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Chelsea Manning Continues Fight Against Unfair Hacking Charge Whistleblower Chelsea Manning was  released from prison more than a year ago, after former President Barack Obama commuted her sentence for releasing military and diplomatic records to WikiLeaks. But her case still continues, as Manning wants to appeal her original conviction—including one charge under a controversial a federal anti-hacking law. The Criminal Fraud and Abuse Act ( CFAA ) is intended to punish people for breaking into computer systems. Yet Manning didn’t break into anything. Instead, she was found guilty of violating the CFAA for using a common software utility called Wget to access a State Department database—a database she was generally authorized to access—in violation of a computer use policy. The policy prohibited the use of unauthorized software, even though the prohibition, which covers everything from computer games to simple automated Web browsing tools like Wget, is rarely enforce by the ch...

EFF tells Patent Office not to seek loopholes in Supreme Court patent rules Since the Supreme Court’s 2014 Alice v. CLS Bank decision, courts have invalidated hundreds of patents that should never have been issued. Unfortunately, the Patent Office may restrict the impact of that ruling on patent applications under examination. The Patent Office has issued a request for comment on a proposal to give guidance to examiners that would put a thumb on the scale in favor of patent applicants. If adopted, the guidance would make it too hard for examiners to reject applications on abstract ideas. We’ve argued before against Patent Office proposals that water down the Supreme Court’s Alice decision. We have submitted new comments urging the office to apply Alice comprehensively and correctly, rather than biasing the process in favor of applicants hoping to patent generic computer functions. The Alice ruling was a big win for software developers and users. The decision empowered dis...