It's hard to imagine that a year ago we were celebrating "positive movement" towards reforms to European copyright law, expecting that the European Commission would be soon proposing new copyright exceptions and other measures to modernize Europe's aging copyright regime. Instead, what we got was a proposal to force...

Laws enacted out of fear, not facts, are a recipe for disaster. That’s what happened with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—the federal statute that makes it illegal to break into computer systems to access or alter information. The law’s notoriously vague language has confused courts, chilled...

Imagine a world where your Internet-connected car locks you in at the behest of its manufacturer—or the police. Where your media devices only let you consume mass media, not remix it to publish a counter-narrative or viral meme. Where your phone is designed to report on your...

It’s been a busy year on a number of fronts as we continue to fight to rein in the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance of innocent people. Since the 2013 leaks by former government contractor Edward Snowden, the secretive and powerful agency has been at the top of mind for...

EFF spends a lot of time investigating the latest trends and developments in technology, trying to stay one step ahead of the most recent threats to your digital rights. This isn’t one of those stories. This is a story about a technology that’s even older than our organization, that’s barely...

As we approach the end of 2016, it’s disturbing to note the wide variety of ways in which government transparency has languished—even under an administration rhetorically committed to it. With the next administration poised to even further extend executive secrecy, it becomes ever more crucial for the courts and...

Author Malcolm Gladwell recently name-checked the EFF in an article published in The New Yorker. Mr. Gladwell’s piece examines what he sees as the differences between whistle-blowers Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg, and concludes that Snowden doesn’t deserve the respect (or apparently the same legal...

In February 2016, a team of scientists published one of the most important pieces of scientific research so far this century. For the first time, researchers had directly observed gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime whose discovery Albert Einstein first predicted a century ago. The team effectively...

In classrooms across the country, students as young as kindergarteners are turning on school-issued devices and logging into their online school accounts. While students and teachers can benefit from educational apps and services, behind the scenes edtech companies are inhaling troves of data on students, often without the awareness and...