Patent reform suffered a massive setback today when Senator Patrick Leahy, as chair of the Judiciary Committee, announced that he is taking patent reform “off the agenda.” We understand that other senators—particularly Sens. Chuck Schumer and John Cornyn—were still working hard to reach a bipartisan deal. Just as they...

Today, Bassel (Safadi) Khartabil is celebrating his 33rd birthday in prison. This day is the 799th since the young software developer was detained in Damascus, Syria. That’s nearly 800 days that Bassel has not been able to write code, or tweet, or hug his family, or do any of...

EFF and Other Civil Liberties Organizations Call on Congress to Support Uncompromising Reform
Since the introduction of the USA FREEDOM Act, a bill that has over 140 cosponsors, Congress has been clear about its intent: ending the mass collection of Americans' calling records. Many members of Congress, the President's...

Say it ain't so, Google. Two weeks ago, the awesome activists at the Peng! Collective launched a funny and smart satirical site, google-nest.org, which purported to offer a host of new Google "products," pairing the launch with a public announcement at the Re:publica 2014 conference in Berlin. The...

For the second year in a row, Investigative Reporters and Editors solicited nominations from the public for one of the least coveted prizes in government: the Golden Padlock. The award recognizes “the most secretive publicly-funded agency or person in the United States,” and the U.S. Border Patrol last year...

If you’ve been imagining NSA surveillance as something distant, with analysts sitting in remote data centers quietly analyzing metadata—stop now. NSA surveillance has become a part of day-to-day law enforcement fabric in the United States. The Snowden disclosures that were made public as part of Glenn Greenwald’s book ...

It's always a pleasure when anything patent-related enters the mainstream. Recently, Stephen Colbert took on the absurd inventions that companies attempt to patent.
In this case, the host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report lampoons Amazon's new patent on a method of photography in front of a...

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is about to get an earful on net neutrality. He’s testifying at a hearing in front of the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology tomorrow, and Congress members from both sides of the aisle are asking for constituents to contribute questions at the hearing...

Update: The US House voted on an updated version of the bill on Thursday, May 22. For EFF's statement on the new bill noting some of the differences click here.
NSA reform is finally moving in Congress. Last year, Senator Patrick Leahy and...