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Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance

Commentary

Commentary

IPR Process Saves 80 Companies From Paying For a Sports-Motion Patent

The importance of the US Patent Office’s “inter partes review” (IPR) process was highlighted in dramatic fashion yesterday. Patent appeals judges threw out a patent [PDF] that was used to sue more than 80 companies in the fitness, wearables, and health industries.
US Patent No. 7,454,002 was...

Twilio Demonstrates Why Courts Should Review Every National Security Letter

The list of companies who exercise their right to ask for judicial review when handed national security letter gag orders from the FBI is growing. Last week, the communications platform Twilio posted two NSLs after the FBI backed down from its gag orders. As Twilio’s accompanying blog post documents,...

Stupid Patent of the Month: Bigger Screen Patent Highlights a Bigger Problem

For more than three years now, we’ve been highlighting weak patents in our Stupid Patent of the Month series. Often we highlight stupid patents that have recently been asserted, or ones that show how the U.S. patent system is broken. This month, we’re using a pretty silly patent in...

Security

Code Review Isn't Evil. Security Through Obscurity Is.

On January 25th, Reuters reported that software companies like McAfee, SAP, and Symantec allow Russian authorities to review their source code, and that "this practice potentially jeopardizes the security of computer networks in at least a dozen federal agencies." The article goes on to explain what source code review...

A striped cat opines using a megaphone.

Private Censorship Is Not the Best Way to Fight Hate or Defend Democracy: Here Are Some Better Ideas

From Cloudflare’s headline-making takedown of the Daily Stormer last autumn to YouTube’s summer restrictions on LGBTQ content, there's been a surge in “voluntary” platform censorship. Companies—under pressure from lawmakers, shareholders, and the public alike—have ramped up restrictions on speech, adding new rules, adjusting their still-hidden algorithms and...

Red pin on a map

When Trading Track Records Means Less Privacy

Sharing your personal fitness goals—lowered heart rates, accurate calorie counts, jogging times, and GPS paths—sounds like a fun, competitive feature offered by today’s digital fitness trackers, but a recent report from The Washington Post highlights how this same feature might end up revealing not just where you are, where...

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