EFF Files FOIA Suit Over U.S. Marshals’ Spy Planes
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit to shine light on the U.S. Marshals Service's (USMS) use of small aircraft mounted with controversial cell-phone tracking systems.
The Wall Street Journal revealed last year that the Marshals have...
Oakland Considers a Privacy Policy for its Domain Awareness (Surveillance) Center
Update, February 11: Last night, the Public Safety Committee, led by Councilmember Desley Brooks, "approved in concept the work that has been done so far" by the Ad Hoc Privacy Policy Committee.Minutes of the meeting aren't yet available, but you can watch the video online. This post will be...
An Exemption to the DMCA Would Let Game Fans Keep Abandoned Games Running
When you buy a video game, you expect to be able to play it for as long as you want. You expect be able to play it with your kids many years from now if you want (well, maybe not Grand Theft Auto). And you would hope that museums and...
EFF Files Petitions to Protect Your Rights to Tinker, Repair, and Remix
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed petitions with the U.S. Copyright Office seeking to keep users who remix DVD content or jailbreak their devices from losing their legal safe harbors and to establish new rights for those who need to circumvent "access control" or "digital rights management"...
EFF Responds to USTR Bullying the World to Repeat Our Copyright Mistakes
From the same agency that brought you the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—the United States Trade Representative (USTR)—comes a lesser-known, but also insidious global intellectual property gambit: the Special 301 Report. The Special 301 Report is a survey conducted under the auspices of the Trade Act and has been...
EFF Supports Comprehensive Reform to California Electronic Privacy Law
With more than 38-million people and some of the largest technology companies in the world calling California home, the Golden State should be a leader in safeguarding electronic privacy. For years the state’s constitution has provided greater privacy protection than the Fourth Amendment. But when it comes to electronic...
Youtube Ditches Flash, and it Hardly Matters: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
Last week, Google announced that its Youtube service would default to using HTML5 video instead of Flash. Once upon a time, this would have been cause for celebration: after all, Flash is a proprietary technology owned by one company, a frequent source of critical vulnerabilities that expose hundreds...
Unpacking France's Chilling Proposal to Hold Companies Accountable for Speech
France’s misguided efforts to grapple with hate speech—which is already prohibited by French law—have been making headlines for years. In 2012, after an horrific attack on a Jewish school, then-president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed criminal penalties for anyone visiting websites that contain hate speech. An anti-terror law passed...
EFF Files Amicus Brief in Case That Seeks to Hold IBM Responsible for Facilitating Apartheid in South Africa
EFF defends rights in the digital world. But what about when the digital world enables violations of human rights? We think that’s important, too. That’s why we filed an amicus brief in In Re: South African Apartheid, a case that seeks to hold IBM's headquarters in New York...
In a First, Government Acknowledges the Limits of Section 215
Following EFF’s victory in a four-year Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the government released an opinion (pdf), written by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2010, that concluded that Section 215—the provision of the Patriot Act the NSA relies on to collect millions of Americans’ phone records—does...
