UPDATE: On May 20, 2016, the Michigan Court of Appeals held that Twitter parodies are protected by the First Amendment, affirming the trial court’s decision to throw out Todd Levitt’s lawsuit against the creator of a parody Twitter account. The court held that “a reasonable reader, viewing the statements...

On Friday, Google reported on its online security blog the faulty issuance of a certificate for google.com and www.google.com by Symantec, a prominent Certificate Authority. This misissuance is significant not only because it represents a breach in the core Internet trust mechanism; it was also the first of its...

Academic researchers by necessity spend a lot of their time thinking about how to minimize harm in the conduct of their research. Prompted by the dark history of abuses in human subjects research, research ethics have become a deeply ingrained part of methods training and institutional review.
But...

In the last few years, the 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...

EFF has long believed that the First Amendment is as important to thinking about the NSA's spying as the Fourth Amendment. When the government can track to whom you talk, when and for how long, like it did with the telephone records collection under section 215 of the Patriot Act,...

Today, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued its opinion in SCA Hygiene v. First Quality Baby Products, a case about adult diapers that had the potential to harm myriad small business owners and innovators.
At issue in the case was the legal doctrine of “laches.”...