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経済産業省は、工場を建設する目的で平成27年（1月～12月期）に1,000平方メートル以上の用地を取得した製造業、ガス業、熱供給業、電気業の事業者を対象に「工場立地動向調査」を実施し、結果を取りまとめました。

4月5日から9日まで、韓国のソウルにおいて、日中韓自由貿易協定(FTA)交渉の第10回交渉会合(局長/局次長会合)が開催されます。

経済産業省は、昨年10月に「活力あふれる『ビンテージ・ソサエティ』の実現に向けた取組に係る研究会」を立ち上げ、検討を重ね、今般報告書をとりまとめました。

交通事故の削減や渋滞緩和、環境負荷低減等の課題解決が期待される協調ITS（※）の実現普及に必要とされる地図データベースの整備や維持・更新のコスト削減に役立つ日本発の国際規格が制定されました。

平成28年3月4日に、東京電力からありました改正電気事業法に基づく会社分割に係る申請について、このたび申請のとおり認可しました。

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

David Greene: Shin, please introduce yourself to the Speaking Freely community.

 Shin Yang: My name is Shin Yang. I am a queer writer with a legal background and experience in product management. I am the steward of Lezismore, an independent, self-hosted, open-source community for sexual minorities in Taiwan. For the past decade, I have focused on platform governance as infrastructure, with a particular emphasis on anonymity, minimal data collection, and behavior-based accountability, so that people can speak about intimacy and identity without fear of extraction or exposure. I am a community architect and builder, not an influencer. I’ve spent most of the past decade working anonymously building systems, designing governance protocols, and holding space for others to speak while keeping myself in the background.

 DG: Great. And so let’s talk about how that work intersects with freedom of expression as a principle, and your own personal feelings about freedom of expression. And so with that in mind, let me just start with a basic question, what does freedom of expression mean to you?

 SHIN: For me, free expression is about possibility, and possibility always contains both and even multiple ends, the beautiful ones and the brutal in equal measure. Maybe not that equal, but you cannot just speak about the beautiful or good things. I think it's not about pushing discomfort out of the room. If we refuse all discomfort, we end up in echo chambers, which is safe, predictable; but dead. What matters to me is the equipment and principles: Who carries through that discomfort, self-discipline, mutual support, and the infrastructure and governance that can let people grow over time. Keeps a workable gray space open: room to make mistakes, learn, repair, and keep speaking.

 DG: How does that resonate with you personally? Why are you passionate about that?

 SHIN: Around 2013 in Taiwan's context, when Facebook started to take over the digital ecosystem in Taiwan, many local independent bulletin boards (BBS) that had been formed for sexual minorities were shut down because they had no income from advertisements, and people were pushed into mainstream platforms—like Facebook, Instagram, Meta, whatever, Twitter now X—where sexual expression was usually reported or flagged, and where I watched sharp intra-community exclusionary voices saying “bisexual and trans people were not pure enough”, or that talking openly about sex would harm our image, or that it was inappropriate to children, or it would invite harassment. Those oppressions are even fiercer within the queer community itself, which is self-censoring in order to gain approval from mainstream society.

 So, the community itself says that the best way to do it is don't talk about it. Never talk about it. Never mention a single thing about it. It was a wakeup call for me, because I think it's not right. And also, there's another more private story for me, it's a story I heard from our sexual minority community. I once heard about a butch student who was sexually assaulted by a group of men because she dated a beautiful classmate, a beautiful woman in the class.

 And when I learned what happened to her, that story changed my focus. Because, you know, when people hear this kind of story, they always focus on punishing those men, punishing those criminals—but what matters for me most is building conditions where someone like her could someday still have a chance at intimacy on her own terms, and finally be free from fear. That's more important for me. I may never meet her, but I know who I am and what I'm here to build. I have been building an infrastructure –– not just “safe space” as a slogan, but an “ecospace” designed to make survival and growth possible. So that's why I believe that a well-governed space is what matters for communities now.

 DG: Why is it so important for sexual minorities to have forums where they can communicate in that way? When it was just the bulletin boards, before social media, what worked really well and what didn’t work well?

 SHIN: That’s a wonderful question. Okay, the bulletin boards I used before, the registration process doesn't require a lot of information. You just need email.

