All posts in Electronic Frontier Foundation

Favorite Lumen View is a typical patent troll. Armed with a vague patent on “facilitating bilateral and multilateral decision-making,” it sent out aggressive letters demanding payment. It refused to explain how its targets actually infringed its patent. Instead, it made shakedown offers it knew would be less than the cost of defending a lawsuit. When…

Favorite School districts across the country are grappling with how to deal with their students’ use of technology and social media. All too often, in an attempt to protect students, they end up implementing technology polices that give administrators too much power and go too far in restricting what students can do online. Williamson County…

Favorite The Patriot Act continues to wreak its havoc on civil liberties. Section 213 was included in the Patriot Act over the protests of privacy advocates and granted law enforcement the power to conduct a search while delaying notice to the suspect of the search. Known as a “sneak and peek” warrant, law enforcement was…

Favorite This Open Access Week, we are celebrating and advocating for unfettered access to the results of research, a movement that has shown considerable progress over the last few decades.  Let’s all take a step back, though. Much of the open access movement is forward thinking, offering solutions and policy changes that will help improve access…

Favorite Even the reports that are supposed to provide transparency about the FBI’s use of national security lettters (NSLs) are secret—or at least a couple dozen pages of them are. NSLs are nonjudicial orders that allow the FBI to obtain information from companies, without a warrant, about their customers’ use of services. They almost always…

Favorite Facebook scolded the Drug Enforcement Administration this week after learning that a narcotics agent had impersonated a user named Sondra Arquiett on the social network in order to communicate and gather intelligence on suspects. In a strongly worded letter to DEA head Michele Leonhart, Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan reiterated that not only…

Favorite Today EFF filed our latest brief in Jewel v. NSA, our longstanding case on behalf of AT&T customers aimed at ending the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans’ communications. The brief specifically argues that the Fourth Amendment is violated when the government taps into the Internet backbone at places like the AT&T…

Favorite We’ve filed our reply brief in the appeal of Smith v. Obama, our case challenging the NSA’s mass telephone records collection on behalf of Idaho nurse Anna Smith. The case will be argued before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal on December 8, 2014 in Seattle, and the public is welcome to attend. Another…

Favorite Privacy, Economic and Free Speech Flaws in Proposed Bitcoin Regulatory Scheme San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with reddit and the Internet Archive, today filed formal comments with the New York State Department of Financial Services opposing the state’s proposed regulations for digital currencies such as Bitcoin. In the letter, EFF…