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In a welcome turn of events, President Barack Obama spoke directly to the patent troll problem and the need for more comprehensive patent reform yesterday in a "Fireside Hangout" — a live question and answer session hosted in a Google+ hangout. The President was responding to a question by the...
This post was co-written by EFF Legal Intern Lara EllenbergIn going after internet service providers (ISPs) for the actions of just a few of their users, Sony Music, other major record labels, and music publishing companies have found a way to cut people off of the internet based on mere...
For the last month, civil liberties and human rights organizations, researchers, and customers have demanded that Apple cancel its plan to install photo-scanning software onto devices. This software poses an enormous danger to privacy and security. Apple has heard the message, and announced that it...
Congress is considering a bill that would throw out the best defenses against bad patents. The Senate IP Subcommittee recently had a hearing about the Stronger Patents Act, a batch of recurring terrible ideas that has been introduced by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) for the third time in three years....
If you click around Facebook’s “Government Request Report,” you’ll notice that, for many countries, Facebook enumerates the number of “content restrictions” the company has fulfilled. This is a sanitized term for censorship. For example, Facebook restricted access to three items of content on its...
At EFF, we've become all too accustomed to bad news on copyright coming out of Europe, so it's refreshing to hear that Portugal has recently passed a law on copyright that helps to strike a fairer balance between users and copyright holders on DRM. The law doesn't abolish legal protection for DRM...
Update [11/9/2015]: President Obama formally notified Congress of his intent to sign the TPP on Thursday November 5—90 days after which he may sign the agreement and send the agreement to Congress for ratification. Trade offices involved in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement...
What does the FBI want when it comes to the encryption “debate”? At an oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, FBI Director James Comey offered what he called the “good news” that it’s not a debate at all. In fact, he said, government and the tech industry all want the same...
Years of lobbying and litigation has made it clear Comcast wants to turn the Internet into a toll road and run the booth If you have signed onto Twitter and have been following the network neutrality debate, you've probably seen Comcast's campaign to rewrite its history of opposition to the Open...
Update: Monday 14th 2019: We've added contact details and an action for Belgium.Update: Tuesday 15th 2019: We've added contact details and an action for Czechia.Sweden: Take Action Here.Germany: Take Action Here. Luxembourg: Take Action Here.Poland: Take Action Here.Belgium: Take Action Here....
San Francisco - Federal law enforcement officers compromised the backbone of the Internet and violated the Fourth Amendment when they demanded private encryption keys from the email provider Lavabit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues in a brief submitted Thursday afternoon to the US...
The field of machine learning and artificial intelligence is making rapid progress. Many people are starting to ask what a world with intelligent computers will look like. But what is the ratio of hype to real progress? What kinds of problems have been well solved by current machine learning techniques, which ones are…
We've reported here often on efforts to ram through Congress legislation that would authorize massive interference with the Internet, all in the name of a fruitless quest to stamp out all infringement online. Today Representative Lamar Smith upped the ante, introducing legislation, called the Stop...
EFF, along with the national ACLU, the ACLU affiliates in Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit urging the court to require a warrant for...
There’s a new bill in Congress that would threaten your right to free expression online. If that weren’t enough, it could also put small Internet businesses in danger of catastrophic litigation. Don’t let its name fool you: the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693) wouldn’t help punish...
A security flaw in New South Wales’ Internet voting system may have left as many as 66,000 votes vulnerable to interception and manipulation in a recent election, according to security researchers. Despite repeated assurances from the Electoral Commission that all Internet votes are “fully...
In the wake of Charlottesville, both GoDaddy and Google have refused to manage the domain registration for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that, in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is “dedicated to spreading anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism.” Subsequently...
Update: On December 15, Judge Edward Shea issued his written opinion in United States v. Vargas, which you can read here. The public got an early holiday gift today when a federal court agreed with us that six weeks of continually video recording the frontyard of someone's home without a search...
The Supreme Court’s Van Buren decision today overturned a dangerous precedent and clarified the notoriously ambiguous meaning of “exceeding authorized access” in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the federal computer crime law that’s been misused to prosecute beneficial and important online...
Outside of the beltway, people all over the United States are taking to the streets to demand fundamental change. In the halls of Congress and the White House, however, many people seem to think the biggest thing that needs to be restructured is the Internet. Last week, the president issued an...
Tell HP: Say No to DRM. Dion Weisler President and CEO HP Inc. 1501 Page Mill Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 September 26, 2016 Dear Mr. Weisler, I write to you today on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to defending technological freedom, human rights and privacy in...
So why do we know so little about it?The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly building what will likely become the largest database of biometric and biographic data on citizens and foreigners in the United States. The agency’s new Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART)...
The government hacking into phones and seizing computers remotely? It’s not the plot of a dystopian blockbuster summer movie. It’s a proposal from an obscure committee that proposes changes to court procedures—and if we do nothing, it will go into effect in December. The proposal comes from the...
eff_ltr_to_rico_mgmt_re_krazam_llc.pdf
Like most people in the United States and around the world, EFF is shocked and disgusted by Wednesday’s violent attack on the U.S. Capitol. We support all those who are working to defend the Constitution and the rule of law, and we are grateful for the service of policymakers, staffers, and other...
Our client, Chris Roberts, a founder of the security intelligence firm One World Labs, found himself detained by the FBI earlier this week after tweeting about airplane network security during a United Airlines flight. When Roberts landed in Syracuse, he was questioned by the FBI, which ultimately...
We could be celebrating the New Year by ripping out the fiber optic cables that are sending copies of all our emails to the National Security Agency. But instead, Congress is planning on ringing in 2013 by re-authorizing parts of the FISA Amendments Act, the controversial 2008 bill that allows...
If you have ever tried scanning or photocopying a banknote, you may have found that your software—such as Adobe Photoshop, or the embedded software in the photocopier—refused to let you do so. That's because your software is secretly looking for security features such as EURion dots in the...
Last week, the ACLU filed a welcome additional challenge to the NSA’s warrantless Internet backbone surveillance (aka “Upstream” surveillance) on behalf of Wikimedia and a number of other media and human rights organizations. We applaud all of those involved in bringing the case. It adds another...
Do you drive a car in the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area? According to the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriff’s Department, your car is part of a vast criminal investigation. The agencies took a novel approach in the briefs they filed in EFF and the ACLU of Southern California’s...