts Congress, Not Surveillance
The FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017—legislation meant to extend government surveillance powers—squanders several opportunities for meaningful reform and, astonishingly, manages to push civil liberties backwards. The bill is a gift to the intelligence community, restricting surveillance... → Read More