84 matches found
Wrongful Arrest Exposes Failures in One of the Oldest Police Face-Recognition Tools in the US
The ACLU is suing two Florida police departments over the arrest of a Fort Myers man in a child-abduction case, saying officers treated a flawed face-recognition match as a near-certain ID...
U.K. Government Drops Apple Encryption Backdoor Order After U.S. Civil Liberties Pushback
The U.K. government has apparently abandoned its plans to force Apple to weaken encryption protections and include a backdoor that would have enabled access to the protected data of U.S. citizens. U.S. Director of National Intelligence DNI Tulsi Gabbard, in a statement posted on X, said the U.S...
6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
The White House has undertaken initiatives to crack down on immigration, suppress speech, and curtail US public health efforts. These online tools are tracking the rapidly changing US landscape...
The Pall Mall Pact and why it matters
The US State Department reportedly plans to sign an international agreement designed to govern the use of commercial spyware known as the Pall Mall Pact. The Pall Mall Pact, formally known as the Pall Mall Process, was initiated by France and the United Kingdom in February 2024. The goal of the...
Congress Clashes Over the Future of America’s Section 702 Spy Program
Competing bills moving through the House of Representatives both reauthorize Section 702 surveillance—but they pave very different paths forward for Americans’ privacy and civil liberties...
US Privacy Groups Urge Senate Not to Ram Through NSA Spying Powers
An effort to reauthorize a controversial US surveillance program by attaching it to a must-pass spending bill has civil liberties advocates calling foul...
US Justice Department Urged to Investigate Gunshot Detector Purchases
A civil liberties group has asked the DOJ to investigate deployment of the ShotSpotter gunfire-detection system, which research shows is often installed in predominantly Black neighborhoods...
Facial recognition tech lands innocent woman with bogus carjacking charge
Detroit law enforcement wrongly arrested a 32 year old woman for a robbery and carjacking she did not commit. She was detained for 11 hours and had her phone taken as evidence before finally being allowed to leave. The reason for the false arrest is down to a facial recognition error, the kind th...
Microsoft Joins Ban on Sale of Facial Recognition Tech to Police
Microsoft is joining Amazon and IBM when it comes to halting the sale of facial recognition technology to police departments. In a statement released Thursday by Microsoft President Brad Smith, he said the ban would stick until federal laws regulating the technology’s use were put in place. “We...
Privacy vs. Surveillance in the Age of COVID-19
The trade-offs are changing: As countries around the world race to contain the pandemic, many are deploying digital surveillance tools as a means to exert social control, even turning security agency technologies on their own civilians. Health and law enforcement authorities are understandably...
Emergency Surveillance During COVID-19 Crisis
Israel is using emergency surveillance powers to track people who may have COVID-19, joining China and Iran in using mass surveillance in this way. I believe pressure will increase to leverage existing corporate surveillance infrastructure for these purposes in the US and other countries. With th...
ACLU Sues Over U.S. Airport Facial-Recognition Technology
The American Civil Liberties Union ACLU has filed suit the Department of Homeland Security DHS over its use of facial recognition technology in airports, decrying the government’s “extraordinarily dangerous path” to normalize facial surveillance as well as its secrecy in making specific details o...
ACLU Sues Over U.S. Airport Facial-Recognition Technology
The American Civil Liberties Union ACLU has filed suit the Department of Homeland Security DHS over its use of facial recognition technology in airports, decrying the government’s “extraordinarily dangerous path” to normalize facial surveillance as well as its secrecy in making specific details o...
Newly Declassified Study Demonstrates Uselessness of NSA's Phone Metadata Program
The New York Times is reporting on the NSA's phone metadata program, which the NSA shut down last year: A National Security Agency system that analyzed logs of Americans' domestic phone calls and text messages cost $100 million from 2015 to 2019, but yielded only a single significant investigatio...
RSAC 2020: Blockchain is 'Garbage In', Voting Needs Paper Ballots
SAN FRANCISCO – Cryptography is at the heart of security, especially here at this week’s RSAC 2020. And during the event’s annual Cryptographer’s Panel, industry leaders broke down their top crypto-concerns, including privacy regulations, election security and blockchain. Privacy is clearly a top...
Federal Court: Suspicionless Search of Traveler Devices by Border Agents Is Unconstitutional
In a win for the privacy of international travelers, a federal court in Boston has ruled that searchers of traveler electronic devices by border agents without suspicion is unconstitutional. The ruling from the U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts came in a 2017 case, Alasaad v. Nielsen...
China's Sway Over Tech Companies Tested with Apple, Blizzard
At least two American tech companies, Apple and gaming giant Blizzard, have come under fire – from different quarters – for wading into waters surrounding the Hong Kong protests that have been ongoing since June. The situation is shaping up to be a test for the American tech sector’s commitment t...
Privacy Groups: Ring's Police Partnerships Can Lead to Sinister Ends
More than 30 privacy and consumer advocacy groups are urging local legislators to intervene in doorbell-camera company Ring’s partnerships with law enforcement. In 2018, Amazon-owned Ring announced that it was starting a “new neighborhood watch” effort, to allow homeowners to provide voluntary...
Regulating International Trade in Commercial Spyware
Siena Anstis, Ronald J. Deibert, and John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab published an editorial calling for regulating the international trade in commercial surveillance systems until we can figure out how to curb human rights abuses. Any regime of rigorous human rights safeguards that would make a...