Laws enacted out of fear, not facts, are a recipe for disaster. That’s what happened with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—the federal statute that makes it illegal to break into computer systems to access or alter information. The law’s notoriously vague language has confused courts, chilled...

Imagine a world where your Internet-connected car locks you in at the behest of its manufacturer—or the police. Where your media devices only let you consume mass media, not remix it to publish a counter-narrative or viral meme. Where your phone is designed to report on your...

There's no question that this has been a big year for government hacking. Not a day has gone by without some mention of it in the news. 2016 may forever be remembered as the year when government hacking went so mainstream that Stephen Colbert cracked jokes about Fancy Bear...

As we approach the end of 2016, it’s disturbing to note the wide variety of ways in which government transparency has languished—even under an administration rhetorically committed to it. With the next administration poised to even further extend executive secrecy, it becomes ever more crucial for the courts and...

While 2016 may not have been the banner year for cryptographic exploits that 2015 was, researchers around the world continued to advance the state of the art.
TLS 1.3 design finalized
The biggest practical development in crypto for 2016 is Transport Layer Security version 1.3. TLS...

In February 2016, a team of scientists published one of the most important pieces of scientific research so far this century. For the first time, researchers had directly observed gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime whose discovery Albert Einstein first predicted a century ago. The team effectively...

In classrooms across the country, students as young as kindergarteners are turning on school-issued devices and logging into their online school accounts. While students and teachers can benefit from educational apps and services, behind the scenes edtech companies are inhaling troves of data on students, often without the awareness and...