On September 9, 2009, a patent troll called Ultramercial sued a bunch of Internet companies alleging infringement of U.S. Patent 7,346,545. This patent claims a method for allowing Internet users to view copyrighted material free of charge in exchange for watching certain advertisements. Yes, you read that correctly. Ultramercial...

Who pays for government surveillance? Taxpayers. And we should all heed the age-old message: buyer beware. Fusion centers are an excellent example of why. The point of fusion centers is to enable intelligence sharing between local, state, tribal, territorial, and federal agencies. But because they involve actors from various...

We're pleased to see Sen. Harry Reid move toward a final vote on the Senate version of the USA FREEDOM Act, S. 2685. EFF has consistently urged the Senate to move forward on the bipartisan bill since it was first introduced in July.
The USA FREEDOM...

The New York Times has published an unredacted version of the famous “suicide letter” from the FBI to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter, recently discovered by historian and professor Beverly Gage, is a disturbing document. But it’s also something that everyone in the United States...

Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer's web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie. Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. In recent months, researchers have reported ISPs in the US and Thailand intercepting their...

One of the most debated items in the launch version of our Secure Messaging Scorecard is whether communications via Skype are end-to-end encrypted, so that the provider (which is currently Microsoft) can't access them.
In preparing the scorecard, Skype was a hard case for us. In its...

Over the past year, millions of Internet users have spoken out in defense of the open Internet. Today, we know the White House heard us.
In a statement issued this morning, President Barack Obama has called on the Federal Communications Commission to develop new “net neutrality” rules and,...