When Google announced its new Allo messaging app, we were initially pleased to see the company responding to long-standing consumer demand for user-friendly, secure messaging. Unfortunately, it now seems that Google's response may cause more harm than good. While Allo does expose more users to end-to-end encrypted messaging, this potential benefit is outweighed by the cost of Allo's mixed signals about what secure messaging is and how it works. This has significance for secure messaging app developers and users beyond Google or Allo: if we want to protect all users, we must make encryption our automatic, straightforward, easy-to-use status quo.

In a bombshell published today, Reuters is reporting that, in 2015, Yahoo complied with an order it received from the U.S. government to search all of its users’ incoming emails, in real time.

There’s still much that we don’t know at this point, but if the report is accurate, it represents a new—and dangerous—expansion of the government’s mass surveillance techniques. 

Americans pay by far the highest prices in the world for most prescription drugs, and of course big pharma would like to keep it that way. Key measures that the industry relies upon in this regard are the Prescription Drug Marketing Act [PDF] and Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act [PDF], which make it unlawful for most Americans to access lower-priced drugs from overseas, coupled with the powers of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to seize such drugs at the border on their own initiative.

It is long overdue for the FCC to address Stingrays' impact on speech, interference with 911 calls, and invasion of privacy.

FCC Helped Create the Stingray Problem, Now it Needs to Fix It

It is long overdue for the FCC to address Stingrays' impact on speech, interference with 911 calls, and invasion of privacy.

Nuevos informes muestran cómo leyes poco precisas pueden allanar el camino para violaciones de los derechos humanos

By the time you read this, Let’s Encrypt will have issued its 12 millionth certificate, of which 6 million are active and unexpired. With these milestones, Let’s Encrypt now appears to us to be the the Internet’s largest certificate authority—but a recent analysis by W3Techs said we were only the third largest. So in this post we investigate: how big is Let’s Encrypt, really?

We believe in celebrating women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics every day, and today – Ada Lovelace Day – is no different. Named after visionary 19^th century mathematician Ada Lovelace, today is an opportunity to recognize the achievements of women in the STEM fields.

Lovelace, who is credited with being among the first to recognize the potential of computing, was encouraged to explore the world of mathematics from a young age at a time when few women were actively involved in the field. At 17, she worked on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, and her notes on his machine included what is recognized as the first computer algorithm as well as ideas about the potential of computational machines.

If you scroll through EFF’s staff bios, you may notice a trend: we have a lot of reporters who have joined the battle for free speech, privacy, and transparency. Some worked for years in newsrooms or as independent journalists. Others studied and taught at journalism schools or worked directly for journalism advocacy organizations. This kind of experience is often a perfect fit for tech policy advocacy, because reporters have a practical understanding of how important our rights are and how to communicate these issues to the public.  And ultimately, EFF’s work is not unlike journalism: we fight to free information and then we write about it.  

After careful consideration, we have decided to add additional warnings and caveats about using WhatsApp to our Surveillance Self Defense guide.

When EFF launched a campaign last year to encourage the public to help us uncover police use of biometric technology, we weren’t sure what to expect.  Within a few weeks, however, hundreds of people joined us in filing public records requests around the country.  

Ultimately, dozens of local government agencies responded with documents revealing devices capable of digital fingerprinting and facial recognition, while many more reported back—sometimes erroneously—that they hadn’t used this technology at all.  Several, however, either didn’t respond, demanded exorbitant fees, or outright rejected the requests.

Before all of this ever went down
In another place, another town
You were just a face in the crowd
You were just a face in the crowd
Out in the street walking around
A face in the crowd

-Tom Petty

If we don’t speak up now, the days when we can walk around with our heads held high without fear of surveillance are numbered. Federal and local law enforcement across the country are adopting sophisticated facial recognition technologies to identify us on the streets and in social media by matching our faces to massive databases.

With a new school year underway, concerns about student privacy are at the forefront of parents’ and students’ minds. The Student Privacy Pledge, which recently topped 300 signatories and reached its two-year launch anniversary, is at the center of discussions about how to make sure tech and education companies protect students and their information. A voluntary effort led by the Future of Privacy Forum and the Software and Information Industry Association (SIAA), the Pledge holds the edtech companies who sign it to a set of commitments intended to protect student privacy.

