Back in June, we urged companies offering educational or communications tools to apply for licenses to make their products available in Sudan. Last week, we were thrilled to learn that Coursera—an online educational course provider that Sudanese activists have told us is "in great demand"—successfully applied for and...

EFF, joined by Access, filed public comments last week urging the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) to tackle the unknown spying activities occurring under Executive Order 12333 (EO 12333). The Executive Order is supposed to protect Americans from presidentially-directed spying; however, despite the protections,...

­Turns out, the DEA and FBI may know what medical conditions you have, whether you are having an affair, where you were last night, and more—all without any knowing that you have ever broken a law.
That’s because the DEA and FBI, as part of over 1000 analysts at...

The NSA’s mass collection of telephone call detail records violates the Fourth Amendment, Anna Smith, the plaintiff in Smith v. Obama, told the Ninth Circuit yesterday, in the third challenge to the so-called section 215 program to reach a court of appeals. The opening brief concludes: “The surveillance...

PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is the government-run online system used by lawyers, the press, and the public to access public federal court records in the United States. The administrators of that system recently announced that a huge number of documents from five federal courts have been permanently...

Update: On August 28, 2014, EFF asked the Federal Circuit for permission to file a short amicus brief in this appeal. Our brief argues that the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS Bank requires that Ultramercial’s patent on showing ads before content (but on the Internet!) be invalidated...

The Texas Supreme Court today ruled that orders preventing people who have been found liable for defamation from publishing further statements about the plaintiff are “prior restraints,” a remedy that the First Amendment rarely permits. Adopting a position advocated by EFF in an amicus brief, the court also...