In the last few years, FBI has been dramatically expanding its biometrics programs, whether by adding face recognition to its vast Next Generation Identification (NGI) database or pushing out mobile biometrics capabilities for “time-critical situations” through its Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC). But two new developments—both...

Yesterday, Personal Audio, LLC filed a notice of appeal of the final decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board that invalidated all of the claims of the infamous “Podcasting Patent” that EFF challenged.
Personal Audio has an uphill battle: the Patent Office accepted virtually...

Ruby developer Rob Manhatton joined us this month as a web developer. Rob will maintain the open-source democracy tools used to effect change on EFF’s issues, and build new Ruby applications to protect privacy and freedom of speech. His favorite part of web development is making use...

It made me feel like I wasn’t human. It made me feel like a criminal.
Those are the words of 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, a smart young student who is also Muslim, and who was arrested just for bringing a home made clock to school to show to...

Next week the Department of Justice will likely decide whether to issue a grant to the Los Angeles Police Department to purchase 700 body-worn video cameras. Because LAPD’s body camera policy fails to ensure accountability and transparency and would, in fact, hide almost all camera footage from the public,...

A federal appeals court sided with EFF yesterday on several of the major questions at issue in the long-running Lenz v. Universal copyright case. Lenz—sometimes referred to as the “Dancing Baby” case because it centers on a 29-second home video of a toddler dancing with a song by...

Celebrating the First Certificate From Let’s Encrypt
Today we mark an important milestone in our march to encrypt all of the Web: the first-ever certificate issued by Let’s Encrypt.
Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, open-source certificate authority (CA). The goal is to revolutionize encryption on...