Righthaven is attempting to make a business out of suing Internet websites for copyright infringement. It has filed 180 copyright actions so far —without ever first asking that a work be removed from the target website—in each case alleging “willful infringement” and attempting to extract settlements by threats of...

EFF recently received documents in response to one of our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that demonstrate a disturbing trend: the FBI's arbitrary application of FOIA exemptions to hide, or in some instances, reveal, its unlawful activities.
Through a careful comparison of thousands of pages of documents we...

EFF has been monitoring the net neutrality debate with an eye to two main concerns, both stemming from our conviction that however laudable the goal of neutrality--and it is a laudable goal--the regulatory and legislative paths that get us there must not amount to a “Trojan horse” that we’ll...

Co-authored by Rainey Reitman and Marcia Hofmann
The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of expression against government encroachment — but that doesn't help if the censorship doesn't come from the government.
The controversial whistle-blower website WikiLeaks, which has begun to publish...

This week's news that the feds seized 82 websites based on allegations of copyright infringement demonstrated that government website seizures can silence innocent speech. But let's take a broader view for a moment. The domain seizure debacle, the COICA Internet censorship bill, ACTA, and many other short-sighted efforts to...

The Transportation Security Administration is feeling public heat these days over its combination of whole-body-image scanners and heavy-handed pat-down searches, and deservedly so.
There’s no question that reform is needed to curtail TSA’s excesses. We especially applaud the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s efforts to increase public...

Good news: after some initial sword rattling, Microsoft has embraced hardware hackers for modifying the Kinect. When asked about Microsoft's stance on hardware hackers putting the Kinect to creative new uses, Shannon Loftis, Studio Manager at Microsoft Game Studios said, "As an experienced creator, I'm very excited to see...

UPDATE: EFF is happy to report that in recent interviews, Microsoft has demonstrated enthusiasm for the creativity of hardware hackers and researchers, ultimately embracing the first wave of Kinect innovation.
When Microsoft announced that it was launching a webcam-style peripheral for its Xbox360 that would allow users to...

Co-authored by Richard Esguerra
The Firesheep Firefox extension has been scaring users across the Internet since itsintroduction at the Toorcon security conference this past weekend by security researchers Eric Butler and Ian Gallagher. Firesheep demonstrates a security flaw that the computer security community has been ...

This week, EFF is taking part in the 32nd Annual Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, where we urged the Privacy Authorities to call for the repeal of the European Union's 2006 Data Retention Directive, which requires Internet service providers operating in Europe to retain telecom and...