Since the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) was signed and its text released earlier this year, preventing the passage of that agreement through Congress during its upcoming lame duck session has become a top priority. But there's another secretive trade agreement lurking out of sight and out of mind, which is also scheduled for completion this year: the Trade in Services Agreement or TISA, which contains many provisions that are a virtual copy-and-paste out of the TPP's Electronic Commerce chapter.

Publicly Funded Research Should Be Open to the Public

When the public pays for research, the public should have free access to that research. You shouldn’t have to buy expensive journal subscriptions or academic database access in order to read research that was paid for with federal funding. That’s the simple premise of FASTR, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (S. 779, H.R. 1477). As we near the end of the 2015-16 session of Congress, the clock is ticking for FASTR.

You should know if the government thinks it can deputize your email provider to scan through your messages.

Like most people, we were shocked at reports earlier this month that Yahoo scanned its hundreds of millions of users’ emails looking for a digital signature on behalf of the government. We join millions of Yahoo users in wanting to know how this happened.

While there are countless examples of DMCA abuse, sometimes a story stands out. Last week, Samsung sent a series of takedown notices aimed at videos showing a GTA V mod in action. The modification replaced an in-game weapon with an exploding Samsung phone. Whether you think these videos are hilarious or in bad taste (or both), they are a parody inspired by real-life stories of Galaxy Note 7s catching fire. Samsung may not enjoy this commentary, but that does not excuse its abuse of the DMCA.

The Obama administration promised privacy protections for foreigners abroad, but PPD-28 fails to deliver those protections

In early 2014, still reeling from global outrage over recently uncovered surveillance programs, President Barack Obama pledged to rein in the U.S. government’s spying and boost privacy protections for people in the U.S. and abroad. His words were heartening:

“People around the world, regardless of their nationality, should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people … and that we take their privacy concerns into account,” he said, standing in front of American flags at Justice Department headquarters in Washington, D.C.

One year ago today, the 100,000^th person added their name to a public petition calling on President Obama to categorically reject any attempt to add backdoors to our devices or otherwise undermine encryption.

Since then, crickets.

Obama has promised to reply to petitions on his We the People platform that receive over 100,000 signatures. But the only response our hugely popular petition received was a nonresponse asking for more input. 

Since then, the issue has become even more pressing. While the urgency of the Apple encryption battle may have abated, the conversation around forcing tech companies to assist the government in obtaining access to unencrypted data has continued.

When Diego Gomez, a biology master’s student at the University of Quindio in Colombia, shared a colleague’s thesis with other scientists over the Internet, he was doing what any other science grad student would do: sharing research he found useful so others could benefit from it and build on it. Indeed, this kind of sharing is the norm in academia, just as it is elsewhere in our increasingly social media-driven online world.

The federal government is set to get massively expanded hacking powers later this year. Thankfully, members of Congress are starting to ask questions.

In a letter this week to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, 23 members of Congress—including Sens. Ron Wyden and Patrick Leahy and Rep. John Conyers—pressed for more information and said they “are concerned about the full scope of the new authority” under pending changes to federal investigation rules.

Are you scrambling for a clever Halloween costume this weekend? We've got you covered. Here are five ideas for digital rights activists planning to trick-or-treat on Monday.

Facial Recognition Face Paint 

Just this week we learned that facial recognition is far more prevalent among local and federal law enforcement than we thought, with at least 26 states using this biometric technology. Of those, 16 states grant the FBI access to their DMV databases. Many large cities have proposed using facial recognition on live camera feeds. 

Should prosecutors have the ability to take advantage of unclear laws to bring charges for behavior far beyond the problem Congress was trying to address? We don’t think so. When not carefully limited, criminal laws give prosecutors too much power to go after innocent individuals for innocuous behavior, like violating a website's terms of use by using a partner’s password to post something for them or print out a boarding pass. And that’s terrifying. It’s also contrary to a long-held constitutional rule requiring vague criminal statutes to be interpreted narrowly—called the Rule of Lenity—intended to ensure that people have clear and unambiguous notice in the letter of the law itself of what behavior could land them in prison. 

You probably don’t expect the government to log and track your personally identifying information, despite having broken no laws, just because you attended an event at the fairgrounds. That would be preposterous in the Land of the Free. 

But, according to the Wall Street Journal, federal agencies have joined forces with local police to deploy automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology at gun shows, with the aim of collecting attendees' plate information—without an explicit target.  Gun show patrons are typically concerned about their Second Amendment rights, but what about the First Amendment?