EFF continues fight for rights and freedoms

There's little doubt that emerging technology is improving our way of life, but it's also creating a quagmire of legal issues surrounding the rights and restrictions we face while living in a digital age. The once ambiguous concept of "digital rights" has now become an all-encompassing term used to designate a wide range of rights that have the potential to be trampled on as courts sort out how Constitutional freedom applies to emerging and existing technologies.

LWN recently chronicled GeekPAC, an organization looking for new ways to protect our rights via the political battlefront. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the oldest non-profit organizations dedicated to establishing and defending our rights in a digital world, takes a different approach.

Since the EFF's mission encompasses such a large body of issues, it's no longer practical to say they're protecting "digital rights." Rebecca Jeschke, Media Relations Coordinator for the EFF, says, "Instead, in our increasingly networked world, they are simply 'rights.' But we'll continue to educate folks on the issues." To do so, the EFF focuses its energies on several important issues including free speech, intellectual property, privacy, and innovation. At first blush, it may be easy to dismiss the work they do as something that only applies to people who download music illegally or who need to protect their online content from thieves. In fact, it may surprise some people to know that the EFF also defends the privacy of airline travelers and cell phone users, issues not typically associated with the purveyors of digital freedoms.

One of the reasons the EFF's reach is so wide is because of the way technology infiltrates our everyday lives. It's easy to understand why sharing the contents of a store-bought music CD with hundreds of people on the Internet may infringe on the rights of the artist hoping to sell his music. In the case of an airline traveler, rights infringement takes on a completely new form when the Transportation Safety Administration's data analysis and screening software wrongly decides someone is a security risk. Not only is there no way to challenge the error, it's a mistake that's likely to haunt them for the rest of their lives.

The more pervasive technology becomes, the more stories of this nature arise. Take, for example, the seemingly innocuous library book. Many public and school libraries are employing RFID technology to track books and other borrowed items. People throw these books into their bag or backpack without realizing the affixed tracking tags can actually be used to track them as well. It's doubtful the government would be interested in the whereabouts of a 9-year old walking home from school, but it's easy to see how this technology can be mishandled or abused.

To be sure, no one is suggesting that technology be removed from our daily lives. The mission of the EFF and its supporters is to effect accountability and protect people's rights within the courts.

Jeschke says one of the biggest battles surrounding digital freedom that we're likely to hear about in the next year or so is the issue of coders' rights. In response to a gradual uptick of cases in which coders, software engineers, and computer science students are being falsely accused of hacking and other nefarious crimes, the EFF has developed the Coders' Rights Project.

According to the EFF, coders are becoming reluctant to explore and research ways to make our technology safer for fear of being prosecuted under laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The Coders' Rights Project protects researchers through "education, legal defense, amicus briefs and involvement in the community with the goal of promoting innovation and safeguarding the rights of curious tinkerers and hackers on the digital frontier."

Jeschke says another big issue to watch involves the National Security Agency (NSA) and its interest in wiretapping phones and email without first obtaining a court order. Though expressly illegal since 1978, President George W. Bush authorized the NSA to proceed anyway and when the news became public in 2005, the EFF immediately sprang into action against the telecommunications companies assisting the government with their illegal practice. Congress passed an amendment of the original law that grants telecommunications companies immunity, and the EFF is currently working to have that law repealed.

Other issues of importance in the upcoming months are expected to be in the area of copyright and fair use in user-generated content. The proliferation of YouTube and other online video hosting sites are creating a new and exciting level of creativity, along with some cinema screen-sized headaches about how content owned by others is permitted to be used..

For example, a homegrown animated video of original content is fine to post online. Setting that video to a favorite Rolling Stones song, however, crosses the line into copyright infringement. Or does it? What if the main character is simply wearing a t-shirt bearing the band's hand-drawn logo? These are some of the issues the EFF is hoping to sort out.

As a non-profit organization, the EFF is funded solely through individual and corporate donations. In fact, a full two-thirds of the foundation's operating budget comes from individual donations, much of which is funneled directly into litigation.

The EFF's status as a charitable organization does not permit the solicitation of politicians and governmental figures to support its cause. Instead, the foundation fights legal battles in court, advises policymakers, and uses it's corps of 50,000 volunteers to educate the public.

One such EFF contributor is SourceForge.net Community Manager Ross Turk, who has been donating consistently to the EFF for 3 years and has been a staunch supporter for much longer. He says:

Turk also notes that EFF Bootcamp, a one day training session presented by the foundation's attorneys has benefited him professionally because it helped him "understand the difference between enforcement and oppression."

It's precisely that kind of education that has kept the EFF going strong for 18 years. The first step in protecting our rights in the burgeoning age of technology is to understand how the things we invent and rely on have the potential to impact our freedoms.