The Year in Government Hacking: 2016 in Review
There's no question that this has been a big year for government hacking. Not a day has gone by without some mention of it in the news. 2016 may forever be remembered as the year when government hacking went so mainstream that Stephen Colbert cracked jokes about Fancy Bear...
What Happened to Unlocking the Box? 2016 in Review
EFF spends a lot of time investigating the latest trends and developments in technology, trying to stay one step ahead of the most recent threats to your digital rights. This isn’t one of those stories. This is a story about a technology that’s even older than our organization, that’s barely...
Top 5 Threats to Transparency: 2016 in Review
As we approach the end of 2016, it’s disturbing to note the wide variety of ways in which government transparency has languished—even under an administration rhetorically committed to it. With the next administration poised to even further extend executive secrecy, it becomes ever more crucial for the courts and...
Whistleblowers Don’t Need Elite Credentials To Help Protect Us from Government Overreach
Author Malcolm Gladwell recently name-checked the EFF in an article published in The New Yorker. Mr. Gladwell’s piece examines what he sees as the differences between whistle-blowers Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg, and concludes that Snowden doesn’t deserve the respect (or apparently the same legal...
Technical Developments in Cryptography: 2016 in Review
While 2016 may not have been the banner year for cryptographic exploits that 2015 was, researchers around the world continued to advance the state of the art.
TLS 1.3 design finalized
The biggest practical development in crypto for 2016 is Transport Layer Security version 1.3. TLS...
This Year in U.S. Copyright Policy: 2016 in Review
Three years into Congress's copyright review and it's still more talk than action.
The talk: at the start of the year, the Commerce Department released its long-awaited recommendations for copyright reform, and in the spring, the Copyright Office moved forward with three major copyright policy...
Open Access Rewards Passionate Curiosity: 2016 in Review
In February 2016, a team of scientists published one of the most important pieces of scientific research so far this century. For the first time, researchers had directly observed gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime whose discovery Albert Einstein first predicted a century ago. The team effectively...
Censorship on Social Media: 2016 in Review
Defending Student Data from Classrooms to the Cloud: 2016 in Review
In classrooms across the country, students as young as kindergarteners are turning on school-issued devices and logging into their online school accounts. While students and teachers can benefit from educational apps and services, behind the scenes edtech companies are inhaling troves of data on students, often without the awareness and...
How to Enable Two-Factor Authentication on Slack
For the twelfth and final day of the 12 Days of 2FA, we will look at how to enable two-factor authentication on Slack. If you are a member of multiple Slack “teams” (e.g. work.slack.com and school.slack.com), you will need to set up 2FA separately for each account you...









