The Justice Department’s announcement yesterday that it will meet with states to discuss whether social media companies are "intentionally" stifling free speech represents a potentially dangerous new step in the wrong direction. Instead of focusing on making social media accountable and transparent, the Justice Department’s effort seems aimed...

UPDATE September 14, 2018: This blog has been updated at the bottom to include information about two Senators’ reactions to the NSA’s call detail record deletion. In late June, the NSA announced a magic trick—hundreds of millions of collected call records would disappear. Its lovely assistant? Straight from the agency’s...

Since the Supreme Court’s 2014 Alice v. CLS Bank decision, courts have invalidated hundreds of patents that should never have been issued. Unfortunately, the Patent Office may restrict the impact of that ruling on patent applications under examination. The Patent Office has issued a request for comment...

At EFF, we often criticize software patents that claim small variations on known techniques. These include a patent on updating software over the Internet, a patent on out-of-office email, and a patent on storing data in a database. Now, Google is trying to patent the use of...