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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Inquiry into freedom of speech really isn’t
EFA is disappointed that the Attorney-General has ignored the major threats to freedom of expression in Australia in framing the terms of reference for the parliamentary inquiry he announced today. The extremely narrow terms of reference for this inquiry mean that it is not ‘an inquiry into freedom of speech’ as the Attorney’s media release claims. There are many serious threats to free expression in 21st century Australia, including our…
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Celebrations as Marrakesh Treaty comes into force
Late last month saw a truly historic day in copyright, one some of us feared we’d never see. On 29th September 2016, the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled came into force. The Treaty, which has already been ratified by 22 countries including Australia, ensures that people with a visual impairment the world over will finally have…
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Is someone really trying to find out if they can destroy the internet?
A prolonged Internet outage affecting major sites like Twitter, Netflix, Spotify and The New York Times on friday has commentators concerned that this is was a practice run for future, more widespread disruption of the internet. The distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) targeted the dynamic domain name service provider Dyn and came in three waves during the day. Dyn provides internet address translation through DNS servers to take a…
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The IANA transition – an explainer
The IANA transition is an important event that is vital for the Internet, but if you hadn’t been told about it you wouldn’t notice it. The change is fundamental, but will change relatively little day to day. IANA is a collection of jobs, mostly administrative, that sit at the core of the Internet. IANA stands for Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, and its job is to serve as the authoritative record…
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Census 2016: what you need to know
We are not the ABS, and we can’t help you obtain a paper form or login details for the census. We know that a lot of people have been having trouble getting through to the ABS and/or haven’t received a form or their login details. According to the ABC, “[p]aper forms need to be returned by September 18, while people have until September 23 to fill out an online…
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Election 2016 Scorecard
Recently, we released our Election 2016 scorecard. We were really pleased to see a lot of substantive and thoughtful replies from the smaller parties. As in 2013, Pirate Party Australia and the Australian Greens have scored full marks. For the first time this year, the Science Party and the Liberal Democrats have also scored full marks. The Glenn Lazarus team scored very close to full marks, but was marked down…
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.