Defending your rights in the digital world
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The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways. It will force other TPP signatories to accept the United States' excessive copyright terms of a minimum of life of the author plus 70 years, while locking the US to the same lengths so it will...
New Report Analyzes How Crypto Backdoors, Interference with Crypto, and Compelled Disclosure of Encryption Keys All Impact Free Expression and Privacy Defending encryption is a human rights issue, according to a new Amnesty International report. The report calls on nation-states to promote the use...
Everyone should be able to read the law, discuss it, and share it with others, without having to pay a toll or sign a contract. Seems obvious, right? Unfortunately, a federal district court has said otherwise, ruling that private organizations can use copyright to control access to huge portions of...
Vigilant Solutions, one of the country’s largest brokers of vehicle surveillance technology, is offering a hell of a deal to law enforcement agencies in Texas: a whole suite of automated license plate reader (ALPR) equipment and access to the company’s massive databases and analytical tools—and it...
EFF is stunned and deeply saddened by the attack on Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper. As free speech advocates, we mourn the use of violence against individuals who used creativity and free expression to engage in cultural and political criticism. Murder is the ultimate form of...
Today, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could allow companies to keep a dead hand of control over their products, even after you buy them. The case, Impression Products v. Lexmark International, is on appeal from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, who last year affirmed...
In a post on Wednesday, researchers Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger presented compelling research suggesting that the NSA has developed the capability to decrypt a large number of HTTPS, SSH, and VPN connections using an attack on common implementations of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange...
Encryption is one of the most important ways to safeguard data from prying eyes. But what happens when those prying belong to the government? Can they force you to break your own encryption and provide them with the information they want? In a new amicus brief, we explain that the Fifth Amendment...
The Entertainment Software Association doesn’t want anyone to restore the functionality of older videogames that are no longer supported by their publisher, because, says ESA, this is “hacking,” and all hacking is “associated with piracy.” EFF, along with law student Kendra Albert, is asking the...
Whether controlled by an artificial intelligence or a remote human operator, armed police robots and drones pose an unacceptable threat to civilians. The ongoing revolution in the field of robotics requires us to act now to prevent a new era of police violence.
In a voice vote earlier this week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 6028, the “Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act.” The legislation is presented as a technical reorganization of some government agencies, but it’s much more than that. H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S....
CISA passed the Senate today in a 74-21 vote. The bill is fundamentally flawed due to its broad immunity clauses, vague definitions, and aggressive spying authorities. The bill now moves to a conference committee despite its inability to address problems that caused recent highly publicized...
This Fourth of July, EFF will be demonstrating our commitment to your Constitutional right of privacy from government surveillance by displaying the text of the Fourth Amendment on our website. This demonstration is a visual symbol of our opposition to the illegal and unconstitutional surveillance...
In a long-awaited decision, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank today, striking down an abstract software patent. Essentially, the Court ruled that adding “on a computer” to an abstract idea does not make it patentable. Many thousands of software patents—particularly the...
EFF, Public Knowledge, and the Center for Democracy and Technology Urge The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to Protect Internet Subscribers in BMG v. Cox. No one should have to fear losing their Internet connection because of unfounded accusations. But some rights holders want...
A bill purporting to target the issue of misinformation and defamation caused by generative AI has mutated into something that could change the internet forever, harming speech and innovation from here on out.The Nurture Originals, Foster Art and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act aims to...
EFF joined over 50 privacy and civil society organizations that sent two letters to Congress demanding it vote against the Senate Intelligence Committee's cybersecurity "information sharing" bill, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA, S. 754) and the House Intelligence Committee’...
Today, a group of 83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate respectively. We, the undersigned, have played...
How India is losing its footing on free expression. The world’s biggest democracy is a formidable power in the IT sector. With software exports comprising approximately ten percent of India’s total GDP and a technology sector that employs more than 2.5 million people, India is poised to become a...
The Supreme Court issued an important ruling today in the long-running patent battle between Apple and Samsung. The appeal involved some of Apple’s infamous design patents on rounded corners. The Federal Circuit had ruled that Apple was entitled to all of Samsung’s profits from the infringing...
You no longer need HTTPS Everywhere to set HTTPS by default! Major browsers now offer native support for an HTTPS only mode. Learn how to turn it on.Read more about the sunset of HTTPS Everywhere.Since we started offering HTTPS Everywhere, the battle to encrypt the web has made leaps and bounds....
The public’s right of access to court proceedings is well-established as a legal principle, but it needs constant defending. In part, that’s because private parties keep asking publicly-funded courts to resolve their disputes in secret. As we and others have written before, this problem is...
HBO Max is incredible. Not because it is good, but because of how many problems with the media landscape it epitomizes. If you ever had trouble seeing where monopoly, net neutrality, and technology intertwine, well then thanks, I guess, to AT...
San Francisco – A federal appeals court in San Francisco today affirmed that copyright holders must consider whether a use of material is fair before sending a takedown notice. The ruling came in Lenz v. Universal, often called the “dancing baby” lawsuit. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)...
All this month, the European Union's "trilogue" is meeting behind closed doors to hammer out the final wording of the new Copyright Directive, a once-noncontroversial regulation that became a hotly contested matter when, at the last minute, a set of extremist copyright proposals were added and...
Prominent experts at the United Nations have now indicated that secretive trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) undermine human rights around the world, both because of the secretive, corporate-dominated process, and due to the substantive content of the provisions that arise...
John L. Young, who died March 28 at age 89 in New York City, was among the first people to see the need for an online library of official secrets, a place where the public could find out things that governments and corporations didn’t want them to know. He made real the idea – revolutionary in its...
San Francisco - Attorney Charles Carreon dropped his bizarre lawsuit against The Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman today, ending his strange legal campaign against Inman's humorous and creative public criticism of a frivolous cease and desist letter that Carreon wrote on behalf of his client Funny Junk...
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and...
Eight years after Google initially took a stand against Internet censorship by exiting the Chinese search market, we are disappointed to learn the company has been secretly re-considering an extended collaboration with the massive censorship and surveillance-wielding state. According to an...