18 civil society organizations sent a joint letter to NY Governor Hochul requesting a veto of the Stealth Crawler Act.
While framed as a way to protect local journalism, the Act harms free expression and establishes a dangerous precedent by effectively deanonymizing and criminalizing automated access to the open web.
The Stealth Crawler Act is a New York law that requires any automated tool accessing a news site to identify itself and disclose all intended uses of the content, with fines.
The letter was signed by ARDC’s Steering Committee members and others: EFF, Internet Archive, Authors’ Alliance, EleutherAI, CDT, NYCLU, Common Crawl, and others. EFF also published a dedicated blog post on the issue.
Public content is public. Read the full letter here.