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This week, EFF joined Foxglove, Human Rights Watch, and 60 other organizations in writing to the UK’s Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum, Alex Norris, raising serious concern about the Home Office’s decision to deploy Facial Age Estimation (FAE) to assess asylum-seeking children from 2027. 

The letter points to four key concerns:

Discrimination 

As with most face estimation and recognition tools, there is ongoing bias in the deployment of these technologies. With FAE, many have highlighted its baked-in failures and discrimination, particularly in relation to women and people of color. Evidence shows that FAE is most accurate for estimating the ages of Eastern European men, but even then it consistently produces errors. The Home Office itself noted “that FAE performance can vary depending on ethnicity” and skin tone. 

Inaccuracy

The Home Office has admitted that FAE systems are imprecise for analyzing 16-to 18-year-olds, with even the “top systems” having an “error margin of around 2.5 years here.” This is exactly the age range for which the Home Office has chosen to deploy this technology. And this error margin will be widened yet further because children seeking asylum often suffer from trauma-induced aging. 

Lawfulness of Use of Children’s Data

Major concerns exist around the lawful basis on which the Home Office, or its chosen third-party FAE vendors, could have sought consent to collect and process photographs or data from asylum-seeking children to train this system. Further, there is no clarity on the images and/or data that this technology has been trained on. 

Lack of Necessary Disclosure 

The Home Office claims “extensive testing has already been carried out across diverse groups, including different ethnicities, genders and age ranges, indicating promising performance and accuracy.” But these purported “promising” results have not been published, nor have any Equality or Data Protection Impact Assessments. 

The letter continues by requesting clarification on several key questions regarding these concerns. EFF and partners have provided the UK government 21 days for a response, and we urge the Home Office to take on this uphill task in good faith and release the information.

You can read the letter in full here. 

三菱電機製MELSEC iQ-FシリーズのFX5-EIPおよびFX5-ENET/IPには、サービス運用妨害（DoS）状態が発生する可能性のある脆弱性が存在します。

CERT/CCから本件に関するアドバイザリが公表されました。

2026年06月18日（現地時間）、米国CISAがCISA ICS Advisory / ICS Medical Advisoryを公表しました。

With no serious debate, including on proposed amendments, Canada is blazing full speed ahead with Bill C-22, which would threaten encryption and increase surveillance. Also known as the Lawful Access Bill, Bill C-22 is currently moving forward quickly to a vote despite the many, many criticisms civil liberty groups and the tech industry have hurled at it.

As we’ve discussed before, Bill C-22 is dangerous on multiple levels. It pushes for requirements for metadata retention, expands information sharing with foreign governments, and establishes a mechanism that allows Canada’s Ministry of Public Safety to demand that companies create backdoors, effectively breaking encryption. That mechanism was a key facet of Part 2 in Bill C-22, and the government prevented it from being independently debated.

In a deep analysis of the bill, Citizen Lab and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association detail every one of flaws of this proposal, concluding that most elements are unsalvageable. 

A wide range of tech companies agree. Signal, Apple, Google, and several VPN providers oppose the bill, and some have said they’d likely be forced to either cut Canadians off from certain features or shut down services in Canada altogether.

The Canadian government wants this dangerous, complicated, overreaching bill passed before June 19. Bill C-22 is riddled with privacy problems that affect millions of people. It should be debated and studied fully, not jammed through on an arbitrary deadline. 

OpenMedia is offering a tool for Canadians to contact their elected representatives about the bill. Actions taken on OpenMedia's website are governed by OpenMedia's privacy policy, not EFF's.

EFF is grateful for SerpApi’s generous support, helping us fight for your rights to speak and access information online. SerpApi has been giving to EFF every year since 2018, and alongside our 32,000 individual donors, their gift is critical to keeping up the fight.

Whether in the courts, halls of power, or broader policy debates, we appreciate the work this support has made possible over the years. Some examples:

• We sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Department of State to stop an unconstitutional social media surveillance program to identify and punish individuals who express viewpoints the government disagrees with.
• We helped develop the Santa Clara Principles, a framework to reign in overbroad content moderation so that all users are treated fairly and offered consistent tools for recourse if their speech is censored by tech companies.
• In the whitepaper Unfiltered: How YouTube’s Content ID Discourages Fair Use and Dictates What We See Online, we pushed back on YouTube for silencing individual creators in the interest of protecting a small number of giant copyright holders.
• We stood with whistleblowers and dissidents persecuted for their online speech.
• We continued the fight to protect Section 230.

