Blog of Rights
Jay
Stanley
Jay Stanley is Senior Policy Analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, where he researches, writes and speaks about technology-related privacy and civil liberties issues and their future.  He is the Editor of the ACLU's "Free Future" blog and has authored and co-authored a variety of influential ACLU reports on privacy and technology topics. Before joining the ACLU, he was an analyst at the technology research firm Forrester, served as American politics editor of Facts on File’s World News Digest, and as national newswire editor at Medialink. He is a graduate of Williams College and holds an M.A. in American History from the University of Virginia.

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01/14/2011
DNA

Combat in Our Genes?

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:07pm

Born soldiers may say they have "combat in our genes" — but a new report suggests the Pentagon may want to give the phrase whole new meaning by turning DNA into the next military battleground.

The report, prepared by a defense science advisory panel known as JASON and reported by Secrecy News and HuffPost's Dan Froomkin, among others, recommends that the military take advantage of the rapidly falling cost of gene sequencing by preparing to engage in the mass sequencing of the genomes of all military personnel. According to the report, the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Veteran's Administration (VA)

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10/04/2012
Video Surveillance

Police Cameras Outside Your Door

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:56am

The ACLU of Michigan recently put out an interesting report on surveillance cameras. Like other ACLU reports on cameras (such as those by our affiliates in Illinois and Northern California, and the materials on our national site) it summarizes the policy arguments against cameras. But it also focuses on a uniquely disturbing application of surveillance cameras: their deployment in residential neighborhoods.

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02/13/2013
Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

The ACLU’s Pizza Video: 10 Years Later

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:48pm

In 2004, the ACLU produced a satiric video called “Ordering Pizza in 2015” that has become the single most-downloaded piece of content we’ve ever produced (at least we believe in the absence of complete stats). I won’t describe it—you can watch it here if you haven’t seen it—but like many successful viral products, it combined humor with a biting commentary on an all-too-real set of trends. 

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10/15/2012
FISA Amendments Act

Does Surveillance Affect Us Even When We Can’t Confirm We’re Being Watched? Lessons From Behind the Iron Curtain

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.

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08/29/2012
Brain Privacy

High-Tech “Mind Readers” Are Latest Effort to Detect Lies

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:41am

I recently wrote about how difficult it is to know which technologies on the horizon will turn into genuine privacy nightmares and which remain menacing but distant threats. One group of technologies that we’ve had our eyes on for a while are those that purport to read minds. On Sunday the Washington Post ran an article on a Maryland case where a murder defendant is trying to introduce fMRI “lie detector” evidence in his defense. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) allows researchers to look at neural activity in real-time by using powerful magnets to trace blood-flow changes in the brain.

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05/18/2012
License Plate Scanners

DEA Recording Americans’ Movements on Highways, Creating Central Repository of Plate Data

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:58pm

The DEA wants to capture the license plates of all vehicles traveling along Interstate 15 in Utah, and store that data for two years at their facility in Northern Virginia. And, as a DEA official told Utah legislators at a hearing this week (attended by ACLU of Utah staff and covered in local media), these scanners are already in place on “drug trafficking corridors” in California and Texas and are being considered for Arizona as well. The agency is also collecting plate data from unspecified other sources and sharing it with over ten thousand law enforcement agencies around the nation.

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11/09/2012
Data Brokers

Data Brokers Release Information About Their Operations In Response to Congressional Inquiry

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:18pm

Yesterday Reps. Ed Markey (D, Mass.) and Joe Barton (R, Texas) released a batch of important details about the operation of the nation’s largest data broker companies. The information came in responses from nine data broker companies to a list of questions posed by a group of Members led by Markey and Barton seeking details of their operation in light of the privacy sensitivity of what they do. The responses released yesterday provide a good snapshot and reminder of what it is these companies are doing.

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11/21/2012
Video Surveillance

Police Install Camera Focused on Back Yard of Woman's Home

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:42am

Recently I wrote about an ACLU of Michigan report that highlighted the problem of police cameras being installed outside of people’s private homes. Last week I learned from my colleague Doug Bonney of the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri about an even more egregious incident involving video surveillance of a private home in Missouri. Bonney described the situation to me:

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08/14/2012
Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

What to Make of the TrapWire Story

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:34pm

Some of the Wikileaks-fueled swirl of stories about the TrapWire program appear to have been overhyped, as my colleague Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts noted in her excellent roundup of the story yesterday. Others writing about the program have followed suit.

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10/25/2012
Photographers' Rights

ACLU Sues Over Abuse Of Photographers By Border Patrol Agents

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 1:42pm

The ACLU of San Diego filed a lawsuit today against the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) for violating the constitutional rights of two photographers, and for maintaining an official policy prohibiting the use of cameras and video recorders at or near U.S. crossing points, which violates the Constitution.

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