EFF is dismayed to learn of the decision by Brazilian prosecutors to charge journalist Glenn Greenwald under the country’s computer crime law.EFF has long warned that cybersecurity laws in the Americas have been written and interpreted so broadly as to invite misuse. Computer crime laws should never be...

Between targeted killings, retaliatory air strikes, and the shooting of a civilian passenger plane, the last few weeks have been marked by tragedy as tensions rise between the U.S. and Iranian governments. In the wake of these events, Iranians within the country and in the broader diaspora...

Massachusetts has long been a leader in the Right to Repair movement, thanks to a combination of principled lawmakers and a motivated citizenry that refuses to back down when well-heeled lobbyists subvert the legislative process.In 2012, Massachusetts became the first US state to enact Right to Repair legislation, with an...

On January 14 and 15, 2020, the German Federal Constitutional Court will be holding a hearing to reevaluate the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) Act, which gives the BND agency (similar to the National Security Agency in the United States) broad surveillance authority. The hearing comes after a coalition of media and activist...

When someone says something unlawful online, they should be the one held responsible for it, not the website or platform where they said it. Section 230—the most important law protecting free speech online—reflects that common-sense principle. This year, EFF defended Section 230 in Congress, the courts, and on the...

Last year, the Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion in a case we’ve written about a lot, called Carpenter v. United States, ruling that the Fourth Amendment protects data generated by our phones called historical cell-site location information or CSLI. The Court recognized that CSLI creates a “detailed chronicle...

Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s landmark case challenging NSA’s mass spying moved forward in 2019, setting up a crucial decision for the Ninth Circuit in 2020. We’ve pursued this case for over a decade because we believe that mass surveillance, like all general search and seizure schemes, is both illegal and...

Content moderation and its effects remained at the forefront of the public imagination in 2019, with stories of takedowns from Sweden to Syria and everywhere in between gaining media attention. Inconsistent and unfair moderation from companies—often under great pressure from governments and other external actors—is still a serious...

The Internet’s decentralized nature has historically been its greatest super-power, granting it the ability to shrug off censors and spies and redistribute power away from corruptible gatekeepers out to the creators and innovators on its edges. But it’s only been in the last few years that the Net's own corporate...