Major Carriers AT&T, Comcast Continue to Lag in EFF Privacy Report

While many companies have made strides when it comes to how they handle transparency and government requests post-Snowden, major telecoms such as AT&T and Verizon continue to lag behind. Despite publishing transparency reports within the last year, the two companies scored the lowest on the...

Court's Ruling a 'Clear Signal' About Mass Surveillance Programs, Experts Say

The ruling last week by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that the NSA’s years-long bulk collection of phone metadata is illegal is a “clear signal” that courts are moving in the direction of striking down some mass surveillance programs, experts say. The decision, issued Thursday, is among 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 ...

New Coalition Launches Fight Against Patriot Act Section 215

A broad group of civil-rights, technology and political groups from across the spectrum has developed a new initiative to advocate for the repeal of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the part that provides the authority for the bulk collection of phone metadata and other information. The new...

Confusion Reigns Over FBI's Plans for National Security Letter Gag Orders

The way that National Security Letters are approved and used is one of the government’s more opaque processes. Now, you can add some more confusion into the mix, courtesy of some new comments from the FBI about when recipients are able to disclose the fact that they have received an NSL. More tha...

EFF, ACLU, Other NGOs Urging U.N. to Create Privacy Watchdog

A coalition of 63 non-governmental organizations NGOs from around the world are calling on national governments to support the establishment of a special rapporteur on the right to privacy within the United Nations. According to U.N. documents, special rapporteurs also known as special procedures...

Canary Watch Site Launches to Track Warrant Canaries

In the years since Edward Snowden began putting much of the NSA‘s business in the street, including its reliance on the secret FISA court and National security Letters, warrant canaries have emerged as a key method for ISPs, telecoms and other technology providers to let the public know whether...

EFF, Privacy Groups Say NIST Crypto Standards Must be Free From Backdoors

The EFF and a long list of civil and privacy groups have sent a letter to NIST, emphasizing the need for the agency to create “a process for establishing secure and resilient encryption standards, free from back doors or other known vulnerabilities.” The letter comes at a time when the agency is ...

Let’s Encrypt — A Certificate Authority to Provide Free SSL Certificates for Entire Web

As days are passing, encryption is becoming a need for every user sitting online. Many tech giants including Google, Apple and Yahoo! are adopting encryption to serve its users security and privacy at its best, but according to Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF, the high-tech Web security should...

EFF, Others Plan to Make Encrypting the Web Easier in 2015

By all accounts, switching web servers over to HTTPS from HTTP has long been viewed as a fickle affair; HTTPS/SSL certificates are expensive and on top of that notoriously cumbersome to install and maintain. A new coalition comprised of The Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF and a handful of othe...

AT&T Drops Controversial Tracking Header

When information came out earlier this month that some mobile carriers were injecting unique identifying “supercookies” into their users’ Web traffic, privacy groups and users were angered. The practice, used by Verizon and AT&T, enables advertisers to track users’ behavior and assemble informati...

AOL Releases Transparency Report Lobbies for USA FREEDOM Act

Noting that Saturday was the 13th anniversary of the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, the Web giant AOL this week released its latest transparency report, detailing estimations of how many Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA orders and National Security Letters NSLs it’s received in the las...

EFF, Snowden Dispute FBI Claims on Device Encryption

The FBI has long said that the use of strong encryption software hampers the bureau’s investigations and makes life easier for criminals. Current FBI Director James Comey continued this line of reasoning in a speech on Oct. 17, saying that the use of crypto could lead the country to a dark place,...

EFF Launches New Anti-Surveillance Site

The EFF has launched a new site dedicated to educating users about how to resist pervasive surveillance online, through the promotion of encryption and other tools and the publication of first-person stories from people around the world who have fought surveillance in various ways. The new site, ...

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 Gains Team From Mitro Password Management Company

Twitter has announced that a cloud-based password management company called Mitro has joined the Twitter team, and all of Mitro’s code is now free and open source. Mitro’s offering a secure password manager that’s meant to help distributed teams share passwords for accounts and services. The...

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...

EFF Releases Open Wireless Router Firmware

The EFF is working on an open wireless router firmware that’s designed to be a secure and flexible alternative to the existing software that runs on home and small business routers, much of which is notoriously insecure. The Open Wireless Router project, which the organization announced at the HO...

DNI, Justice Department Deny Targeting Americans for Surveillance Based on Religion, Politics

The Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice have denied a report based on leaked documents from Edward Snowden that United States intelligence and law enforcement agencies conduct surveillance of Americans based on their ethnicity, religious affiliation or political stance...

Open Wireless Router Let You Share Your Internet with the World

In this era of mass surveillance, we have always learned from security folks to protect and encrypt our communication and networks, especially widely open private Wi-Fi networks. It is always recommended to use a strong password and encryption on Wireless Routers in an effort to safeguard the...