 What I miss about bulletin boards is the sense of structure. You didn’t enter a personalized feed—you entered a place with visible rooms and topics. Even in the spaces you visited daily, you’d encounter views you didn’t like, and you had to live with that—and learn how to argue, or leave, or build something parallel. In some boards, moderators were community-chosen, which created a practical kind of participation—not perfect democracy, but civic practice.

 You have to provide the information of which school you are in, because it's based on school. But it's not that difficult to use that. And also they have some kinds of logistics, like you log into different boards with different topics, and you can see that there are huge topics along with several small topics. So when you log into that, you can sense and feel the whole structure of that community. It's not a personal feed bombing you with everything you like. So you know, even in the board you’re most likely to visit every day, you will definitely encounter some speech you don't like, and you argue with them, you fight with them, or build something parallel, that's the civic foundation of democracy. You experience the everyday practice of civic democracy. People can vote for moderators or even recall them.

 DG: You mean, the community can ask them to leave the bulletin boards?

 SHIN: No, they don't actually leave the bulletin board. It's more that the moderator no longer has the right to perform administrative tasks, but they can still be part of the community, and ordinary users can vote in the election for this.

 DG: Okay, and then what were the shortcomings of the bulletin boards?

 SHIN: Yeah, it’s brutal. Really brutal. And I’ve seen people literally organize to push others out. I didn’t expect this to turn into story time, but I actually love this. So—back in Taiwan, we had this big BBS forum called PTT. There was a board called the ‘Sex’ board, where people could talk about sexual topics and share sexual health info. But around 2010, the space was dominated by mainstream straight cis men. And whenever a woman or a sexual minority posted anything, they often got harassed or attacked. So, women created another board inside the forum—basically a separate space—called ‘Feminine Sex.’ And from then on, the original Sex board and the Feminine Sex board were in conflict all the time. And honestly, if this happened today on Facebook, Threads, or X… we’d just block each other. Easy. Clean. Done.

But the problem is: when blocking becomes the default, we don’t really learn how to argue well, how to organize our reasons, or even how to sit with discomfort and understand why the other side thinks the way they do. We lose that practice—because it’s just so easy to delete people from our world now. I’m not saying blocking is always wrong. But there’s a trade-off.

 DG: I get that. Then when Facebook and the other social media platforms that followed came along and the users migrated over to the commercial services, what was lost? 

 SHIN: What was lost? I think our behavior got shaped—personal branding became the default setting for joining an online community. If you don't do it, like me, you basically don't exist.  Influence can be shaped by the number of social media followers; people define each other based on this. Choosing not to obey the logic of mainstream platforms means being unseen, and being unseen means having no influence.

And sure, personal branding can be useful—but I don’t believe it’s the only way to express yourself or connect with a community. The problem is, on mainstream platforms, the whole system is built for visibility. So clout becomes the game. Look at what they push: stories, reels, short-form visuals. And as a former product manager, I can tell you—this is not accidental. It’s designed. It’s designed around human nature: to avoid friction as much as possible. So they keep you scrolling, to make reacting effortless. One tap and you’ve sent a smiley face. Engagement becomes easier… but also cheaper.

And the scary part is, people start thinking that’s the whole internet. It’s not. But the more we get trained by these interfaces, the harder it becomes to even imagine other ways of building community. It is becoming more difficult for people to imagine that the "right" amount of friction can actually help us to grow, and coexist with the diversity.

 DG: So did you find that there were certain things you couldn't talk about on Facebook or on the other social media platforms because they were sexual, because sexual speech was not as welcome as it was earlier?

 SHIN: Yes, when I first started building my community, I knew nothing about technology. Like everyone else, I just created a fan page on Facebook, which was then flagged and deleted. This happened. I think it still happens to this day. At first, I was so angry about it. I felt it was unjust. But every time I wrote to Facebook, they just said that I had violated the user terms. At first I was furious. But I don’t stop at anger. I dig deeper. I thought, “Why do you say I violated the user terms?”

I read the terms, compared policies across platforms and applications, and realized the pattern: All of the terms of use forbid adult or erotic content in fine print. Because these are profit-driven systems optimized to minimize legal and business risk. So, I don’t frame it as “evil platforms.” I frame it as incentives. Once I understood this, I realized that we should not only protest and ask those big tech platforms to “give” us a voice –– that's a good approach, but it shouldn't be the only one. I believe we should build our own community. That's why I started researching open-source software and building my own self-hosted community.

 DG: Please talk a little bit more about what you're building, and how what you're building is consistent with your view of free expression.

