The long-awaited report[pdf] by the House Judiciary Committee staff[1] on Big Tech’s monopoly power hits all the right notes—and just a few wrong ones. Following a year of hearings and research, the staff of the Subcommittee on Antitrust found that Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple all...

The last few months have seen a steady stream of proposals, encouraged by the advocacy of the FBI and Department of Justice, to provide “lawful access” to end-to-end encrypted services in the United States. Now lobbying has moved from the U.S., where Congress has been largely paralyzed by...

On Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the long-running case of Oracle v. Google. We’ll be following closely, and looking for signs that the Court will reverse the Federal Circuit’s dangerous decisions in this ground-breaking litigation. And then we’ll be waiting and hoping...

The early 1980s were a period of tremendous foment and excitement for tech. In the four years between 1980 and 1984, Americans met:The Vic-20 (1980);The Commodore 64 (1981);The IBM PC (1982); andThe PC-compatible ROM (1984)But no matter how exciting things were in Silicon Valley during those years, even more...

U.S. antitrust enforcers are reported to be crafting a lawsuit against Google (and its parent company, Alphabet). The Department of Justice and a large coalition of state attorneys general are meeting this week and could file suit very soon. While it will reportedly focus on Google’s dominance in online...

Law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local level are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on surveillance technology in order to track, locate, watch, and listen to people in the United States, often targeting dissidents, immigrants, and people of color. EFF has written tirelessly about the...

In a nation ruled by law, access to public court records is essential to democratic accountability. Thanks to the Internet and other technological innovations, that access should be broader and easier than ever. The PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) system could and should play a crucial role in...

A company called PopID has created an identity-management system that uses face recognition. Their first use case is as a system for in-store, point of sale payments using face recognition as authorization for payment.They are promoting it as a tool for restaurants, claiming that it is pandemic-friendly because...

This week, EFF sent a letter (pdf link) to the Supreme Court of California objecting to the required use of the proctoring tool ExamSoft for the October 2020 California Bar Exam. Test takers should not be forced to give their biometric data to ExamSoft, the letter says, which...

In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a sweeping overhaul of U.S. copyright law notionally designed to update the system for the digital era. Though the DMCA contains many controversial sections, one of the most pernicious and problematic elements of the law is Section 1201,...