NextGov.com is reporting that the FBI will begin rolling out its Next Generation Identification (NGI) facial recognition service as early as this January. Once NGI is fully deployed and once each of its approximately 100 million records also includes photographs, it will become trivially easy to...

Proponents of pseudonymity scored a major victory today, when Google executive Vic Gundotra revealed at the Web 2.0 Summit that social networking service Google+ will begin supporting pseudonyms and other types of identity.
The news comes after several months of what has been dubbed Nymwars, in which opposing...

Amazon recently announced that the new Kindle Fire tablet will ship with a brand new browser called Silk. The Silk browser works in “cloud acceleration” mode by routing most webpage requests through servers controlled by Amazon. The idea is to capitalize on Amazon’s powerful ...

“When everything is classified, then nothing is classified…The system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion.” ~ Justice Stewart, New York Times v. United States, 1971.
Last week, the White House issued the...

As several international organizations hatch new ways to impose control over online activities, genuine multi-stakeholder input in policy development becomes extremely crucial. The sixth UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF), held in Nairobi, Kenya, was an important venue for discussing competing models for governing the Internet.
EFF played a...

Occupy Wall Street has called for a global day of action on October 15, and protesters are mobilizing all over the world. In the United States, the Occupy Wall Street movement has already spawned sizeable protests in New York, Washington DC, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Austin, and other...

The saga of the lost iPhone prototype -- the 2010 incident at least, not the most recent one -- has finally concluded. On Tuesday, Brian Hogan (who allegedly found the iPhone 4 prototype in a Redwood City bar) and Sage Wallower (who allegedly helped Hogan contact various web...

Just three months ago, we at EFF expressed our disappointment with Australia's two largest Internet service providers (ISPs), Telstra and Optus, for agreeing to implement a filtering scheme after a filtering bill from the Australian government failed to pass.
The blocked sites were to include "the appropriate subsection...

For the past six months, EFF has strongly supported SB 914, a bill recently passed by the California state legislature that would require police officers to get a warrant before searching through an arrested suspect’s cell phone.
Last month, the bill received overwhelming support from both Democrats and Republicans,...

On Saturday October 1st, eight countries (the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea) signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in Tokyo, Japan. Three of the participating countries (the European Union, Mexico, and Switzerland) have not yet signed the treaty, but have issued...