A federal magistrate judge in Brooklyn took an admirable stand last week when he questioned the government’s authority to compel Apple to unlock a seized mobile device using the All Writs Act. That’s a general-purpose law passed in 1789 that allows a court to require third parties’ assistance to...

Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a significant decision rejecting an absurd copyright claim in yoga poses. The decision is pretty entertaining, but its implications are important for technologists as well as yogis.
That’s because the opinion offers a close analysis of...

Obama’s position on encryption is now public, as reported by the Washington Post. According to Ellen Nakashima and Andrea Peterson of the Post, Obama “will not —for now—call for legislation requiring companies to decode messages for law enforcement.”
Instead, the Post reports, the “administration will continue trying to...

Californians can rest assured that law enforcement can’t poke around in their digital records without first obtaining a warrant. Today, Gov. Jerry Brown has signed S.B. 178, the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA).
After months of pressure from public interest groups, media organizations, privacy advocates, tech companies, and...

Much has changed in the nearly ten years since we launched our first lawsuit challenging the NSA’s illegal surveillance of millions of Americans’ Internet communications. Over time, the defendants in the cases have changed; the legal “authority” the government has invoked to justify the program has changed; and the public’s...