It’s an old legal adage: bad facts make bad law. And the bad facts present in the Playpen prosecutions—the alleged possession and distribution of child porn, coupled with technology unfamiliar to many judges—have resulted in a number of troubling decisions concerning the Fourth Amendment’s protections in the digital age.

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Baycloud Systems has become the latest company to join the EFF’s Do Not Track (DNT) coalition, which opposes the tracking of users without their consent. Baycloud designs systems to help companies and users monitor and manage tracking cookies. Based in the UK, it provides thousands of sites across Europe...

In December 2014, the FBI received a tip from a foreign law enforcement agency that a Tor Hidden Service site called “Playpen” was hosting child pornography. That tip would ultimately lead to the largest known hacking operation in U.S. law enforcement history.
The Playpen investigation—driven by the FBI’s...

Last month we submitted comments to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an agency within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, opposing its proposal to gather social media handles from foreign visitors from Visa Waiver Program (VWP) countries. CBP recently provided its preliminary responses (“Supporting Statement”) to several...

Edward Snowden’s 2013 release of once-secret documents about U.S. intelligence surveillance of the private communications of Americans and non-U.S. persons focused much-needed attention on the problem of how to control the burgeoning U.S. surveillance-industrial complex.
But while the USA Freedom Act began to limit national security surveillance to...

Let’s Send a Message to the FCC: Consumers, Not Hollywood, Should Drive the Pay TV Market

The FCC is about to make a decision about whether third-party companies can market their own alternatives to the set-top boxes provided by cable companies. Under the proposed rules, instead...