President Urged to Reject Mandatory Backdoors

One-off opposition to calls on Congress from FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers to draft a legal framework that would enable law enforcement to access encrypted communication has been scattered at best. Experts have taken to their own forums to voice opposition to the...

Appeals Court Rules NSA Metadata Collection Not Authorized by Section 215

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Thursday that the Patriot Act does not authorize the bulk collection of phone records by the NSA. The ruling undermines the key foundation upon which the federal government’s phone metadata surveillance program is built, Section 215 ...

Satellite-Based Monitoring Constitutes a Fourth Amendment Search

The Supreme Court has weighed in on a series of lower court decisions, issuing a summary opinion that satellite-based monitoring is in fact a Fourth Amendment search. What remains to be decided is whether GPS-based tracking constitutes an unreasonable search and is thus a violation of the Fourth...

National Security Letters Challenged in Ninth Circuit Court

In the Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco Wednesday morning, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s EFF Kurt Opsahl urged the federal appeals court to uphold a lower court’s ruling that national security letters NSLs are unconstitutional. Regardless whether the ruling is upheld, the matter of NSL...

Twitter Files Suit Over Government Restrictions on National Security Letter Data

Twitter has filed a lawsuit in federal court asking that the United States Department of Justice’s prohibitions on publishing the number and kind of government requests for data the company receives be declared unconstitutional. The suit claims that the rules infringe on Twitter’s right to free...

EFF Files Motion Asking Judge to Rule NSA Data Collection Unconsitutional

The EFF has asked a federal judge to rule that the NSA’s collection of massive amounts of upstream user data is unconstitutional, violating the Fourth Amendment. The motion for partial summary judgment in the case of Jewel v. NSA, a six-year-old lawsuit related to NSA data collection on AT&T’s...

PayPal Freezes $275,000 Campaign Funds of Secure-Email Startup 'ProtonMail'

ProtonMail, an End-to-End Encrypted email service developed by MIT, Harvard and CERN researchers, who already received over $275,000 from a crowdfunding campaigns to their PayPal account, and was so much excited to launch its beta version, but just before that PayPal freezes their account without...

Massachusetts Supreme Court Rules Defendant Must Decrypt Data

Encryption software has been enjoying a prolonged day in the sun for about the last year. Thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden about the NSA’s seemingly limitless capabilities, security experts have been pounding the drum about the importance of encrypting not just data in transit, but...

House Amendment Limits Funding for NSA Surveillance

The House of Representatives last night overwhelmingly passed an amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act that would cut funding for two programs that grant intelligence agencies access to the private data and communications of U.S. citizens. The amendment shows that Congress is...

US Prosecutor drops Criminal charges against Barrett Brown

U.S. Prosecutors decided not to pursue crucial criminal charges against journalist and activist Barrett Brown, and dismiss a majority of charges related to sharing a link to a dump of credit card numbers connected to the breach of intelligence firm Stratfor. Supporters say Brown just copied the...

NSA Bulk Telephony Metadata Collection Program Legal

A federal court today shot down a challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union ACLU to the National Security Agency’s bulk phone metadata collection program, determining that the spy agency’s actions are legal. The ruling by U.S. District Court judge William Pauley contradicts a Dec. 16 D.C...

Judge Ruled - NSA Telephone Metadata Collection violates the Fourth Amendment

Big and Good news for all of us. A federal court judge 'Richard J. Leon' said that he believes, US National Security Agency’s NSA controversial practice of routinely collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans likely violates the 4th Amendment and is unconstitutional, even though th...

U.S. District Court Judge Rules NSA Metadata Collection Likely Violates Fourth Amendment

A United States District Court judge has ruled that the bulk metadata collection program maintained by the National Security Agency for years now likely is unconstitutional. The judge, ruling on a pair of law suits that claimed the NSA’s methods violated users’ privacy and civil rights, said that...

EFF Argues For Search Warrant Requirement to Get Cell Location Data

With each day bringing new information about the way that intelligence agencies and law enforcement are tracking the activities and movements of U.S. citizens, the issue of when these organizations can legally obtain such data has become a major one. Now, a case that seemingly has little connecti...

Federal Judge ruled at Child pornography case, 'Your Peer-to-Peer file sharing data is not a private matter'

Today computer telecommunications have become one of the most prevalent techniques used by pedophiles to share illegal photographic images of minors and to lure children into illicit sexual relationships. The Internet has dramatically increased the access of the preferential sex offenders to the...

EFF: Fifth Amendment Protects Against Compelled Decryption

With new leaks about the extent of U.S. government surveillance coming almost daily, one constant remains among all the deterrents to the NSA’s prying eyes: encryption technology works. As far as we know, the math behind encryption is solid, despite the specter of some unnamed breakthrough made b...

LinkedIn Asks for Transparency on National Security Letters

LinkedIn on Tuesday joined the fray of Internet companies requesting permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to publish data on the number of National Security Letters it receives. Unlike Google, Microsoft and others that have petitioned the FISA court to lift its ban on the...

FISC: No Phone Company Ever Challenged Metadata Collection Orders

A newly declassified opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court from this summer shows the court’s interpretation of the controversial Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act that’s used to justify the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collections, and reveals that none ...

Declassified 2011 FISC Opinion Shows Court Found Some NSA Surveillance Unconstitutional

Newly declassified documents released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the EFF show that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2011 declared that the National Security Agency’s techniques for collecting upstream Internet communications was unconstitutional an...

EFF: Forced Decryption Violates Fifth Amendment

If the government would like to force Jeffrey Feldman to decrypt the contents of the hard-drives and Dell computer found in his apartment, then they must offer him immunity and cannot use any of the information found on the devices as part of their case against him. That is what the Electronic...