Author: Matthew Guariglia

California Governor Newsom has signed S.B. 524, a bill that begins the long process of regulating and imposing transparency on the growing problem of AI-written police reports. EFF supported this bill and has spent the last year vocally criticizing the companies pushing AI-generated police reports as a service.  S.B.524 requires police to disclose, on the […]

In a joint letter to the ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, EFF has joined with 20 other organizations, including the ACLU, Brennan Center, CDT, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and Demand Progress, to express opposition to a rule change that would seriously weaken accountability in the intelligence community. Specifically, under the proposed […]

Flock Safety, the police technology company most notable for their extensive network of automated license plate readers spread throughout the United States, is rolling out a new and troubling product that may create headaches for the cities that adopt it: detection of “human distress” via audio. As part of their suite of technologies, Flock has […]

A San Francisco supervisor has proposed that police and other city agencies should have no financial consequences for breaking a landmark surveillance oversight law. In 2019, organizations from across the city worked together to help pass that law, which required law enforcement to get the approval of democratically elected officials before they bought and used […]

The California legislature has passed a necessary piece of legislation, S.B. 524, which starts to regulate police reports written by generative AI. Now, it’s up to us to make sure Governor Newsom will sign the bill.  We must make our voices heard. These technologies obscure certain records and drafts from public disclosure. Vendors have invested […]

EFF urges California state lawmakers to pass S.B. 524, authored by Sen. Jesse Arreguín. This bill is an important first step in regaining control over police using generative AI to write their narrative police reports.  This bill does several important things: It mandates that police reports written by AI include disclaimers on every page or […]

EFF has filed an amicus brief in Trabajadores v. Bessent, a case concerning the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) sharing protected personal tax information with the Department of Homeland Security for the purposes of immigration enforcement. Our expertise in  privacy and data sharing makes us the ideal organization to step in and inform the judge: government actions like […]

The Trump administration has been heavily invested in consolidating all of the government’s information into a single searchable, or perhaps AI-queryable, super database. The compiling of all of this information is being done with the dubious justification of efficiency and modernization–however, in many cases, this information was originally siloed for important reasons: to protect your […]

New reporting has revealed that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is attempting to create the Intelligence Community’s Data Consortium–a centralized online marketplace where law enforcement and spy agencies can peruse and buy very personal digital data about you collected by data brokers. Not only is this a massive escalation of the […]

Montana has done something that many states and the United States Congress have debated but failed to do: it has just enacted the first attempt to close the dreaded, invasive, unconstitutional, but easily fixed “data broker loophole.” This is a very good step in the right direction because right now, across the country, law enforcement […]