Court Rules Accessing a Public Website Isn't A Crime, But Hiding Your IP Address Could Be
In the ongoing legal battle between craigslist and 3taps, a new court opinion makes clear that people are "authorized" under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to access a public website. But what the court gave with one hand it took with the other, as it also...
EFF Supports Human Rights Case Against Cisco for Selling Surveillance Technologies to China
EFF filed an amicus brief in an important case known as Du v. Cisco, where Chinese human rights activists have sued the US tech giant Cisco in Maryland federal court. The case alleges that Cisco knowingly customized, marketed, sold, and provided continued support and service for technologies used by...
DEA and NSA Team Up to Share Intelligence, Leading to Secret Use of Surveillance in Ordinary Investigations
UPDATE: Add the IRS to the list of federal agencies obtaining information from NSA surveillance. Reuters reports that the IRS got intelligence tips from DEA's secret unit (SOD) and were also told to cover up the source of that information by coming up with their own independent leads to...
New Court Ruling Makes it Easier for Police to Track Your Cell Phone
A Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling this week will make it easier for police to track your movements through your cell phone after the court decided police aren't required to obtain a search warrant to track you.
The case involved a 2010 law enforcement request to obtain...
State AGs Ask Congress to Gut Critical CDA 230 Online Speech Protections
Earlier today, 47 state attorneys general asked Congress to severely undermine the most important law protecting free speech on the Internet. In a letter to Congressional leaders, the AGs asked Congress to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -- which protects online service providers from...
State Courts Join State Lawmakers in Demanding Warrants for Location Information
We've all heard a lot in the last month about the government's flimsy excuse for the NSA's massive collection of telephone and Internet metadata: that this sensitive information is somehow just "business records" that don't require a warrant for government access. That same argument has been used by the government...
Why Doesn't Skype Include Stronger Protections Against Eavesdropping?
Skype has long claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted", an architectural category that suggests conversations over the service would be difficult or impossible to eavesdrop upon, even given control of users' Internet connections. But Skype's 2005 independent security review admits a caveat to this protection: "defeat of the security...
EFF Calls For Court Sanctions For Copyright Troll's Public Humiliation Tactic
EFF fought back against a particularly nasty copyright troll tactic this week. Lawyers representing the adult film producer Malibu Media, LLC file long lists of movie titles on the public record, accusing an Internet subscriber of copying those movies illegally. Among the titles on that list are many adult films...
Weev's Case Flawed From Beginning to End
As Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer finishes his third month in a federal penitentiary, we filed our appeal of the computer researcher's conviction and 41-month prison sentence for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and identity theft statute on Monday.
Auernheimer's case is...
Federal Circuit gets Ultramercial wrong, again. Supreme Court needs to step in, again.
Well, here we go.
The tortured history of Ultramercial v. Hulu continues, with a new ruling from the Federal Circuit upholding one of our favorite, most absurd patents: one that claims a process for doing no more than viewing ads online before accessing copyrighted content. How could...
