A new bill introduced today in the Senate provides necessary protections from NSA surveillance programs. The USA Rights Act, introduced by Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and eleven other Senators would provide meaningful reforms to one of the government’s most powerful surveillance tools. It fixes the “backdoor search...
A photographer and a photo agency are teaming up to restart a legal war against online linking in the United States. When Internet users browse websites containing images, those images often are retrieved from third-parties, rather than the author of the website. Sometimes, unbeknownst to the website author, the...
As Congress considers reforming Section 702, the NSA’s warrantless surveillance authority, EFF and ACLU are asking a federal court of appeals in New York to find this surveillance unconstitutional. Section 702 allows the government to collect billions of electronic communications—including those of Americans—and to use these communications in criminal...
The global movement for open access to publicly-funded research stems from the sensible proposition that if the government has used taxpayers' money to fund research, the publication of the results of that research should be freely-licensed. Exactly the same rationale underpins the argument that software code that the government...
Newly-minted FBI Director Christopher Wray threw out several justifications for the continued, warrantless government search of American communications. He’s wrong on all accounts. In a presentation hosted by The Heritage Foundation, Wray warned of a metaphorical policy “wall” that, more than 15 years ago, stood between the U.S....
Across the country, state lawmakers are fighting to restore the Internet privacy rights of their constituents that Congress and the President misguidedly repealed earlier this year. The facts and public opinion are on their side, but the recent battle to pass California’s broadband privacy bill, A.B. 375, suggests...
At EFF, we've become all too accustomed to bad news on copyright coming out of Europe, so it's refreshing to hear that Portugal has recently passed a law on copyright that helps to strike a fairer balance between users and copyright holders on DRM. The law doesn't abolish legal...
Increased smartphone usage and availability of wireless broadband has propelled the use of Internet based platforms and services that often compete with similar services based on older technologies. For example services like Facebook, Skype and WhatsApp that offer voice or video calls over the Internet compete with traditional SMS and...
The National Symbols Officer of Australia recently wrote to Juice Media, producers of Rap News and Honest Government Adverts, suggesting that its “use” of Australia’s coat of arms violated various Australian laws. This threat came despite the fact that Juice Media’s videos are clearly satire and no reasonable...
This week security researchers announced a newly discovered vulnerability dubbed KRACK, which affects several common security protocols for Wi-Fi, including WPA (Wireless Protected Access) and WPA2. This is a bad vulnerability in that it likely affects billions of devices, many of which are...
E-Verify is a massive federal data system used to verify the eligibility of job applicants to work in the United States. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) administer E-Verify. Until now, the federal government has not...
A local organization in the Electronic Frontier Alliance (not EFF) will host this event: Dynamic Agreements What if agreement began with people envisioning their ideal world? What if prior to signing a contract, people engaged a process that facilitated discovery of values, principles, and...
