Keynote Address

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, opens by explaining what the EFF does and why digital civil liberties now shape everyday life. She describes the organization's mix of tools: impact litigation, a coders' rights program that advises security researchers, international advocacy, grassroots activism, and a technical team that builds privacy tooling such as HTTPS Everywhere and certificate transparency work.

The middle of the talk focuses on the EFF's Threat Lab, a small group that studies surveillance and targeted malware used against journalists, activists and dissidents. She argues that such threats were long ignored because they lacked commercial appeal and were less sophisticated than the nation-state campaigns that security vendors liked to publicize. She points to projects that map police surveillance purchases, research on cell site simulators, and a campaign against government facial recognition.

She closes with stalkerware and domestic abuse, describing the flood of requests she received after offering to help survivors check their devices. Most cases turned out to need account lockdown rather than forensics, which led her to push antivirus vendors to treat stalkerware as unwanted software and to urge companies to make it easier for users to see and revoke access. Her takeaway for attendees is that no formal permission is needed to start research: pick a community, learn where it is underserved, consult a lawyer, and publish.