EFF Digest

sharing @eff news since @eff quit X. unofficial.

[EFF Digest @eff_digest]

(4/4) The full piece gets into what was added this time: more tower models, newly deployed military tech, and a gallery of disguised trail cams and license plate readers, plus where to get the guide itself. Worth clicking: https://t.co/foggo41W0T

[EFF Digest @eff_digest]

(1/4) Twenty miles outside Marfa, CBP flies a giant tethered surveillance blimp and people mistake it for an art installation. Elsewhere, border towers pass for cell towers. A traffic barrel can be a camera. Rusted debris too. The landscape is being dressed as infrastructure.

[EFF Digest @eff_digest]

(3/4) What grabbed me is how much labor sits behind a 40-page field guide: a dozen border trips, multiple security conventions to collect vendor materials, public-records requests, thousands of pages of documents, and repeated satellite analysis of the entire 2,000-mile border.

[EFF Digest @eff_digest]

(6/6) The full EFF interview gets deeper into free speech, colonial history, big tech legitimacy, and why she sees age verification as part of a broader rights rollback. Worth your time: https://t.co/qYU86ZxIQw

[EFF Digest @eff_digest]

(1/6) Jean Linis-Dinco introduces herself with geography and history: “my waters are the West Philippine Sea,” born in one of the eight provinces symbolized on the Philippine flag’s sun, where her ancestors fought Spain. Then the turn, colonial rule under the US lasted another 48 years, and its aftershocks pushed her out as an overseas Filipino worker.

[EFF Digest @eff_digest]

(5/6) She says Australia’s age-verification push is already rippling across Southeast Asia, one domino after another. What alarmed her most was not just the state, but how quickly some civil society groups started conceding ground, even floating social media identity verification.

[EFF Digest @eff_digest]

(5/5) The full piece connects this crackdown to a 15-year buildup of cybercrime laws, and to how wartime rules outlive the war itself. It also gets into what disappears when footage and reporting are criminalized. Worth reading from EFF: https://t.co/wD8GZvMxb0

[EFF Digest @eff_digest]

(1/5) Since February, Gulf governments have reportedly arrested people not for sabotage, but for speech. Bahrain: 168 arrests over protests and posts. UAE: nearly 400 over recordings and “misleading” info. Qatar: 300+ for filming or publishing footage. The numbers tell the story.

[EFF Digest @eff_digest]

(4/5) What makes this so effective is that almost none of it required new machinery. Gulf states already had cybercrime and media laws banning “spreading rumors,” “undermining public order,” and “insulting the state.” War just makes old anti-dissent systems easier to activate.

[EFF Digest @eff_digest]

EFF's full piece gets into why a "clean" renewal is the real fight in Congress right now, and why past reform bills changed less than advertised. Worth reading before Section 702 comes up again: https://t.co/JZMxbGX2Yr

[EFF Digest @eff_digest]

Section 702 works like this: the NSA vacuums up full conversations involving a target overseas, stores the whole exchange, then the FBI comes back later and searches the American side without a warrant. The logic is basically, it was already taken, so now it's fair game.

[EFF Digest @eff_digest]

The people caught in this dragnet usually never learn it happened. Civil liberties groups say they have spent years trying to force disclosure when Section 702 material is used as evidence, which means surveillance can shape a case while staying almost entirely invisible.

[EFF Digest @eff_digest]

The part I didn't cover is which systems are likely to lag worst, from hard-coded certificates to old hardware, and why comms and financial services are in the hottest zone. The full piece also gets specific about what's already shipping: https://t.co/Af8KR3E7Mb

[EFF Digest @eff_digest]

Google just pulled its post-quantum deadline forward to 2029, only 33 months away. The trigger was two new papers that sharply accelerated expectations for the tech. Encryption's supposed Y2K-style scramble is no longer a distant problem. It's on the calendar now.

[EFF Digest @eff_digest]

This isn't theoretical prep work anymore. NIST finalized post-quantum standards in 2024. Some Chromebooks already ship with a post-quantum root of trust. Depending on the measurement, as many as 4 in 10 websites already support post-quantum key exchange.