The city council of Somerville, Massachusetts voted unanimously last week to become the first city on the East Coast to ban government face surveillance. It is encouraging to see cities across the country take this proactive step in anticipating the surveillance problems on the horizon and head them off in...

Earlier this year, the UK government produced the “Online Harms White Paper,” creating a plan for a “system of accountability and oversight for tech companies.” The draft scheme put forth by the government is flawed, and these flaws prompted EFF and OTI to respond to the questions asked...

The best legal minds in the Bay Area gathered at Github to participate in EFF's 12th Annual Cyberlaw Trivia Night on June 27th. Over 100 participants from technology law firms and Internet companies throughout the Bay Area attended for a night filled with obscure tech law trivia, delicious food, and...

Our phones hold a plethora of important, private information about our personal lives, and it’s not just their contents that matter: the data that our phones exchange with cell towers during basic connection procedures can reveal critical, and private, information. Perhaps you called the suicide prevention hotline from the Golden...

A federal judge has ruled that litigation can go forward to determine whether Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act violates the First Amendment as applied. EFF brought this litigation on behalf of security researcher Matt Green, technologist bunnie Huang, and bunnie's company Alphamax, in order to...

In 2002, Lexmark was one of the leading printer companies in the world. A division of IBM—the original tech giant—Lexmark was also a pioneer in the now-familiar practice of locking customers in to expensive "consumables," like the carbon powder that laser-printers fuse to paper to produce printouts.Lexmark gave its customers...

Communities and lawmakers across the country are waking up to the fact that using face recognition for government surveillance is a troubling trend, particularly when used with cameras that police officers wear. On Thursday, Axon—a major police body-worn camera maker—added its voice to calls to press the pause button...

Just as the Trump administration has signaled its interest in a permanent “clean” reauthorization of the Patriot Act’s phone surveillance provision, the NSA proves once again that it is not to be trusted with these tools. New documents obtained by the ACLU and reported in the...

Communities called for police officers to wear cameras with the hope that doing so would improve police accountability, not further mass surveillance. But today, we stand at a crossroads. Face recognition technology is now capable of being interfaced with body-worn cameras in real-time—a development that has grave implications for privacy,...

A California legislative committee today voted to direct the State Auditor to launch a probe into the use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) by law enforcement agencies. The audit will include the first comprehensive statewide survey of which agencies use this surveillance technology and what vendors they...