Blog of Rights
Chris
Calabrese
Christopher Calabrese is the legislative counsel for privacy-related issues in the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington Legislative Office (WLO). Prior to joining the WLO, Calabrese served as project counsel to the ACLU Technology & Liberty Project (TLP).  As legislative counsel, Calabrese leads the office's advocacy efforts related to privacy and the responsible use of technology, developing proactive strategies on pending federal legislation and executive branch actions concerning data collection, surveillance, and identification systems.
12/03/2010

The Single Greatest Chart Ever (At Least if You Want to Know Where Your Personal Information Goes)

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:46pm

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report (PDF) on Wednesday that provides an outstanding start on describing the problems of data collection both on and offline.

Buried in that FTC report is a small gem: On pages 107 and 108 is Appendix C, a chart prepared by technologist Richard Smith which conveys all of the personal information collected about all of us and where it goes.

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09/13/2010
Net Neutrality

A Disturbing Vision for the Future of the Internet

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:42pm

The era that Net Neutrality supporters have long feared is here — major companies have begun divvying up the internet. Last month, Google and Verizon announced a "policy framework" of how the rules for the internet could work in the future. The framework is a disturbing vision for the future. Wireless internet — such as services delivered over smart phones — would be completely unregulated; companies would be free to prioritize their own services — for everything from music to video to chat — over those of competitors.

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04/09/2010

The NYT Demands DotRights. You Should Too.

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:06pm

The ACLU has recently been making a lot of noise about modernizing the laws that protect our online privacy. We believe that law enforcement should have to go to a judge and get a warrant that says it has probable cause to believe you've committed a crime before it can read your email, browse through your social networking account, or track your location. Right now, that's not the case. Digital information simply isn't getting the protection it deserves and that the framers would have wanted (if they knew what digital information was). That's why we're working so hard to raise visibility of this issue.

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03/30/2010
ECPA

Electronic Privacy Law is Older Than the World Wide Web — It’s Time for An Upgrade

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:23pm

In 1986, there was no World Wide Web, nobody carried a cell phone, and the president was a man born in 1911. That was the year that the statute that protects the privacy of your electronic life — email, search terms, cloud computing, cell phone location records, postings to Facebook — was passed into law. Even then, Congress recognized that computerized record-keeping would pose privacy issues as information that had formally resided in the home (and been protected by the Fourth Amendment) moved to the hands of businesses.

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02/10/2010

Body Scanner = Naked Movie Star Pictures; That Didn't Take Long

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:42pm

We're not the type to say "I told you so." Alright maybe we are. In this case we just couldn't help ourselves.

Since December, we've been expressing skepticism about the deployment of whole body imaging at airports. We call them virtual strip searches because we think the graphic images they create of people are incredibly invasive. We've even noted that images of famous people are likely to be particularly prized.

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12/03/2009

News Flash: Another Fake Deadline Ignored; Real ID Still Dead

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:02pm

Real ID — the system to make state drivers licenses into national IDs — is full of melodramatic deadlines. Citizens of states who don't comply aren't supposed to be able to use their licenses to fly or enter a federal facility. Seemingly scary stuff for noncompliant states. The drafters of Real ID purposefully made it so; they knew that it was the only way to get states to swallow a program that heavily infringed on privacy and cost $24 billion (almost all of it state money!) to implement.

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11/18/2009

Technology Changes Things. Latest Example: Student Records.

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 2:16pm

Schools care about kids. Some are better than others but educators get into the business because they want to help kids grow and learn. Any teacher will tell you one of the key ingredients for doing that is knowing your kids. What kind of student are they, how are things at home, are they having discipline issues, the list goes on and on. In order to accomplish this, schools (big surprise) keep records so they can monitor educational achievement and other things. Of course this is generally a good thing, caring equates to better education.

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10/01/2009
TSA

The Naked Truth

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 1:12pm

As we gear up for another holiday season, the Transportation Security Administration has added a new wrinkle: naked travel.

USA Today has just reported that the TSA has purchased “150 security machines at airport checkpoints that enable screeners to see under passengers' clothes”. These virtual strip searches allow TSA screeners to see detailed images of passengers' bodies. These machines have been around for a while, but it appears they have gone mainstream. This purchase will “vastly expand the use of the controversial body scanners.”

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07/15/2009

Like Frankenstein's Monster, DHS and the Senate Try to Revive Real ID

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:51pm

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said today that Real ID was "DOA". That's "Dead On Arrival" for the tiny percentage of you out there who don't watch a lot of cop shows on TV. What she meant was that states are not implementing Real ID. She repeatedly referenced the fact that 13 states have opted out of Real ID altogether, passing statutes that bar participation in the program. Of course the ACLU agrees with that message, we've been shouting it from the rooftops for years. But the real question is: If Real ID is dead, why is everybody working so hard to bring it back to life?

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06/09/2009
TSA

Put Those X-Ray Specs Back in Your Pocket, TSA!

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 1:37pm

Last Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives dealt a sharp blow to electronic voyeurs everywhere by placing extensive restrictions on the use of electronic body scanners as part of airport security.

Known more colloquially as virtual strip searches, these machines produce strikingly graphic images of passengers’ bodies when they are utilized as part of the airport screening process. Those images reveal not just graphic images of “naughty parts,” but also intimate medical details like colostomy bags.

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