 SHIN: Sure. It’s a long process but the reason why I use open-source software is, for a person knowing nothing about technology, I can come to the open-source community and ask questions about it. It’s more reliable than building it myself.

 And the second example is about how I designed Lezismore’s registration and community access, mostly through trial and error.

 We don’t require any real-name or ID verification. In fact, you can register with just an email. But instead of “verifying people,” we redesigned the "space".

 Lezismore is built as a two-layer structure. The main website is searchable, but it looks almost… boring on purpose—advocacy articles, writers’ posts, slow content. The truly active community space is inside that main site, and the entry point is not something you casually discover through search. Most people learn how to get in through word of mouth. We also block search engines, bots, and crawlers from the community area. So from day one, we gave up visibility on purpose—we traded reach for resilience.

 Then there’s the onboarding. New users go through an “apprenticeship” period. You can’t immediately post, comment, or DM people. You first have to read, observe, and understand how the community works. We don’t even tell you exactly how long it takes—you just have to be patient. In the fast-content era, people constantly complain that this is “annoying” or “hard to use.” And yes, it is friction indeed.

 But that friction buys something valuable: a space that can stay anonymous, inclusive, and high-trust—without being instantly overwhelmed by harassment or bad-faith users. It also means we don’t need to depend on Big Tech’s third-party verification APIs. With relatively low technical cost, we’re using governance design—not data collection—to balance inclusion and protection.

And honestly, as a platform owner, I have to be real about what users “actually” need. If this was truly “just terrible UX,” the site wouldn’t survive in today’s hyper-competitive platform environment. But Lezismore has been running for over a decade, and we still have tens of thousands of people quietly reading and interacting every month. This is one of the biggest tradeoffs in my governance design. In an attention economy, choosing low visibility is a bold decision, and maintaining it has a real cost.

 On top of that, we rely on human, context-based moderation. We use posts, replies, and Q&A threads to actively teach community norms—why diversity and conflict exist, how to handle risk, and how to protect yourself. Users also share practical safety tips and real interaction experiences with each other. There are many more small mechanisms built into the system, but that’s the core logic.

 And there’s one more layer: the legal environment. In Taiwan, the legal climate around sex and speech can create chilling effects for smaller platforms. Platform owners can be criminally liable in certain scenarios. That’s exactly why governance design matters—it’s how we keep lawful expression possible without over-collecting data.

 DG: Ah, so you need to be careful. I’m curious whether you’ve had any examples of offline repression. Do you have any experiences with censorship or feeling like you didn’t have your full freedom of expression in your offline experiences? Any experiences that might inform what an ideal online community might look like?

 SHIN: Yes—actually, most of my earliest experiences with repression were offline, and they shaped how I later understood the internet as an escape route.

 Back when I was a high school student, I was already involved in student movements and gender-related advocacy. One very concrete example was dress codes. The school restricted what female students could wear, and students organized to push for change. At one point we even had a vote—something like 98% of students supported revising the policy. But when the issue entered the “official” system, the administration simply ignored it. They bypassed procedure, dismissed the consensus, and used authority to shut it down completely.

That was my first clear lesson about repression: it’s not always someone telling you “you’re forbidden to speak.” Sometimes it’s a system designed so that even if students, women, or sexual minorities spend enormous effort building agreement, once our voices enter the institution, they can be treated as if they don’t exist.

That’s why, in the early 2010s, online space became my breakthrough. This was still the blog era, before social platforms fully standardized everything, and even before “share” mechanisms were built into everyday activism. I started experimenting with things like blog-based petitions, and a lot of students joined. The internet became a way to bypass institutional gatekeeping.

In college, I saw another layer. There was serious sexism from people in authority—military-style discipline officers, some teachers, and administrators. When gender-related controversies happened on campus, the media sometimes showed up and reported in ways that were harmful: exposing people, sensationalizing stories, and ignoring the realities of sexual minority students. Meanwhile, the administration would shut down student demands with authority, and at the same time use incentives and pressure behind the scenes, especially around housing or “benefits”—so some student representatives were afraid to speak honestly in meetings.

And this was before livestreaming was a normal tool. But even then, I was already using audio-based live channels to connect students across campuses. Online networks became a lifeline for young advocates, especially those of us who didn’t “fit” the institution and needed each other to survive.

