The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. heard oral argument yesterday in the closely watched “breast cancer gene” patent case. At issue are two patents covering naturally occurring human genes that, when present, signal an increased likelihood of developing breast cancer. The ACLU and the ...

In yesterday's Senate Judiciary Hearing, "Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation," FBI Director Robert Mueller testified about the Bureau's desire to extend three expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act PATRIOT Section 215, authorizing secret court orders for the Internet and financial records of innocent Americans;...

Today the House Oversight Committee held a hearing titled, “Why Isn't the Department of Homeland Security Meeting the President’s Standard on FOIA?” As we wrote last October, redacted DHS emails revealed the agency was targeting certain Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and certain FOIA requesters—such as activist...

By delaying or even blocking security updates for mobile devices, mobile carriers put their users, their business, and the country’s critical infrastructure at unnecessary risk. Mobile security problems plague the entire software stack — the baseband, the kernel, the application frameworks, and the applications — and carriers continue to...

When legal issues light up the Internet, people turn to EFF for answers. Whether it’s attacks on coders' rights, overreaching copyright claims online, or governments' efforts to censor or spy on people, we are often among the first to hear about troubling events online, and we're frequently the first place...

UPDATE (3/26/11): HTTPS is again available for those in the countries discussed below. Microsoft denies deliberately blocking access to HTTPS, blaming the problem on a bug:
We are aware of an issue that impacted some Hotmail users trying to enable HTTPS. That issue has now been resolved. Account...

On March 15th, an HTTPS/TLS Certificate Authority (CA) was tricked into issuing fraudulent certificates that posed a dire risk to Internet security. Based on currently available information, the incident got close to — but was not quite — an Internet-wide security meltdown. As this post will explain, these events...