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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10/05/2012
Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

Would it be Easier to Fight Surveillance if the Soviets Were Still Around?

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 10:05am

Sometimes the constant news on the surveillance front makes me wonder: would it be easier to fight new surveillance programs if the Soviet Union were still around?

On the one hand the Cold War was a bonanza for the military and for our three-letter security agencies, which were invested with a mission of world-historical importance at a time when the nation was truly facing an existential threat (nuclear war). These agencies saw their budgets and powers expand dramatically in ways that were unprecedented in a country that had always held a deep suspicion of government power in general and “standing armies” in particular. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, these institutions faced an existential crisis of their own.

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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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09/28/2012
Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

Breaking the Law, Videotaping Suspicious Characters, and Seeing Through Walls (Friday Links Roundup)

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:28pm

Reports circulated this week that Facebook’s new Timeline was placing private messages into people’s public Timeline displays. Facebook said it was certain that was not happening. According to a statement from Facebook:

Our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users' profile pages. Facebook is satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy.

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09/25/2012
Domestic Drones

Heritage Foundation Weighs in On Domestic-Drone Policy Issues

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:13pm

The conservative Heritage Foundation has issued a report on “Drones in U.S. Airspace: Principles for Governance” with proposals for how domestic drones ought to be regulated. The authors agree with much of what my co-author Catherine Crump and I said in our drones report last year. The Heritage Foundation tends to lean more towards national-security conservatism than libertarian conservatism, so when the ACLU and the Heritage Foundation see more or less eye to eye on an issue like this, it’s a sure sign that a national consensus is emerging.

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09/21/2012
Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

Lie Detection, Special Treatment at the Airport, and Recursive Cameras (Friday Links Roundup)

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:26pm

Salon has a nice piece on how research shows the difficulty of detecting lies—the impossibility, really—and how people consistently overestimate their ability to do so. And, how people consistently misidentify signs of stress (from a variety of causes) as proof of lying. Of course, an entire TSA program has been built on the premise that people can be trained to detect lies with a reasonable level of certainty.

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09/19/2012
Location Tracking

When Privacy Gets Personal For Policymakers

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.

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09/17/2012
Police Surveillance

New Public Safety Broadband Network: Tool For A Domestic Secret Police?

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 6:19pm

Police in Tampa used smartphones and tablets to spy on protesters at the Republican National Convention, according to a report today from the National Journal.

Smartphones have proven to be an excellent tool for empowering individuals faced with sometimes unprofessional or abusive law enforcement officers, thanks to their built-in cameras and the constitutional right to record the police. But they also allow the police, according to the article, to blend in and transmit live video of protesters:

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09/14/2012
Cell Phones & Smartphones

The President Reads His Daily Brief on an iPad (and Other Lessons From the NSA)

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.

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09/13/2012
Consumer Online Privacy

Is the ACLU Inconsistent on Regulation of Speech and Privacy?

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:02pm

Adam Thierer of the libertarian Mercatus Center posted a thoughtful critique of my recent piece on online tracking and consumer “choice.” I wrote about a new paper on behavioral advertising and how it “demonstrates the absurdity of the position that individuals who desire privacy must attempt to win a technological arms race with the multi-billion dollar internet-advertising industry.”

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09/07/2012
Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

Hacking Cars, Chipping Kids, and Fingerprinting at Disney (Friday Links Roundup)

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:34pm

A disgruntled worker at a Texas auto dealership hacked into a vehicle-immobilization system and disabled more than 100 vehicles. Our automobiles are getting more and more computerized, so the threat of hacking vehicles is being taken increasingly seriously, according to this interesting article in CIO Magazine. And as computerization proceeds, with cars tied in to GPS, social networks, and who knows what else, the threat will increasingly be not just to security but also to privacy. Already today’s cars contain as many as 70 independent computers with up to 100 megabytes of code. And, vehicles—perhaps we should start calling them “transportation computers”—are increasingly being plugged into various networks, which greatly increases their vulnerability. Already, the job description “car thief” has come to take on some of the qualities of “hacker,” with today’s thieves plugging into vehicles’ data ports, replicating RFID key fobs, and otherwise manipulating data rather than hardware. It’s always seemed to me that one way to increase the security in cars and other publicly important software, is to require that their code be open source.

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