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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CitizenFour: Why it’s already the movie of the year
By Alex Schlotzer, EFA Board Member Less than two weeks after its Australian release, CitizenFour today received the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film had previously won the British equivalent (BAFTA) as well as a long list of awards from film festivals and critics societies. I was fortunate enough to catch the Melbourne preview screening earlier this month organised by EFA, Madman and civil liberties councils across Australia…
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Ludlam demolishes data retention bill
At the end of January, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) held two days of hearings into the government’s data retention legislation (transcripts here and here). These hearings were at times a testy affair, with a number of Coalition members particularly being openly antagonistic to privacy advocates, including EFA’s Jon Lawrence (see the transcript of EFA’s testimony), while accepting, almost completely uncritically, the largely unsupported assertions of…
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George Brandis still struggling with metadata
While it is perhaps unsurprising, the Attorney-General’s latest attempt to use the Sydney siege and recent events in France as justifications for the government’s mandatory data retention laws is as distasteful as it is misleading. It’s difficult to know whether he is being deliberately disingenuous or whether his understanding of the detail of what he is proposing has not advanced significantly since his spectacular failure to explain it to Sky…
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Five things we learned about the Government’s data retention regime in 2014
By Alex Schlotzer, Board Member – Electronic Frontiers Australia Right now the Government is proposing to introduce a mandatory, society-wide regime for the retention of communications data (‘metadata’) for two years. In the latest public hearing into the Government’s proposed legislation a number of important matters were revealed by the Attorney-General and Australia’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies. If you weren’t paying attention to the workings of Parliament in the…
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EFA joins call for transparency in Trans-Pacific Partnership talks
EFA joins the Australian Digital Alliance, Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network (AFTINET), Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), Australian Libraries Copyright Committee (ALCC), the Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) and 42 other civil society groups and experts from around the world to call on trade ministers of countries negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to publish the current draft of the agreement, as well as all nations’ negotiating positions.…
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.