I came from a literature background. I had zero technical training at the beginning. But I’ve always been the kind of person who loves trying new technology. And I was lucky, because I was born in that strange window when the internet was rapidly expanding, but not yet fully swallowed by Big Tech. So, I grew up in this tension between nostalgia and innovation, and I kept pushing, resisting, and experimenting. I’ve experienced both sides of speech: how beautiful freedom can be, and how terrifying it can become. 

 DG: Going back to Lezismore, I’m curious: When you ask people to observe before they post, what are you hoping they learn about the community before they more actively participate in it?

 SHIN: I hope people understand that this is a community rather than a dating app focused on results. The community needs people to support and nurture each other. Some people see us as a dating app and expect a frictionless experience; naturally, they are disappointed. If you're only looking for a fast-food relationship, that's fine. Here, however, it is a community that offers more than just hooking up. The design focuses on words and a person’s behavioral history rather than just a photo. Dopamine bombing is not how we do things here.

 We’ve also built a library of community safety notes, FAQs, and governance reminders over time. Some written by the team, some contributed by members. Not everyone reads them, and that’s fine. But the design makes it easier for people who want a slower, more intentional space to stay—and for people who want something frictionless to self-select out.

 SHIN: I run the platform anonymously by design. People may know that there’s an admin called “Shin”, but I don’t associate a face or personal brand with the role because I don’t want the community to depend on my visibility for their trust.

 We maintain a clear distinction between work and private life. Admin power is never a shortcut to social capital. In a sex-positive space, this boundary is a matter of ethics. The moment a founder’s identity becomes central, the space starts to orbit that person, and expectations, fan-service dynamics and power asymmetries creep in. Then speech becomes performance.

It also means I’m less “marketable” to attention-driven media—but that tradeoff protects the community’s integrity. Some media outlets only want a face and a persona. However, I accept this cost because I am trying to build a community that can thrive independently of an idol, where people relate to each other through behavior and shared norms, not proximity to the founder.

 DG: It sounds like a lot of what you’re doing is about people being authentic on the site, not using personas or using it to create a personal platform for themselves for marketing purposes.

 SHIN: Exactly, people can share links, but if a post is purely self-promotion with no contribution to the community, we don’t encourage this. I hope people here can respect the reciprocity.

 DG: I want to shift a bit and talk about freedom of expression as a principle for a while. Do you think freedom of expression should be regulated by governments?

 SHIN: Speech regulation is hard, because speech is freaking messy. And once you turn messy human speech into rules that scale, nuance gets flattened. Minority communities usually pay first, because large systems choose efficiency over lived reality.

 I also don’t think the answer is “erase all conflict.” Some friction is the price of pluralism, and with good guidance and interface design, conflict can become a point of learning instead of a point of collapse. From a platform owner’s perspective, legal liability is real and often cruel. So if we expect platforms to be free, frictionless, allow everything we like, erase everything we dislike, and still amplify our visibility—then we’re really asking for magic. That’s why we need to talk seriously about alternatives and procedural safeguards, not just louder demands.

 Age verification is a good example. I get that the goal is to protect minors. But identity-based age gates often turn into identity infrastructure. They chill lawful adult speech, concentrate gatekeeping power, and push everyone to hand over personal data just to access legal content. From my experience, there are other tools that can reduce harm with less damage—things like community design, visibility gating, and human, context-based moderation. Those approaches can protect people without building a personal-data checkpoint for everyone.

 DG: You talked about minority voices, and minority speech. Are you concerned that any regulation will end up trying to silence minority speakers, or won’t benefit minority speakers. How are these speakers more vulnerable to speech regulations than others?

 SHIN: Hmmm......a lot of minority speech is context-heavy. The same words can be support, education, or harassment depending on who says it and why. When regulation turns into broad categories, sexual health education, self-explore experiment sharing, trans healthcare discussions, or reclaimed language can be treated as “harmful” out of context (at both sides). So the risk isn’t only censorship, it’s misclassification at scale.

 DG: Are there certain types of speech that don’t deserve the conversation. Some people might say that hate speech or speech that’s dehumanizing doesn’t deserve the conversation. Are there any categories of speech that you would say we shouldn’t consider, or do we get to talk about everything?

 SHIN: Okay, I don't think the issue is about saying certain kinds of speech don't deserve to be discussed; the problem lies in the definition. As soon as we suggest that some speech doesn't merit discussion, some people will exploit this to silence their opponents. Whether it's right-wing, left-wing or anything else, if we say that we don't allow any kind of hate speech, the next thing someone will do is define your speech as hate speech. It's an endless war that draws us all into an eagerness to silence others and grab the mic, instead of creating more space for conversations and learning from each other.

