Remember over-the-air broadcast television? The kind that you can receive on a variety of devices, without scrambling or monthly fees? For decades, the principle that the public airwaves are just that – public property – has been an obstacle to TV studios’ efforts to control when, where, and how we...

According to a report from Ma’an News published today, the Palestinian Authority has ordered the blocking of websites belonging to eight news outlets critical of President Mahmoud Abbas. The report states that technicians at PalTel—the largest ISP in the West Bank—tweaked their proxy server and web cache daemon to...

Yesterday, EFF participated in a panel discussion about CISPA moderated by CNET's Declan McCullagh and put on by Hackers and Founders. We were happy to have the opportunity to do so, and although we disagreed quite a bit with a key proponent of the bill, House...

Iran: Authorities Seeking Information on Censorship Tools
The Islamic Republic of Iran has recently become notorious for its efforts to create a “halal” Internet. This week, a security researcher found that Iranian authorities published a “Request for Information” (RFI) seeking details on new types of censorship tools...

EFF Releases New Government Documents on Drones and Law Enforcement Training
EFF recently posted three new sets of documents obtained through FOI requests. Yesterday, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, EFF released the lists of private and public entities that have been granted authorization by the...

At first blush, it seems obvious that a picture could reveal your location. A picture of you standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge sensibly leads to the conclusion you're in the San Francisco Bay Area when the photo was taken. But now that smartphones are quickly supplanting...

View Map of Domestic Drone Authorizations in a larger map
This week the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) finally released its first round of records in response to EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for information on the agency's drone authorization program. The agency...

On Monday, EFF launched our Stop Cyber Spying platform featuring our new Congressional Twitter Handle Detection Tool. Users can enter a zip code in order to find their Representative’s Twitter account. Folks are then urged to tweet messages to their Representatives highlighting the invasive nature of the CISPA...

Thai journalist Chiranuch Premchaiporn, better know by her pen name Jiew, is awaiting an April 30th court verdict that could sentence her to years in prison for violating Thailand’s draconian crackdown against free speech. Jiew’s case has focused international attention on Thailand’s lèse majesté laws, which have been used...