25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough

This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared inLawfare. One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance--such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders--to mass surveillance techniques--suc...

Separating AI’s Technological Problems from Its Capitalism Problems

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared inTech Policy Press. AI represents the first time we humans can do cognitive work outside of our bodies at scale. The only comparable moment is the early years of the industrial revolution, when new technologies like the steam...

John Oliver on Data Brokers

John Oliver has an excellent segment on data brokers and surveillance capitalism...

Privacy predictions 2022

We no longer rely on the Internet just for entertainment or chatting with friends. Global connectivity underpins the most basic functions of our society, such as logistics, government services and banking. Consumers connect to businesses via instant messengers and order food delivery instead of...

California’s Prop 24 splits data privacy supporters

California’s data privacy house is divided. On the Golden State’s November ballot this year is the question as to whether to amend California’s barely-two-year-old data privacy law, the California Consumer Privacy Act. Far from the first attempt to change the fledgling law, Proposition 24 sets...

Cory Doctorow on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Cory Doctorow has writtten an extended rebuttal of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. He summarized the argument on Twitter. Shorter summary: it's not the surveillance part, it's the fact that these companies are monopolies. I think it's both. Surveillance capitalism has some...

Another California Data Privacy Law

The California Consumer Privacy Act is a lesson in missed opportunities. It was passed in haste, to stop a ballot initiative that would have been even more restrictive: In September 2017, Alastair Mactaggart and Mary Ross proposed a statewide ballot initiative entitled the "California Consumer...

Smart cities, difficult choices: privacy and security on the grid

All is not well in the land of smart city planning, as the latest major planned development from Google's sister company Sidewalk Labs continues to run into problems in Toronto, Canada. A groundswell of support? Building a city “From the ground up” is apparently no longer a thing: at least some...

Cybersecurity for the Public Interest

The Crypto Wars have been waging off-and-on for a quarter-century. On one side is law enforcement, which wants to be able to break encryption, to access devices and communications of terrorists and criminals. On the other are almost every cryptographer and computer security expert, repeatedly...

Cybersecurity for the Public Interest

The Crypto Wars have been waging off-and-on for a quarter-century. On one side is law enforcement, which wants to be able to break encryption, to access devices and communications of terrorists and criminals. On the other are almost every cryptographer and computer security expert, repeatedly...

Google Tracks its Users Even if They Opt-Out of Tracking

Google is tracking you, even if you turn off tracking: Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you've been. Google's support page on the subject states: "You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored." Tha...

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, news articles and commentators have focused on what Facebook knows about us. A lot, it turns out. It collects data from our posts, our likes, our photos, things we type and delete without posting, and things we do while not on Facebook and even when...

On the Equifax Data Breach

Last Thursday, Equifax reported a data breach that affects 143 million US customers, about 44% of the population. It's an extremely serious breach; hackers got access to full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, driver's license numbers -- exactly the sort of information...

Team Ghostshell Allegedly Spills 2.5 M Russian Records

As part of what it’s calling “Project Blackstar,” the hacking collective Team Ghostshell posted approximately 2.5 million records it claims belong to Russian individuals who work across the political, educational and law enforcement spectrum online earlier this morning. With the project, detailed...

Citigroup sites hit by Brazilian Anonymous hacker #OpWeeksPayment

Citigroup sites hit by Brazilian Anonymous hacker Citigroup has confirmed its consumer banking sites were temporarily offline Friday because of what a bank spokesman referred to as temporary outages. Hackers with Anonymous have claimed to be behind the attacks. The operation behind the attacks...