EFF has long been critical of overbroad government secrecy, which has been used to cover up everything from illegal activities to questionable legal justifications for mass surveillance.
Given that government officials default to withholding important details from the public regarding national security, we were pleasantly surprised to...

Trade Protection Not Troll Protection Act Would Prevent Patent Trolls from Blocking Imports
Patent trolls don’t just demand money from innovators; they can actually interfere with international trade and block imports from entering the country. There’s a new bill in Congress designed to take this powerful tactic away from...

Publishers are seeking to expand the copyright restrictions they can impose on news platforms, in the latest example of a phenomenon known as “copyright creep.” That kind of creep happens when lawmakers lose sight of the central purpose of copyright: to ultimately grow the cultural commons by ensuring that authors...

Sens. Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein recently released a draft bill forcing nearly all U.S. companies to decrypt any encrypted data they may handle. Specifically, it would place a new, sweepingly broad duty on device manufacturers, software developers, ISPs, online services and others to decrypt encrypted data or offer...

State lawmakers recently introduced some misguided changes to California’s Assembly Bill 1681, which would require that manufacturers and operating system providers be able to decrypt smartphones sold in the state. On first glance, the amendment to A.B. 1681 might seem to address some of EFF’s previous criticisms, but...

Fight to Make Documents Public Continues
In December, 2014, EFF asked a court to allow it to intervene in a patent case so that we could formally request that certain documents in the court record be unsealed and made available to the public. Yesterday, EFF’s motion to intervene was...

End-to-end encryption has just gone massively mainstream. In an update on March 31st, the Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp quietly pushed an update adding end-to-end encryption enabled by default to its chat and call functionality. They announced the change publicly on Tuesday, allowing the app's over 1 billion monthly...

With the goal of keeping tabs on sex offenders, the state of Illinois has veered way off course. Its offender registration statute requires individuals to report every nook and cranny of their online activities to law enforcement—or face jail time. Every Internet site they visit, every online retailer account they...

The Federal Communications Commission is trying to open up the closed world of TV set-top boxes, with the goal of finally killing that dust-gathering, power-sucking box altogether. They’ve proposed a new rule known as “Unlock the Box” that allows devices and apps from any...