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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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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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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07/19/2012
Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

Will We Mold Ourselves To Match Our Data?

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:42pm

I recently came across a very nice essay on “The Stupidity of Computers” by David Auerbach, which is really much more interesting than that truism of a headline might suggest.

Auerbach starts with the observation that computers “are the undisputed chess champions of the world, but they can’t understand a simple English conversation.” The point is a commonplace, almost clichéd one—but Auerbach quickly builds on it, slowly moving to a stunning punch line of a thesis that is thought-provoking and fresh.

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07/17/2012
Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

A Modest Proposal For Protecting Our Privacy

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:38pm

One of the biggest problems with protecting privacy in the United States is that, almost alone in the advanced-industrial world, we do not have an overarching privacy law that codifies the basic privacy principles that are accepted around the world as the gold standard for protecting this human right. 

Instead, the United States pursues a sector-by-sector approach to privacy. The result is that our privacy protections vary wildly according to area. We have some (inadequate) protections for our health and financial data, very few protections for our commercial transactions, and very rigorous protections for our video rental records. 

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07/10/2012
Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

What’s Wrong With the Pauls’ Internet Manifesto

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:36pm

Ron and Rand Paul’s manifesto on “The Technology Revolution,” released the other day, is unexpectedly incomplete, focusing most of its animus not on government security and police agencies, but on what they call “collectivists,” by which they mean those who advance attempts to “regulate competition, infrastructure, privacy and intellectual property.” I think they mean us.

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06/12/2012
License Plate Scanners

Have State Legislators Staved Off DEA License Scanning On Utah Interstate?

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 6:07pm

(Update below)

The DEA has withdrawn its request to Utah for permission to install license plate scanners on the Interstate there—but it’s not clear if the agency is abandoning the installation or if it just plans to go ahead without the state’s cooperation (something it has already claimed the power to do).

(I wrote about the DEA plan last month in this post, and also wrote about ALPR in two followup posts.)

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06/01/2012
Anti-Muslim Bias

Muslim Profiling and Behavioral Profiling

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:24pm

Yesterday I posted about the debate over profiling Muslims at the airport, and how Bruce Schneier persuasively argued that the concept, which seems so intuitively sensible to so many Americans, is a terrible idea even just from a security point of view. He also commented on the other, less tangible costs that such a scheme would impose, such as the alienation of Muslims from American life, and the corruption of our values.

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05/31/2012
Anti-Muslim Bias

Profiling Muslims at the Airport

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:20pm

I finally had a chance to read this extended debate between the security-ologist Bruce Schneier and critic-of-religion Sam Harris (yes that Sam Harris) over whether we should profile Muslims in airport security.

First of all, Sam Harris performs a useful function by articulating a more sophisticated version of what is the intuitive position for many Americans, which runs something like: “we know who the danger is, it ain’t old ranchers from Texas or pretty blondes from San Diego—it’s Muslims, so let’s focus airport security on them.” (I hear this regularly myself when discussing airline security in public.) By fearlessly arguing for such profiling—which many people might quietly suspect makes sense—Harris sets it forth explicitly so that it can be explicitly debunked. And Schneier not only debunks it, he demolishes it.

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05/29/2012
Police Surveillance

Gunshot Detectors: the ACLU’s View

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:37pm

The New York Times has a story today about gunshot location systems, which use microphones installed around a city to detect, and triangulate the location of, gunshots, so that police can be sent to the scene. We have been asked what we think of this technology from time to time since at least 2004.

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05/13/2013
Government Surveillance

The Asymmetry Between Past and Future, and Why it Means Mass Surveillance Won’t Work

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:39am

Former Senator Joseph Lieberman recently charged that mistakes by U.S. security agencies were responsible for failing to stop the Boston Marathon bombing. I recently wrote about how mass surveillance makes this kind of recrimination inevitable, because once a government agency spies on a person, they become in a sense responsible for any actions that that person takes. To paraphrase Colin Powell, we might sum it up as “You surveil him, you own him.”

I recently came across a good analogy for why it’s deceptively hard for security agencies to detect and stop out-of-nowhere terrorist attacks like the Boston bombing—and why mass surveillance isn’t likely to help. It comes from the book The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by the physicist and writer Leonard Mlodinow, in a discussion of Brownian motion.

Brownian motion, you may recall, is the random jiggling of molecules in a liquid or other substance. A dye molecule floating in a seemingly still glass of water will randomly move about, covering about an inch in three hours, buffeted by random collisions with the smaller water molecules that surround it.

What would it take to actually explain the motion of that molecule? This is where the parallel to anti-terrorism efforts comes in. Mlodinow points out, “In any complex string of events in which each event unfolds with some element of

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