You lost some important Fourth Amendment protection when the Supreme Court ruled yesterday in Maryland v. King that the police can take a DNA sample from an arrestee without a search warrant for purposes of general law enforcement rummaging.
The court was reviewing the constitutionality of...

Frank La Rue, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion delivered this week a landmark report [PDF] on state surveillance and freedom of expression. In preparation, the Special Rapporteur reviewed relevant studies, consulted with experts including EFF, and participated in the state surveillance...

In the months since Aaron Swartz’s death, it’s become clear to the American public that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) has become one of the most dangerous and abused criminal laws available to prosecutors. One of its biggest problems—its draconian sentencing scheme—is on full display in the...

Frustration with patent trolls, and momentum for reform, has been building for some time now. Today, the stakes got even higher when the White House announced that it was actively taking on the troll problem. This is big news, and not just because of the seven legislative...

All but seven states have proposed or adopted legislation relating to the domestic use of drones, or unmanned aerial systems, in domestic airspace, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Now, at the invitation of the Aerospace States Association, EFF has rung in with the three crucial elements...

It's been a bad month for Singaporean netizens. First came the news that the Media Development Authority (MDA), the country's press oversight agency, now requires that websites that have more than 50,000 viewers and that post one "Singapore news programme" (a loosely defined term that basically includes any news about...

State legislatures had a busy week passing electronic privacy laws. Will Congress follow?
First, the Texas legislature unanimously passed HB 2268, which requires state law enforcement to obtain a search warrant before accessing emails and other forms of electronic communications content from service providers. This law...

In Taiwan, province of China*, the intellectual property office proposed a new Internet blacklist law that would have targeted websites for their alleged use in copyright infringement. The initiative would have forced Internet Service Providers to block a list of domains or IP addresses connected to websites and services...