Congress has no business approving government programs that neither it nor the public understands. Yet policymakers have repeatedly authorized surveillance activities without doing their homework. Over the eight years since enacting reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), Congress has failed to gain a functional understanding of NSA Internet...

In an attack on ad-blocking software, the Newspaper Association of America filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission last week, asking the agency to ban a variety of functions, including “evading metered subscription systems and paywalls,” and ad substitution. NAA also called into question new business models that...

Today is EFF day at Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. Maron is releasing an interview with me, in my official capacity as Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents. WTF is also donating $5,000 to EFF and will match up to $5,000 in donations through June. Donate to...

What is EFF worried about?
The W3C effort to standardize Encrypted Media Extensions (EME, part of the Media Extensions Working Group) marks a new era in W3C standardization. For the first time, implementations of a W3C standard will be covered by "anti-circumvention" laws such as the Section 1201 of...

Three years ago today, the world got powerful confirmation that the NSA was spying on the digital lives of hundreds of millions of innocent people. It started with a secret order written by the FISA court authorizing the mass surveillance of Verizon Business telephone records—an order that members of...

A court in Seattle has lifted an order that required our client MuckRock to remove documents one of its users obtained from a public records request.
Agreeing with EFF, King County Superior Court Judge William Downing ruled that the previous order amounted to a prior restraint on speech...

The Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement is a key protection against invasive government searches, but getting a warrant doesn’t solve every problem that can arise, particularly with searches for digital data. When the government has a warrant to search for specific files on a computer, courts may permit it to copy...

Too often copyright maximalists take the view that if anyone is making money and using a copyrighted work, no matter how or how minimally, then the copyright owner should get a cut. That’s the attitude that has pushed, among other things, a “clearance culture” in music sampling, a belief that...