Blog of Rights
Catherine
Crump

Prior to joining the ACLU, Crump clerked for the Hon. M. Margaret McKeown, a judge on U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. Crump graduated from Stanford University and Stanford Law School. She is a non-residential fellow with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

06/18/2012
Online Privacy

Monitoring Internet Usage Patterns Has Privacy Implications Too

By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:34pm

The New York Times Sunday Review included a striking op ed suggesting that universities could one day deploy software to analyze students’ internet usage for the purpose of assessing their mental health. The writers, Sriram Chellappan and Raghavendra Kotikalapudi, support their argument by explaining that they conducted a study on university students that demonstrated a correlation between depression and certain patterns of internet usage (for example, “very high e-mail usage”). The study involved screening 216 students at Missouri University of Science and Technology for depression and then having “the university’s information technology department provide us with campus Internet usage data for our participants . . . . This didn’t mean snooping on what the students were looking at or whom they were e-mailing; it merely meant monitoring how they were using the Internet” (so, for example, if they were surfing the web, checking email, using p2p programs, etc.).

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05/17/2012
GPS Act

In Congress Today: Testifying in Support of Geo-Privacy

By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:23pm

Today I testified before the House Judiciary Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee in support of the Geolocational Privacy Surveillance Act, a law that would require law enforcement to obtain a warrant based upon probable cause before tracking a person by (for example) attaching a GPS device to their car or getting records from their cell phone provider. (My written testimony is here).

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04/27/2012
Location Tracking

Need For a Warrant For GPS Tracking Still Not Settled

By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 8:40am

Last night we filed an amicus brief in United States v. Pineda-Moreno, a Ninth Circuit case that could play a significant role in determining how broadly the Supreme Court’s recent GPS tracking decision, United States v. Jones, is applied to protect Americans’ privacy.

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03/31/2012
Location Tracking

Results of Nationwide Government Cell Phone Tracking Records Request Show Frequent Violations of Americans' Privacy Rights

By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 1:17pm

The ACLU has released the results of our public records requests to hundreds of police departments asking about their cell phone tracking policies. What we have learned is disturbing.

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03/29/2012
Freedom of Association

Judge Rules in Favor of Bradley Manning Supporter and Allows Lawsuit Challenging Laptop Search

By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:43pm

The ACLU charges David House's laptop, camera and a USB drive were confiscated at O'Hare airport in 2010 because of his association with the Bradley Manning Support Network.

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02/23/2012

Surveillance Drones Coming to a Police Department Near You

By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:51pm

If there had been any doubt about drones being used for aerial surveillance inside the U.S., those doubts were dispelled when Congress passed and the president signed a law requiring the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to integrate drones into American airspace by 2015. In our recent report on domestic drones, we argued that protections must be put in place to safeguard Americans' privacy from unwarranted surveillance by drones. Among other things, we called on Congress or the FAA to take privacy into account when setting the rules for the use of drones.

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02/16/2012
Spying

Is the Government Reading Our Email, Texts and IMs Without a Warrant? You Bet.

By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:36pm

Today the ACLU filed a batch of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to learn more about the government's practice of reading people's email, text messages and other private electronic communications without a warrant.

It has been clear since the 1870s that the government needs a warrant to read snail mail, and there is no good reason for email to be treated differently. Unfortunately, the government continues to take advantage of an outdated law to read Americans' private electronic communications without a warrant. Under the law, the government does need a warrant to access the content of electronic communications that are 180 days old or less, but doesn't need one for older emails. In an era when everyone stores their email forever, this rule makes no sense and puts a great deal of personal information at risk.

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01/26/2012
Location Tracking

Supreme Court GPS Ruling: Bringing the 4th Amendment Into the 21st Century

By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:05pm

On Monday the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision protecting privacy in the digital age. In U.S. v. Jones, a unanimous Supreme Court held that the police and FBI violated the Fourth Amendment when they attached a GPS device to Antoine Jones’s car and tracked his movements for 28 days. While the case turned on the fact that the government physically placed a GPS device on Mr. Jones’s car, the implications are far broader. A majority of the justices acknowledged that advancing technology, like cell phone tracking, gives the government unprecedented ability to collect, store, and analyze an enormous amount of information about our private lives.

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12/16/2011
GPS

Justice Department Avoids Decision On Warrantless Cell Phone Tracking

By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:04pm

Federal law enforcement has used people’s cell phones to track their movements for at least a decade, but even today there is no clear answer to whether the government needs a warrant to do so. Why? In part because the U.S. Justice Department appears to be pursuing a conscious strategy of trying to avoid a ruling on this question by a court of appeals.

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12/02/2011

Better Than a Tinfoil Hat

By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:06pm

Wired’s ThreatLevel blog published a list of “9 Reasons Wired Readers Should Wear Tinfoil Hats.” Well, that’s one option. But if you’re concerned about Big Brother tracking Americans’ movements or rifling through our laptops, why not support the ACLU instead?

We’re working hard to ensure that as technology advances, our civil liberties aren’t left behind.

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