By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:09am
The TSA has issued a “Market Research Announcement” in which the agency expresses a desire to expand its Pre-Check whitelist program by allowing private companies to carry out risk analysis of Americans that would determine whether they are “trusted” enough to participate in the trusted traveler program. This would be a major step toward turning the agency’s Pre-Check whitelist into the insidious kind of passenger profiling system that was proposed under the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11, and a confirmation of our longstanding warnings that the logic of the risk-assessment approach to security will drive the government toward the use of more and more data on individuals. It would be the most significant of the new initiatives the TSA is looking at this year.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 7:14pm
I’ve written before about how talking on the phone to a telemarketer or customer-service agent is often more like dealing with a computer than a human being. Even though the person on the other end is human, their discretion is often tightly circumscribed by the computer in front of them—often including the words they say, which are confined to computer-generated scripts. I got a political telemarketing call recently that reshaped my understanding of this dynamic in very interesting ways and raised some new questions in my mind.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:21pm
November 25 marked the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Homeland Security Act, which created the sprawling Department of Homeland Security. Included in this new behemoth agency was another agency that had been created a year earlier, the Transportation Security Administration. It’s worth taking a look back at the short history of this agency.
The first and biggest conclusion we can reach is that the vast bulk of the increased security that we’ve obtained since 9/11 has been due to two factors: the securing of airplane cockpit doors, and the fact that no planeload of passengers in a hijacked aircraft will ever again sit back placidly and wait to land in Cuba or whatever. We’ve been saying this for years and it remains true. It’s hard to believe in light of all that has followed, but a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the ACLU issued a press release with the headline, “ACLU Applauds Sensible Scope of Bush Airport Security Plan.” What we were reacting to was a set of commonsense steps the administration had taken such as increased baggage screening and securing those cockpit doors.
By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:25pm
With one major exception, the Roberts Court has been quite protective of unpopular (and even revolting) speech under the First Amendment. That exception, however, is a doozy. It involves a statute criminalizing “material support” for terrorism, and the danger of the law was on stark display this week with reports of a petition to hold Twitter responsible for allowing Hamas to use the service.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:16pm
During the Cold War, as I argued last week, the totalitarian governments of the Soviet bloc functioned as a standing warning to Americans of the dangers of unchecked surveillance—lessons that we would do well to remember despite the fall of the Iron Curtain.
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 2:29pm
This summer ACLU affiliates all around the country filed open-records requests seeking information about how government agencies are using automated license plate readers. One set of records, released this week to the ACLU of Massachusetts by the police department here in Boston, provides a snapshot of the data-collection practices that are taking place around the nation.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:21am
Data from license plate readers in Minnesota was obtained by a St. Paul car dealer using open-records laws, and used to repossess at least one car, according to a recent article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The article included this amusing tidbit:
When the Star Tribune published data tracking Mayor R.T. Rybak's city-owned car over the past year, the mayor asked police Chief Tim Dolan to make a recommendation for a new policy about data retention.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:10am
(Updated below)
I was invited to give a talk on surveillance at the Information Security Systems Association (ISSA) Baltimore Chapter yesterday, and the keynote speaker was Dr. John Levine of the NSA. He works on the “information assurance” side of the agency (charged with securing communications rather than breaking them) and had some interesting things to say on the NSA’s work trying to make mobile devices more secure for the military and other government users who need to exchange classified information.
By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:22pm
Yesterday we asked the full Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to consider the arguments in our amicus brief that it should rehear a case decided by a three-judge panel in a ruling last month that undermined the privacy rights of everyone who carries a cell phone.
In the case, law enforcement agents required Melvin Skinner’s cell phone company to provide them with his GPS coordinates continuously for three days as he drove across the country. The agents did not get a warrant or demonstrate probable cause. Using the data, the agents tracked Skinner down, searched his motor home, and arrested him for his alleged role as a drug courier. On appeal, Skinner argued that the warrantless GPS phone tracking violated his Fourth Amendment rights.
By Naomi Gilens, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:03pm
The Republican Party’s 2012 platform, unveiled at the RNC Tuesday, includes this reference to domestic drone surveillance:
Affirming ‘the right of the people to be secure in their houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,’ we support pending legislation to prevent unwarranted or unreasonable governmental intrusion through the use of aerial surveillance or flyovers on U.S. soil, with the exception of patrolling our national borders. All security measures and police actions should be viewed through the lens of the Fourth Amendment; for if we trade liberty for security, we shall have neither.