 We should go further than just regulation and create spaces where people can coexist in a grey area, endure some discomfort and engage with each other. I prefer this approach to trying to draw lines.

 DG: So even well-intentioned restrictions might always be used against minority speakers?

 SHIN: I wouldn’t say restriction is not good. There always has to be some kind of restriction, but people will always find a way to overcome or take advantage of it. So, the thing I believe is that regulation is regulation, but community should be an open-source archive. How we govern community, how we dialogue between each other when we disagree with each other…how can we create a space where those things can exist? I believe that those things should be open source. People always talk about open source like it’s just coding, but I believe governance should be open source too.

 DG: So when you said before some restrictions are necessary but then we talk about open source governance, we’re talking about the same thing. When you say some restrictions are necessary, you’re not necessarily saying government restrictions, but that restrictions should come from somewhere else: that’s an open source governance model?

 SHIN: Yes. And it should include restrictions in law, and how people deal with it, the way we deal with it. I’m not saying every rule or detection signal should be public. By “open-source governance,” I mean shareable governance playbooks: proportional steps, appeals templates, community norms, and design patterns that small communities can adapt. The goal is portability and adaptability of methods, not making systems easy to game. Because malice is always part of the environment.

 DG: Is there anything else you want to say about your theory of open-source governance or what it means to you?

 SHIN: I noticed there was a question in another interview about fostering transparency in social media, and how to appeal, and that the reason [for a takedown] should be more transparent. The interesting thing is that before our interview today I was joining a law and technology policy research group, and they’re reading a book called “Law and Technology: A Methodical Approach”. It's worth mentioning that it's very interesting. Apparently, scientists tend to place emphasis on complexity, which often trips up pragmatic reform efforts, so the recommendations often only call for greater transparency or participation.

 I think this echoes what we were talking about before and the transparency thing. I heard this podcast in Taiwan about cybersecurity where they interview an outsourced ex-moderator from Meta and how the platform moderates speech. Because most of the information is confidential, the moderator can’t say too much, but she told us that every day Meta provided a whole set of lists with things they should ban, and every day it changes. Sometimes it even changes on an hourly basis. And they can never really put those fully transparent to the world. The reason they can’t do that is because those words are partially forbidding scams, because the scale is too big. So, when they show the transparency of how they ban things, the scammers will use this against them. Like, “now you’ve banned this word so I’ll just use another one.” It’s an endless war. So, I think transparency matters, but it shouldn’t be the only thing we think about, we should think about governance as well. And when we talk about governance, we shouldn’t just think about some high authority in government or a law just forcing the platform into something we like. We should go back and think about what we can do. We’ve got lots of open-source software now and we can literally build those things by ourselves. That’s what I’m trying to say.

 DG: Okay, one last question. This is the last question we ask everybody. Who’s your free speech hero?

 SHIN: This is the question I saw everyone answering, and I honestly struggled with it. Because I’m Taiwanese, and the names that often come up in U.S. free speech conversations aren’t the names I’m familiar with. I’m sorry about this.

 DG: That’s okay, it doesn’t have to be a perfect answer.

 SHIN: If you want a public figure from Taiwan, I think of the journalists and dissidents who pushed for press freedom during Taiwan’s democratization—Nylon (Tēnn Lâm-iông) is one name many Taiwanese recognize.

 If I answer this as truthfully as I can, my hero is my family. My father taught me that integrity is not a slogan. It’s the ability to keep your ethics when it costs you something. My mother is the opposite kind of teacher: she’s relentless in a practical way: she doesn’t easily back down, and she keeps finding room to move even when the room is small. Put together, that’s what free expression means to me. It’s not “I can say anything.” It's about whether you can continue to think independently and live with integrity through layers of fear, pressure, temptation and coercion, while still moving forward and creating more possibilities for others.

　消えた南鳥島案を追う　HBC「核のごみ」で芸術祭優秀賞　学生時代の思い胸に制作＝山﨑裕侍（http://jcj-daily.seesaa.net/article/485551858.html）　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　「核のごみ」処分地をめぐり揺れる北の大地。この問題を追い続ける北海道放送（ＨＢＣ）の山﨑裕侍報道部編集長に、文化庁芸術祭優秀賞を受賞した思いを寄稿してもらった。　　　　　　◇　僕にとってこの番組はある人の存在なしには作り得なかった。番組と..

