In Saturday’s edition of the New York Times, Matt Apuzzo reports that the Department of Justice is locked in a “prolonged standoff” with WhatsApp. The government is frustrated by its lack of real-time access to messages protected by the company’s end-to-end encryption. The story may represent a disturbing...

Update (April 8, 2016): The encryption bill has been amended. The changes are discussed in a new post.
Smartphone users in California take notice: a new CA State Assembly bill would ban default encryption features on all smartphones. Assembly Bill 1681, introduced in January by Assemblymember Jim...

EFF recently received records in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Justice for information on how the US Marshals—and perhaps other agencies—have been flying small, fixed-wing Cessna planes equipped with "dirtboxes”: IMSI catchers that imitate cell towers and are able to capture the...

Update 2015-05-12: The Let's Encrypt client has now been renamed to Certbot. And Let's Encrypt has now issued over three million certificates!
Yesterday, the Let's Encrypt CA issued its millionth certificate. This is a perfect occasion for us to talk about some plans for the CA...

Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

When you pay for federally funded research, you should be allowed to read it. That’s the simple premise of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (S.779, H.R.1477), which was just passed out of a...

If you are a company that collects customer data, it’s your job to protect it. Your customers expect it. You can’t dodge that responsibility by altering your terms and conditions, especially when finding them is equivalent to playing “Where’s Waldo?” on your website.
This is not only outrageous, but...

The Open Source Initiative, a nonprofit that certifies open source licenses, has adopted an important principle about standards, DRM, and openness, and just in time, too.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which makes the core standards that the Internet runs on, is in the midst of a long,...

One of the United States government's priorities in Internet policy is encapsulated by a term that's recently been making the rounds; the "free flow of information." It appears almost every time U.S. officials describe how they intend to protect the free and open Internet, especially when it comes to international...