Kurt Opsahl

Get the latest information about how the law is racing to catch up with technological change from staffers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the nation's premiere digital civil liberties group fighting for freedom and privacy in the computer age. This session will include updates on current EFF issues such as:

Congress' EARN-IT legislation (designed to mandate backdoors in encryption);

Van Buren v. U.S., the upcoming Supreme Court case on the CFAA (federal anti-hacking law)

Law and policy for COVID-19 tracking/quarantine/immunity passport apps;

The growing trends to limit government use of facial recognition technology;

as well as updates on EFF's technology projects, cases, and legislation affecting security research, and much more. Half the session will be given over to question-and-answer, so it's your chance to ask EFF questions about the law and technology issues that are important to you.

Other people: Naomi Gilens Rory Mir India McKinney Alexis Hancock

This talk will discuss all about the Five Eyes, the espionage alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. It is one of the largest intelligence operations in the world, which monitors billions of communications around the globe in the name of security. Yet the Five Eyes propose to weaken security, privacy and eroded the possibility of secure systems.

This talk will go into details about the Five Eyes (FVEY), covering its origins in the aftermath of World War II, its expansion in the cold war, ECHELON, and further expansion in the the era of counter-terrorism, through today, where the Five Eyes have set their sights on enabling mass surveillance and stopping strong encryption. The discussion will include: - The history and background of the Five Eyes Origins Cold War (ECHELON) Terrorism - How the FVEY spying and intelligence sharing works - Malware - Backdoors - Routers - Internet exchanges - Domestic sharing: when one member spies on another’s citizens, and shares the information back to get around prohibitions on domestic surveillance. - More Eyes, More Problems. Proposals to expand the number of eyes, including many within the EU - Whistleblowers: What the documents shared by Edward Snowden revealed about the Five Eyes - The Five Eyes latest fight: Against strong encryption. FVEY member claim to aim to "thwart the encryption of terrorist messaging,” and the UK and Australia have taken steps through legislation to weaken security. - Why this matters - the legal and policy framework for communications surveillance and the application of human rights principles for surveillance.

Our lives are on our laptops – family photos, medical documents, banking information, details about what websites we visit, and so much more. Digital searches at national borders can reach our personal correspondence, health information, and financial records, allowing an affront to privacy and dignity which is inconsistent with the values of a free society. While privacy and security is important for any traveler, this has become a critical issue for international conferences and their attendees, who shouldn’t need to trade off an invasive search for participating in important conversations. This talk will discuss the both the legal and policy issues with border searches, as well as technological measures people can use in an effort to protect their data.

This talk will begin with an overview of the legal and policy issues surrounding border crossings, where many countries will conduct more invasive searches than their constitutions would otherwise allow. The discussion will include examples of countries that can require you to enter passwords to decrypt data on your laptop and will examine your social media and cloud data, and provide advice on which countries may require more extensive precautions. This includes the challenges of entering the United States in the time of Trump, discussing the recent changes to policy for visitors entering the country, what your rights are as a visa holder, and details about EFF’s lawsuit to challenge the policy. Turning to the practical, the talk will discuss techniques to help protect your data, from basic precautions like backups and externally stored data, to more advanced advice about encryption and password strategies, secure boot processes, as well as data hygiene - how to travel clean, and still have access to important information on the other side. This will cover what border agents are theoretically capable of doing to compromise devices, and what precautions you can take to secure your data before this interaction occurs. The discussion will include advice about laptops, mobile phones, flash drives, digital cameras, and other common digital data devices. While critical, technological protections are not enough, so we will also discuss the practicalities of interacting with border agents. Finally, we will discuss what people can do to keep themselves informed, and stay active in the fight for a better future.

Other people: William Budington

Both strong end-to-end communications encryption and device encryption are legal in most jurisdictions today, and remain widely available. Yet software programmers and hardware producers are increasingly under pressure from law enforcement and policy makers around the world to include so-called backdoors in encryption products.

In this lecture, I will provide the state of the law as we moving into 2017, detailing what happened in the fight between Apple and the FBI in San Bernardino and the current proposals to weaken or ban encryption, covering proposed and recently enacted laws. I will also discuss the extra-legal pressures placed upon companies, and the rise of government hacking and state-sponsored malware as an alternative or addition to weakening software. Finally, the presentation will discuss possible realistic outcomes, and give my predictions on what the state of the law will be as we head into 2017, and discuss how we can fight for a future that will allow for secure communications for everyone. The discussion will include: - The law and policy issues in the FBI v. Apple iPhone case, - The FBI’s purchase of 0day access to the iPhone 5c, and Apple’s technical response, - The rise in use of government malware to access encrypted device - Proposed and enacted crypto laws in the United States, Australia, India, Russia, and the UK, - Legal pressures on companies, like Brazil’s arrest of Facebook executives to pressure WhatsApp, - Q&A with the audience.

Governments around the world are seeking to put a stop to secure end-to-end encryption, from the UK’s Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act, to Australia’s Defence Trade Controls Act, to India’s draft proposal to require plain text copies of all secure messages, to the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation’s public pressure on global companies like Apple and Google to weaken their security and provide law enforcement access to plain text content.

Yet it is impossible to give these governments what they want without creating vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors. Moreover any attempt to prevent people from writing and publishing strong encryption without backdoors conflicts with the right to freedom of expression enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This presentation will address the history of crypto wars, update the audience with the latest information on government proposals from around the world, and discuss how we can fight for a future that will allow for secure communications for everyone. The discussion will also include information about EFF’s effort to protect and promote strong encryption, including the Secure Messaging Scorecard, Encrypt the Web report and the Who Has Your Back reports. The presentation will explain how the unintended consequence of these efforts to provide law enforcement unfettered access to communications for users’ privacy and the security of the Internet far exceeds the benefits that would be gained. The proposals are often made in the name of protecting national security, but are likely to have severe economic, political and social consequences for these nations and their citizens, while doing little to protect their security. Contrary to these government proposals, encryption has a critical role to play in national security by protecting citizens against malicious threats. The harm to the public that can be presented by lax digital security has been illustrated too many times: weak or flawed cryptography led to vulnerabilities such as Logjam and FREAK that compromised the transport layer security protocols used to secure network connections worldwide. Encryption is not only essential to protecting free expression in the digital age – it’s also a critical part of national security. This presentation will address the history of crypto wars, update the audience with the latest information on government proposals from around the world, and discuss how we can fight for a future that will allow for secure communications for everyone. The discussion will also include information about EFF’s effort to protect and promote strong encryption, including the Secure Messaging Scorecard, Encrypt the Web report and the Who Has Your Back reports.

From Stellar Wind to PRISM, Boundless Informant to EvilOlive, the NSA spying programs are shrouded in secrecy and rubber-stamped by secret opinions from a court that meets in a faraday cage. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Kurt Opsahl explains the known facts about how the programs operate and the laws and regulations the U.S. government asserts allows the NSA to spy on you.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil society organization, has been litigating against the NSA spying program for the better part of a decade. EFF has collected and reviewed dozens of documents, from the original NY Times stories in 2005 and the first AT&T whistleblower in 2006, through the latest documents released in the Guardian or obtained through EFF's Freedom of Information (government transparency) litigation. EFF attorney Kurt Opsahl's lecture will describe how the NSA spying program works, the underlying technologies, the targeting procedures (how they decide who to focus on), the minimization procedures (how they decide which information to discard), and help you makes sense of the many code names and acronyms in the news. He will also discuss the legal and policy ramifications that have become part of the public debate following the recent disclosures, and what you can do about it. After summarizing the programs, technologies, and legal/policy framework in the lecture, the audience can ask questions.