Hitachi Energyが提供するRTU500シリーズには、規定されたセキュリティチェックの実装が不適切な脆弱性が存在します。

Dell Inc.が提供するUPS Multi-UPS Management Console（MUMC）には、複数の脆弱性が存在します。

２月２６日、現政権のメローニ首相が党首を務める「イタリアの同胞」「同盟」などを中心とした、中道右派グループが署名した選挙法改革案を国会に提出した。今後、国会で議論が行われる予定だ。この選挙法案には、野党からも知識人たちからも懸念が出ている。（サトウノリコ=イタリア在住）

JPCERT/CCは、「JSAC2026 開催レポート DAY 2」を公開しました。本稿では、DAY 2 Main Trackの講演について紹介しています。

EFF, along with the national ACLU and the ACLU affiliates in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit urging the court to require a warrant for border searches of electronic devices, an argument EFF has been making in the courts and Congress for nearly a decade.

The case, U.S. v. Roggio, involves a man who had been under ongoing criminal investigation for illegal exports when he returned to the United States from an international trip via JFK airport. Border officers used the opportunity to bypass the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement when they seized several of his electronic devices (laptop, tablet, cell phone, and flash drive) and conducted forensic searches of them. As the district court explained, “investigative agents had a case coordination meeting and border search authority was discussed in early January 2017,” before Mr. Roggio traveled internationally in February 2017.

The district court denied Mr. Roggio’s motion to suppress the emails and other data obtained from the warrantless searches of his devices. He was subsequently convicted of illegally exporting gun manufacturing parts to Iraq (he was also charged in a superseding indictment with torture and also convicted of that).

The number of warrantless device searches at the border and the significant invasion of privacy they represent is only increasing. In Fiscal Year 2025, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) conducted 55,318 device searches, both manual (“basic”) and forensic (“advanced”).

While a manual search involves a border officer tapping or mousing around a device, a forensic search involves connecting another device to the traveler’s device and using software to extract and analyze the data to create a detailed report the device owner’s activities and communications. Border officers have access to forensic tools that help gain access to data on a locked or encrypted device they have physical access to. From public reporting, we know that more recent devices (and ones that have had the latest security updates applied) are more resistant to these type of tools, especially if they are turned off or turned on but not yet unlocked.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized for a century a border search exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, allowing not only warrantless but also often suspicionless “routine” searches of luggage, vehicles, and other items crossing the border.

The primary justification for the border search exception has been to find—in the items being searched—goods smuggled to avoid paying duties (i.e., taxes) and contraband such as drugs, weapons, and other prohibited items, thereby blocking their entry into the country. But a traveler’s privacy interests in their suitcase and its contents are minimal compared to those in all the personal data on the person’s phone or laptop.

In our amicus brief, we argue that the U.S. Supreme Court’s balancing test in Riley v. California (2014) should govern the analysis here. In that case, the Court weighed the government’s interests in warrantless and suspicionless access to cell phone data following an arrest against an arrestee’s privacy interests in the depth and breadth of personal information stored on a cell phone. The Court concluded that the search-incident-to-arrest warrant exception does not apply, and that police need to get a warrant to search an arrestee’s phone.

Travelers’ privacy interests in their cell phones, laptops and other electronic devices are, of course, the same as those considered in Riley. Modern devices, over a decade later, contain even more data that together reveal the most personal aspects of our lives, including political affiliations, religious beliefs and practices, sexual and romantic affinities, financial status, health conditions, and family and professional associations.

In considering the government’s interests in warrantless access to digital data at the border, Riley requires analyzing how closely such searches hew to the original purpose of the warrant exception—preventing the entry of prohibited goods themselves via the items being searched. We argue that the government’s interests are weak in seeking unfettered access to travelers’ electronic devices.

First, physical contraband (like drugs) can’t be found in digital data.

Second, digital contraband (such as child sexual abuse material) can’t be prevented from entering the country through a warrantless search of a device at the border because it’s likely, given the nature of cloud technology and how internet-connected devices work, that identical copies of the files are already in the country on servers accessible via the internet.

Finally, searching devices for evidence of contraband smuggling (for example, the emails here revealing details of the illegal import scheme) and other evidence for general law enforcement (i.e., investigating non-border-related domestic crimes) are too “untethered” from the original purpose of the border search exception, which is to find prohibited items themselves and not evidence to support a criminal prosecution. Therefore, emails or other data found on a digital device searched without a warrant at the border cannot and should not be used as evidence in court.

