Name: EFF to Supreme Court: American Companies Complicit in Human Rights Abuses Abroad Should Be Held Accountable
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EFF to Supreme Court: American Companies Complicit in Human Rights Abuses Abroad Should Be Held Accountable

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Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItFor years EFF has been U.S. companies that act as “repression’s little helpers” to be held accountable, and now we’re telling the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite all the ways that technology has been used as a force for good—connecting people around the world, giving voice to the less powerful, and facilitating knowledge sharing—technology has also been used as a and , a dark side that cannot be denied.Today EFF filed a urging the Supreme Court to preserve one of the few tools of legal accountability that exist for companies that intentionally aid and abet foreign repression, the (ATS). We told the court about what we and others have been seeing over the past decade or so: surveillance, communications, and database systems, just to name a few, have been used by foreign governments—with the full knowledge of and assistance by the U.S. companies selling those technologies—to spy on and track down activists, journalists, and religious minorities who have been imprisoned, tortured, and even killed.Specifically, we asked the Supreme Court today to rule that U.S. corporations can be sued by foreigners under the ATS and taken to court for aiding and abetting gross human rights abuses. The court is reviewing an brought by former child slaves from Côte d’Ivoire who claim two American companies, Nestlé USA and Cargill, aided in abuse they suffered by providing financial support to cocoa farms they were forced to work at. The ATS allows noncitizens to bring a civil claim in U.S. federal court against a defendant that violated human rights laws. The companies are asking the court to rule that companies cannot be held accountable under the law, and that only individuals can.We were joined in the by the leading organizations tracking the sale of surveillance technology: Access Now, Article 19, Privacy International, Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, and Ronald Deibert, director of Citizen Lab at University of Toronto. We told the court that the Nestlé case does not just concern chocolate and children. The outcome will have profound implications for millions of Internet users and other citizens of countries around the world. Why? Because providing sophisticated surveillance and censorship products and services to foreign governments is . The fact that their products are clearly being used for tools of oppression seems not to matter. Here are a few examples we cite in our brief:Cisco custom-built the so-called “Great Firewall” in China, also known as the “Golden Shield,” which enables the government to conduct Internet surveillance and censorship against its citizens. Company documents have revealed that, as part of its marketing pitch to China, Cisco built a specific “Falun Gong module” into the Golden Shield that helped Chinese authorities religious minority, who were then apprehended and subjected to Recently, the government of Belarus used technology from , a U.S. network equipment company, to block much of the Internet during the disputed presidential election in August (the company with Belarus because of the censorship). The company’s technology by Turkey, Syria, and Egypt against Internet users to redirect them to websites that contain spyware or block their access to political, human rights, and news contentWe also cited a where we filed a brief in support of the plaintiffs, , who sued under the ATS on claims that the tech giant aided and abetted the human rights abuses they suffered at the hands of the South African government. IBM created a customized computer-based national identification system that facilitated the “denationalization” of country’s Black population. Its customized technology enabled efficient identification, racial categorization, and forced segregation, furthering the systemic oppression of South Africa’s native population. Unfortunately the case by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.&nbsp; The Supreme Court has of the ATS in several rulings over the years. The court is now being asked to essentially grant immunity from the ATS to U.S. corporations. That would be a huge mistake. Companies that provide products and services to customers that clearly intend to, and do, use them to commit gross human rights abuses must be held accountable for their actions. We don’t think companies should be held liable just because their technologies ended up in the hands of governments that use them to hurt people. But when technology corporations custom-make products for governments that are plainly using them to commit human rights abuses, they cross a moral, ethical, and legal line.We urge the Supreme Court to hold that U.S. courts are open when a U.S. tech company decides to put profits over basic human rights, and people in foreign countries are seriously harmed or killed by those choices.&nbsp;Share ItHow transparent are police about surveillance technology? It depends on where you look. When it comes to acceptable levels of secrecy around police tools, states have drawn their lines in very different places, resulting in some communities where it is much harder for the public to know what invasive tools...By unanimous vote, San Francisco's public records appeals body ruled last night that the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) violated state and local laws when it failed to respond adequately to EFF's requests for documents about face recognition and the department's relationship with the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC),...Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter highlights the risks to human rights and personal safety when any single person has complete control over policies affecting almost 400 million users. And in this case, that person has repeatedly demonstrated that they do not understand the realities of platform policy at scale.EFF and the the are seeking to unseal a host of court records documenting a patent dispute between Google and Uniloc, a prolific patent litigant.Secrecy pervades the entire record in Uniloc v. Google. When Google filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, the parties...Democracy means allowing everyday people to have their voices heard on public matters involving their communities. One of the goals of civic technology is to allow a more diverse group of people to have input on government affairs through the use of technology and the internet. Beth Noveck, author of...SAN FRANCISCO—As part of its ongoing work to ensure that people can know and understand the laws they live under, , a nonprofit organization, on Thursday vindicated its ability to publicly post important laws online in standard formats, free of copy protections and cumbersome user interfaces.The win for Public...EFF is suing the Department of Homeland Security for transparency into its social media surveillance program targeting visa applicants.Each year during Sunshine Week (March 13-19), The Foilies serve up tongue-in-cheek "awards" for government agencies and assorted institutions that stand in the way of access to information. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock combine forces to collect horror stories about Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and state-level public records...For more than three years, EFF has been to court records in a patent case between Uniloc, one of the world’s most prolific patent trolls, and Apple, one of the world’s biggest tech companies. The district court has ruled three different times that the public...Over the last few years, technology platforms have . In one example of this, technology companies have refused to host speech by Palestinian activist Leila Khaled. Khaled is associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group on...Share It

Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItFor years EFF has been U.S. companies that act as “repression’s little helpers” to be held accountable, and now we’re telling the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite all the ways that technology has been used as a force for good—connecting people around the world, giving voice to the less powerful, and facilitating knowledge sharing—technology has also been used as a and , a dark side that cannot be denied.Today EFF filed a urging the Supreme Court to preserve one of the few tools of legal accountability that exist for...

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EFF to Supreme Court: American Companies Complicit in Human Rights Abuses Abroad Should Be Held Accountable

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