Courts Must Not Allow Litigants to Plead Around The First Amendment’s Speech Protections

Meritless defamation lawsuits can deter legal speech by forcing people to spend time and money fighting them. That is why courts must diligently protect people’s First Amendment rights by quickly dismissing claims that target people’s protected opinions. That did not happen in a case on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Amin...

22h

The Breadth of the Fediverse

The Washington Post recently published an op-ed by Megan McArdle titled "Twitter might be replaced, but not by Mastodon or other imitators." The article argues that Mastodon is falling into a common trap for open source projects: building a look-alike alternative which improves things a typical user doesn’t care about, while missing elements that made...

1d

EFF, ACLU Seek to Protect the Public’s Right to Access Judicial Records

Amicus Brief Urges the Court to Increase Transparency of SCA Warrant Requests ST. LOUIS — The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of an appeal filed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP). The brief argues that RCFP has standing to sue...

1d

Civil Society Organizations Call on the House Of Lords to Protect Private Messaging in the Online Safety Bill

As the UK's Online Safety Bill enters its Second Reading in the House of Lords, EFF, Liberty, Article 19, and Big Brother Watch are calling on Peers to protect end-to-end encryption and the right to private messaging online. As we've said before, undermining protections for end-to-end encryption would make UK businesses and individuals less safe online,...

3d

The FCC Broadband Maps: Meet the New Maps, Same as the Old Maps

When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released their new broadband map in November 2022, many hoped the chronic inaccuracies of past FCC maps would be resolved. Previous maps of high-speed broadband access in the United States painted inaccurate pictures partly because the definitions of things like “access” and “high-speed” were, frankly,...

4d

Setting the Record Straight: EFF Statement in Support of FCC Nominee Gigi Sohn

In the last week, a number of dangerous and conspiracy-driven attacks were made against EFF board member Gigi Sohn, an eminently qualified nominee to the Federal Communications Commission. These attacks attempt to twist EFF's long-held positions and commitments into dog whistles against Ms. Sohn. We’d like to set the record straight. First, we’ve...

4d

EFF Files Amicus Briefs in Two Important Geofence Search Warrant Cases

Should the police be able to identify everyone who was in a busy metropolitan area, just because a crime occurred there? In two amicus briefs just filed in appellate courts, we argue that’s a clearly unconstitutional search.[1] The two cases are People v. Meza, in the California Court of Appeal, and United States v. Chatrie, in the federal Fourth...

4d

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back on Vaccine Privacy in New York

EFF was proud to support New York’s A. 7326/S. 6541, which the legislature passed to protect the confidentiality of medical immunity information. It limits what data can be collected or shared, who it can be shared with, and how long it can be stored. (In New York, bills must have identical versions in each chamber.) It’s important to put privacy protections...

4d

Stupid Patent of the Month: Digital Verification Systems Patents E-Signatures 

Patent trolls make patents, and argue over them. They don’t have to ever make the thing described in their patents, if it’s even possible to determine what those things are. Instead, they generate legal threats and waste the time and money of companies that do do these things.  This month’s Stupid Patent of the Month is a great example of that. U.S....

5d

California Law Says Electronic Search Data Must Be Posted Online. So Where Is It?

Update 3:10pm, January 30: We have temporarily disabled access to data from 2022. We will provide more information soon. When it was passed in 2015, the California Electronic Communications Act (CalECPA) was heralded as a major achievement for digital privacy, because it required law enforcement to obtain a warrant in most cases before searching...

5d