We live in an era when lawful speech and the right to access information are being targeted by Big Tech and governments around the world that are hostile to dissent. Free speech online is core to EFF’s mission, and SerpApi’s support will help us continue the fight to protect everyone’s right to free expression.

情報通信審議会　情報通信技術分科会　電波有効利用委員会（第14回）

電波法による旅費等の額を定める政令の一部を改正する政令案に係る意見募集の結果

携帯電話不正利用防止法の改正についての説明会の開催

第337回　官民競争入札等監理委員会（開催案内）

情報通信審議会　電気通信事業政策部会（第91回）の開催について

統計法等に関する研究会（第2回）

「電波有効利用委員会報告（案）」に対する意見募集の結果

2020年基準 消費者物価指数 全国 2026年(令和8年)5月分

令和8年度バイオマス産業都市募集開始のプレスリリースについて

第230回統計委員会

林総務大臣閣議後記者会見の概要

This Pride season, join EFF and the Queer Arts Collective in building a creative space at the intersection of digital justice and artistic expression. 

We’re looking for fresh, untold, historically censored takes on digital liberation. 

Whether it’s pointing the lens towards an issue you feel is underrepresented in digital justice efforts; sharing personal accounts of joy, pleasure, or sorrow under surveillance; painting your widest imagination for our communities using technology for good instead of carcerality and doom—we want to see it and we want it to expand our own understanding of what’s important and beautiful. 

We’re going to be curating between five and nine art pieces across writing (fiction, nonfiction, poetry) and visual arts (photography, drawing, painting). We welcome fluidity in medium and genre, and cross-genre works of all kinds, such as graphic storytelling and collaborations. 

We are looking for works that convey the importance of digital liberation and ways of achieving it, particularly from under-represented perspectives. Pieces will be selected based on interpretation of the theme, emotional resonance (does it surprise, move, frighten, delight?), and overall curatorial cohesion for each issue. 

Submissions that adhere to the following length guidelines are preferred: 

(NON)FICTION - max 1500 words
POETRY - max 2 poems 
VISUAL ARTS - max 1 artwork, which can be a serialized collection. 

Please submit to paige+pride@eff.org by June 30, 2026, including your piece as an attachment and a short bio in the body of the email, alongside anything else we should know about your submission. You can expect to hear back from us around July 31, and we aim to have the first issue published in September. If we select your submission for publication on both EFF and Queer Arts Collective websites, we will compensate you between $25 - $50, depending on the number of pieces published. 

There is no fee for entry. Please only submit one piece or a contained series for this call, and wait for us to get back to you before submitting again. If you plan to submit both individually and as part of a collective, one submission in each of these categories applies. 

Your submission must be your original work and you must have the legal right to authorize us to publish it, but it need not be created specifically for this project; you may submit a work you have published previously. Please disclose any use of AI in a note in your application—this will not disqualify your entry, though we value transparency of labor exchange. 

As attempting to witness art is a highly subjective endeavor, please don't consider not being selected as anything other than circumstantial. We are looking to foster a community of artists working for digital justice, and would love to see more from you in the future. 

You will retain all legal rights to your work, but agree to provide EFF and Queer Arts Collective with a non-exclusive and non-time-limited license to publish your work on their websites and other promotional materials, such as in zines. 

Meet the Judges

Kit Walsh is an EFF attorney who works to protect the rights of activists, journalists, researchers, and dissenters in order to build a better world. She is also a Nebula-award-winning author and is best known for her tabletop roleplaying game Thirsty Sword Lesbians.

Paige Collings is an EFF activist working to dismantle systems of oppression and advance collective liberation. Her work focuses on highlighting how state surveillance and corporate restrictions stifle marginalized communities and perpetuate historic injustices and harm. She works with activists across the globe to facilitate systemic change by speaking truth to power and creating spaces for alternative imaginations.

The Queer Arts Collective is an NYC-based collective run by queer and racialized artist-activists, looking to make space for art that is deliberately disruptive of structural hierarchies that power the status quo.

