"Stop Cyber Spying" Campaign Tells Obama and Congress to Drop Failed Cybersecurity Bills
EFF, Access, and a coalition of other digital rights organizations have launched a campaign opposing legislative attempts to make information sharing between companies and the government easier. The 5 bills—touted as cybersecurity bills—would provide legal avenues for Internet companies to share unprecedented amounts of data with the US government,...
Investigative Reporting on MPAA's SOPA Revival Effort Wins Pulitzer
A New York Times series on secretive corporate lobbying of state attorneys general has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting today. The entire series does important digging on an area of political influence that's generally less transparent than Congressional lobbying. But most relevant to EFF was...
New “Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation Act” Targets Many of DMCA Section 1201's Problems
On Thursday, Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Jared Polis introduced a new bill to fix many of the problems that Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act causes for free speech, privacy, security research, and innovation. Called the “Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation Act,” the bill would...
United Airlines Stops Researcher Who Tweeted about Airplane Network Security from Boarding Flight to Security Conferences
Our client, Chris Roberts, a founder of the security intelligence firm One World Labs, found himself detained by the FBI earlier this week after tweeting about airplane network security during a United Airlines flight. When Roberts landed in Syracuse, he was questioned by the FBI, which ultimately seized a...
Is This Justice? Charging an Eighth Grader with a Felony for “Hacking”
A 14-year-old eighth grader in Florida, Domanik Green, has been charged with a felony for “hacking” his teacher’s computer. The “hacking” in this instance was using a widely known password to change the desktop background of his teacher’s computer with an image of two men kissing. The outrage of...
EFF's Podcasting Patent Win Highlights a Disturbing Trend
It's time to take a closer look at EFF's recent victory against bogus patents and highlight what we and others concerned about our patent system are up against. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), acting on our request for review, last week invalidated claims from a...
Fast Track Bill Would Legitimize White House Secrecy and Clear the Way for Anti-User Trade Deals
Following months of protest, Congress has finally put forth bicameral Fast Track legislation today to rush trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) through Congress. Sens. Orrin Hatch and Ron Wyden, and Rep. Paul Ryan, respectively, introduced the bill titled the...
On the Clipper Chip's Birthday, Looking Back on Decades of Key Escrow Failures
On this day in 1993, the Clinton White House introduced the Clipper Chip, a plan for building in hardware backdoors to communications technologies. The chip would be used in American secure voice equipment, giving law enforcement agencies the explicit ability to decrypt its traffic using a key stored by...
EFF at 25: Remembering the Case that Established Code as Speech
EFF at 25: Remembering the Case that Established Code as Speech
One of EFF's first major legal victories was Bernstein v. Department of Justice, a landmark case that resulted in establishing code as speech and changed United States export regulations on encryption software, paving the way for international e-commerce. We represented Daniel J. Bernstein, a Berkeley mathematics Ph.D. student, who wished...