If the Third Circuit is not inclined to require a warrant for electronic device searches at the border, we also argue that such a search—whether manual or forensic—should be justified only by reasonable suspicion that the device contains digital contraband and be limited in scope to looking for digital contraband.

This extends the Ninth Circuit’s rule from U.S. v. Cano (2019) in which the court held that only forensic device searches at the border require reasonable suspicion that the device contains digital contraband—that is, some set of already known facts pointing to this possibility—while manual searches may be conducted without suspicion. But the Cano court also held that all searches must be limited in scope to looking for digital contraband (for example, call logs are off limits because they can’t contain digital contraband in the form of photos or files).

We hope that the Third Circuit will rise to the occasion and be the first circuit to fully protect travelers’ Fourth Amendment rights at the border.

The U.S. military has officially ended its $200 million contract with AI company Anthropic and has ordered all other military contractors to cease use of their products. Why? Because of a dispute over what the government could and could not use Anthropic’s technology to do. Anthropic had made it clear since it first signed the contract with the Pentagon in 2025 that it did not want its technology to be used for mass surveillance of people in the United States or for fully autonomous weapons systems. Starting in January, that became a problem for the Department of Defense, which ordered Anthropic to give them unrestricted use of the technology. Anthropic refused, and the DoD retaliated.

There is a lot we could learn from this conflict, but the biggest take away is this: the state of your privacy is being decided by contract negotiations between giant tech companies and the U.S. government—two entities with spotty track records for caring about your civil liberties. It’s good when CEOs step up and do the right thing—but it's not a sustainable or reliable solution to build our rights on. Given the government’s loose interpretations of the law, ability to find loopholes to surveil you, and willingness to do illegal spying, we needs serious and proactive legal restrictions to prevent it from gobbling up all the personally data it can acquire and using even routine bureaucratic data for punitive ends.

Imposing and enforcing such those restrictions is properly a role for Congress and the courts, not the private sector. 

The companies know this. When speaking about the specific risk that AI poses to privacy, the CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei said in an interview, “I actually do believe it is Congress’s job. If, for example, there are possibilities with domestic mass surveillance—the government buying of bulk data has been produced on Americans, locations, personal information, political affiliations, to build profiles, and it’s not possible to analyze all of that with AI—the fact that that is legal—that seems like the judicial interpretation of the Fourth Amendment has not caught up or the laws passed by Congress have not caught up.” 

The example he cites here is a scarily realistic one—because it’s already happening. Customs and Border Protection has tapped into the online advertising world to buy data on Americans for surveillance purposes. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been using a tool that maps millions of peoples’ devices based on purchased cell phone data. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has proposed a centralized data broker marketplace to make it easier for intelligence agencies to buy commercially available data. Considering the government’s massive contracts with a bunch of companies that could do analysis, including Palantir, a company which does AI-enabled analysis of huge amounts of data, then the concerns are incredibly well founded. 

But Congress is sadly neglecting its duties. For example, a bill that would close the loophole of the government buying personal information passed the House of Representatives in 2024, but the Senate stopped it.  And because Congress did not act, Americans must rely on a tech company CEO has to try to protect our privacy—or at least refuse to help the government violate it.

Privacy in the digital age should be an easy bipartisan issue. Given that it’s wildly popular (71% of American adults are concerned about the government's use of their data and among adults that have heard of AI 70% have little to no trust in how companies use those products) you would think politicians would be leaping over each other to create the best legislation and companies would be promising us the most high-end privacy protecting features. Instead, for the time being, we are largely left adrift in a sea of constant surveillance, having to paddle our own life rafts.

EFF has, and always will, fight for real and sustainable protections for our civil liberties including  a world where our privacy does not rest upon the whims of CEOs and back room deals with the surveillance state. 

AIネットワーク社会推進会議（第32回）・AIガバナンス検討会（第30回）合同会議

地域DXに向けた計画の策定等の伴走支援を受ける　地方公共団体等の一次公募の開始及び公募説明会の開催

電気通信に関するグローバル連合（GCOT）による6Gに関する成果文書の公表等

電気通信事業法施行規則の一部を改正する省令案等に係る意見募集の結果

情報通信審議会　情報通信技術分科会　陸上無線通信委員会（第98回）