Last week, Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden introduced the Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression, or JAWBONE Act. The bipartisan legislation creates a federal cause of action against government officials who coerce or attempt to coerce broadcasters, interactive computer services, or AI providers into taking actions against lawful, First-Amendment-protected speech, and establishes a transparency system for government communications with those intermediaries about user expression.

We thank the Senators for their leadership on this important issue. Jawboning occurs when the government pressures private companies to censor speech protected by the First Amendment, and it’s not always obvious to the public or to the victims what has actually happened. Deleting posts or cancelling accounts because a government official or agency demanded it or even made threats in making those demands—just like spying on people’s communications on behalf of the government—raises serious free speech concerns. Among other things, this bill would provide a new legal right to bring claims against the government in federal court, in addition to what the First Amendment provides.

At EFF, we’re continuing to fight back on behalf of those censored by government coercion. One recent example: we represent the creator of ICEBlock, an app that allows the public to report immigration enforcement activity in their communities. In June 2025, high-ranking federal officials began threatening to investigate and prosecute the creator of ICEBlock, Joshua Aaron. In October 2025, the U.S. Attorney General demanded Apple remove ICEBlock from the App Store, and the company complied. The government’s coercion violated Aaron’s First Amendment rights.

We’ve also filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the same government agencies that threatened Aaron and other services that provided forums to report ICE activity. The lawsuit seeks the disclosure of the government’s communications with Apple, Google, and Meta that forced the services to remove lawful speech.

When federal officials pressure private companies into censoring protected speech, it can violate the First Amendment. But, not every communication from a government agency to a platform is unconstitutionally coercive. Treating legitimate communication and information-sharing between the government and private actors as though it were always unconstitutional would chill the valuable, good-faith engagement that supports a healthier and safer internet and nation for all Americans. This is a complex issue, and one that is important for Congress and the courts to get right. 

Finally, contrary to what many in Congress have been saying, social media platforms and other internet intermediaries have their own First Amendment rights to decide how they moderate users’ speech. They are not “state actors” and do not have an obligation under the First Amendment to allow all user speech on their platforms. EFF filed an amicus brief setting out our position in 2018, and we’ve said it in many cases since. The Supreme Court recognized again in the Netchoice cases that these services have a right to curate and edit their users’ speech, whether or not it aligns with the government’s position. And, it’s important to defend that First Amendment right so that governments cannot dictate how to edit a company’s site according to the government’s wishes and desires. To prevent jawboning by default, companies must be free to curate their platforms as they wish.

EFF applauds Senators Cruz and Wyden for taking this critical issue seriously, and we look forward to working with Congress on this bipartisan bill as it moves through the process. We hope it lands on the right balance to provide additional protections for everyday users around freedom of expression. 

Court records belong to the public. Yet anyone seeking access to federal court filings through PACER, a government software system that stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, is usually required to pay hefty fees to search for and view documents. PACER’s fees have long acted as a barrier that makes it hard, especially for low income people, to see and understand the work produced by our own public servants. 

That's why EFF joined a broad group of organizations supporting the Open Courts Act of 2026, legislation that would modernize the federal courts' electronic filing systems and eliminate PACER fees. 

Public access to the courts is a cornerstone of democratic accountability.

The bill would replace the aging PACER and CM/ECF systems with a modern, unified platform designed to improve public access, strengthen cybersecurity, and reduce long-term costs. Supporters note that PACER currently collects more than $150 million annually in fees from the public, despite court records being public documents.

The Open Courts Act would also make court records easier to find, access, and understand. The legislation builds on a similar proposal, also supported by EFF, that previously won bipartisan support in the Senate Judiciary Committee but did not become law before the end of the congressional session.

This is not a new issue for EFF. More than a decade ago, we criticized PACER's paywalls and the removal of some court records from online access, arguing that the public should not have to pay to read the law and the judicial decisions that shape it. The Open Courts Act would move U.S. courts a big step closer to that goal. 

In addition to EFF, the bill is supported by Fix the Court, the group pushing this bill forward; the Free Law Project, which maintains RECAP, software that has created a large archive of legal opinions and other court records; as well as civil society groups, open government watchdogs, and media groups. 

Public access to the courts is a cornerstone of democratic accountability. Let’s eliminate unnecessary barriers to court records, and bring the federal judiciary’s tech into the modern era. 

• Read the full letter supporting the Open Courts Act of 2026