Promoting And Protecting Digital Rights Since 1994
EFA is an independent non-profit association that relies on membership subscriptions and donations. If you’re concerned about digital rights in Australia, please join or donate today.
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Comprehensive national face database incompatible with a free society
Australia’s leading privacy and civil liberties organisations condemn the decision by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) to provide all images from state and territory driver’s licence databases to the federal National Facial Biometric Matching Capability. These organisations are the Australian Privacy Foundation, Digital Rights Watch, Queensland Council for Civil Liberties, NSW Council for Civil Liberties, Liberty Victoria, South Australian Council for Civil Liberties and Electronic Frontiers Australia. The creation…
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AGM 2017: documents published; Board election starts today.
All supporting documents for the 2017 AGM, including the Proxy Form, are now available on our 2017 AGM page. The AGM will be held (on Internet Relay Chat) at 15:00 AEDT on Sunday 8th October 2017. Proxy forms are due by 12:00 AEDT on Sunday 8th October 2017. The voting period for the election of Board members will commence at 15:00 AEDT today (5th October). Eligible members should receive a…
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National Facial Recognition: towards the Panopticon
The latest mass shooting in Las Vegas over the weekend has provided an opportunity for Prime Minister Turnbull to increase focus on the National Facial Biometric Matching Capability at the Coalition of Australian Governments counter-terror meeting scheduled to occur tomorrow (5th October). The Attorney General’s Department states that the National Facial Biometric Matching Capability is another tool to prevent terrorism by “sharing and matching of facial images from existing records…
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Why the marriage equality poll is a privacy issue
What is it about August 9th? Last year it was that evening of national beating-your-head-against-your-laptop as the Census website went down, and stayed down. This year, the government decided the mark the anniversary of #censusfail by handing the architects of that omnishambles, the ABS, the hospital pass of 2017: responsibility for a national same-sex marriage poll. (Me, I marked the date by baking the ABS this special anniversary cake. No,…
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ACLU To Court: It’s Legal To Tell Bob To Eat Shit
So we fully expected the ongoing to lawsuit filed by coal boss Bob Murray against comedian John Oliver to lead to some truly captivating moments (it already has!), but the West Virginia chapter of the ACLU has leapt into the case with wild abandon and made sure that people were paying attention. If you somehow missed it, Oliver did a segment on coal jobs a month and a half ago,…
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Streisand Effect helps Sci-Hub to acquire almost all scholarly literature, dooms traditional academic publishing
Techdirt has been covering the story of Sci-Hub, which provides unrestricted access to a massive (unauthorized) database of academic papers, for a while now. As several posts have emphasized, the decision by the publishing giant Elsevier to pursue the site through the courts is a classic example of the Streisand Effect: it has simply served to spread the word about a hitherto obscure service. There’s a new paper exploring this…
Help fight for our digital rights
What We Do
Policy
We actively monitor a number of policy areas and specific issues. The topics below provide a detailed view of EFA’s policy positions.
Copyright
Australia’s copyright laws are outdated, inflexible and not fit for the digital age. As such, EFA is a long-standing supporter of reform of Australia’s Copyright Act.
Privacy & Security
Privacy is fundamentally about consent and control over access to information, and goes hand-in-hand with security. Privacy is a human right.
Censorship
Adults should be able to make their own informed decisions about what content they create and consume.
Encryption
Access to encryption technologies is vital for individuals and groups to be able to safeguard the security and privacy of their information.
Internet Safety
Surveillance is not safety. Safety for whom, against what? This complex problem is more likely to be exacerbated, rather than solved, by measures that allow for unaccountable surveillance and the undermining of communications security.
Surveillance
EFA is committed to ensuring that Australian’s home life is not subject to arbitrary interference.