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.
04/17/2013
E-Verify

Mandatory E-Verify: A Giant Plunge Into a National ID System

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

Today's release of an immigration reform proposal from the Gang of Eight raises a host of civil liberties issues, many of which the ACLU will undoubtedly be commenting on in the coming days and weeks.

Today, I'm focusing on our concerns with one particular program, E-Verify. Currently, E-Verify is a largely voluntary system where employers can check with the Department of Homeland Security to see if someone is allowed to work. Basically it's a giant list of everyone – immigrants and citizens – legally in the United States.

Read More»
07/09/2012
Cell Phones & Smartphones

Mobile Phone Surveillance by the Numbers

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:56am

Wow.  Sometimes one word says it all.  The New York Times reports that in response to letters from Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), mobile phone providers disclosed that they received approximately 1.3 million law enforcement requests for customer records last year alone. What an extraordinary number: more than a million accounts subject to at least some level of law enforcement investigation just in 2011. As we have discussed elsewhere, beyond what is reported by carriers in these letters, there is absolutely no reporting or tracking regarding how these numbers are handled.  

Even more amazing, as you dig into the article and read the underlying letters it becomes clear that this is actually a vast undercount of the number of Americans who have been affected by this tracking.  Sprint disclosed that it received approximately 500,000 subpoenas in 2011 (a subpoena is a written request for information from law enforcement that isn’t reviewed by a judge) and that “each subpoena typically requested subscriber information on multiple subscribers.” In addition, several carriers disclosed that they sometimes provide all the information from a particular cell tower or particular area.   Metro PCS for example charges:

$50 for Cell Tower Dump per tower for a 2 hour period
$100 for an Area Dump (if you know the location but do not know the cell towers that affect the area) for a maximum of 2 cell towers for a 2 hour period per cell tower search

Everyone whose phone has been used by a particular cell tower over a particular time period—likely hundreds or thousands of people—could have their data examined by investigators.  And these dragnet data requests are on the rise.  Verizon estimates that over the last 5 years it has seen an average increase of 15% annually, and T-Mobile reported increases of approximately 12%-16%.  This has also led to at least some possible abuse; T-Mobile disclosed that in the last three years it has referred two inappropriate law enforcement requests to the FBI. 

Read More»
05/09/2012
Social Networking Privacy

Password Protection Act of 2012: A Good Start Against Employer Snooping

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 6:06pm

Today Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Representative Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and a number of cosponsors filed the Password Protection Act of 2012 in the Senate and House to prevent employers from strong-arming employers and job applicants into sharing information from their personal social networking accounts. It’s an important idea and one that we’ve been pushing for more than a year, but the bill itself doesn’t go as far as we think it should.

Read More»
04/21/2011

Does the Government Want to Read Your Texts and Emails?

By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project & Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:45pm

Last week the Justice Department squandered an opportunity to reassure Americans that as technology advances our civil liberties will not be left behind. The Justice Department was called before Congress to say whether it should be permitted to read people's email, text messages and other electronic communications without a probable cause warrant — that is, without a judicial determination that it has a good reason to believe a search will turn up evidence of a crime. The clear answer to this question should have been "no." After all, a warrant has been required for postal mail since at least the 1870s and for telephone conversations since the 1960s. Why shouldn't our email receive the same protection?

Read More»
07/30/2012
Government Surveillance

The Biggest New Spying Program You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 2:18pm

Update: Since this piece was posted, the ACLU has filed FOIA requests seeking more information on data-mining by the NCTC. Read more »

What if a government spy agency had power to copy and data mine information about ordinary Americans from any government database? This could include records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records. Literally anything the government collects would be fair game, and the original agency in charge of protecting the privacy of those records would have little say over whether this happened, or what the spy agency did with the information afterward. What if that spy agency could add commercial information, anything it – or any other federal agency – could buy from the huge data aggregators that are monitoring our every move?

Read More»
11/16/2011
E-Verify

Oversharing Is Never a Good Thing, Especially When it’s With DHS

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 1:55pm

Sometimes sharing is bad. Don’t worry. We don’t plan to rush into kindergartens across America and break the news to all the 5-year-olds, but it’s true. Especially when it comes to national security and your privacy, it may be necessary to collect and use certain information, but wrong to share it.

When a federal government advisory committee recently revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (which contains both the Secret Service and the TSA) is in the “process of creating a policy framework and technology architecture for enhancing DHS's information-sharing capabilities,” it immediately raised these types of concerns and today we sent a letter to DHS outlining those concerns.

Read More»
01/23/2013
Online Privacy

Hurray for Google Transparency, Now Where is Everyone Else?

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:16pm

Google released its latest transparency report today. They’ve made some interesting additions and the overall number of government requests is on the rise. But before we get to that, there is one major overriding point: good for Google and where is everybody else? The only other major company to release these types of numbers is Twitter. Where are Verizon and Facebook and Microsoft? How about AT&T, Amazon or Comcast? I could make this list endless but the major salient fact is that Google has paved the way (this is their 7th report) and there hasn’t exactly been a stampede to follow suit.

Read More»
12/13/2012
NCTC

Vast New Spying Program Was Started in Secret on a Bogus Pretext

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:25am

The Wall Street Journal today published (alternate link) an in-depth review of a new, relatively unknown program run by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Although we have been warning about the dangers of the program for months, and I testified before Congress about the issue in July, the Journal’s story conveys how controversial the program was even inside the government. It also describes the broad scope of new authority the government is granting itself.

Read More»
05/26/2011

We Must Combat Child Pornography Without Abandoning Online Privacy

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:56pm

Sexual abuse of children is deeply evil, not to mention criminal. It harms children to an almost unfathomable degree. Child pornography commercially exploits that harm, exacerbating the initial crime. Unfortunately, terrible crimes can sometimes lead to law enforcement excesses in battling them.

Yesterday, Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fla.) introduced H.R. 1981 the "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011." Section four of this legislation would impose sweeping requirements on internet companies, forcing them to keep records on their customers for 18 months — impacting millions of individuals who have no connection to the sexual exploitation of children whatsoever. It doesn't have to go down like this.

Read More»
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.

Read More»
Statistics image