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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04/24/2012
Photographers' Rights

All Dressed Up And Nothing to do Except Arrest Photographers

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:31pm

Police around the country continue to violate individuals’ right to photography. A photographer named Carlos Miller maintains a web site in which he chronicles this problem. Now, Miller himself has obtained information about his own arrest for photography, which took place during the eviction of Miami Occupy protesters in January. Using an open-records request, he found that officials at the Miami-Dade Police Homeland Security Bureau, aka Fusion Center, had exchanged numerous e-mails over a period of months, in which they discuss their monitoring of Miller and his activities.

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12/15/2011
Domestic Drones

New Eyes in the Sky: Protecting Privacy from Domestic Drone Surveillance

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 10:32am

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – UAV’s or “drones” as they are called – are on the way. Just this week the Los Angeles Times reported that Customs and Border Patrol agency has been lending their Predator drones to law enforcement agencies for domestic operations. And their use is only going to spread.

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04/09/2013
Domestic Drones

Three Reasons the Drone Industry Should Support Privacy Protections

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:31am

As I mentioned recently, lobbying by Boeing contributed to the defeat (for now) of drone privacy legislation in Washington state. In fact, we are starting to see a few of the many legislative proposals for regulating drones die in state legislatures (our updated chart on the status of such legislation is here). One of the reasons legislation has been shut down in some of these states is (poorly founded) concern that passing such protections will inhibit a state’s chances of winning one of the drone “test sites” that the FAA is in the process of awarding. Meanwhile, the drone industry association, the AUVSI, has also been opposing state privacy-protection bills, citing the unconvincing argument that existing laws and the courts are enough to ensure privacy. And drone boosters have always intimated that privacy rules will interfere with economic benefits that a booming drone industry will provide.

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10/10/2012
Artificial Intelligence

Newest Video Analytics Technique “Product Recognition” Aims to Judge You By What You Wear

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:56pm

I blogged recently about video analytics, the attempt to build intelligence into video surveillance so that cameras can not only record our every move in public, but also in some respects understand what they are seeing. Now comes word of the latest twist in this effort: “product recognition.” As Technology Review reports, a startup called Graymatics

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08/22/2012
Protestors' Rights

First Amendment Violations to Watch for at the RNC and DNC

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:11am

We know that photographers have been having problems all over the country with police harassment, and that demonstrators’ free speech rights have also been under assault. But with the Democratic and Republican political conventions coming up, we have all too much reason to expect that free speech rights will be swallowed up in the vortex of those events, which have become constitutional black holes in recent years.

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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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04/25/2013
Location Tracking

ACLU testimony in hearing today on location tracking

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 10:59am

My colleague Catherine Crump is testifying today at a House committee hearing on location tracking and the proposed GPS Act. The hearing can be watched live here, and Crump's written testimony is online here.

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06/28/2012
Freedom of Expression

Legal Responsibility As Computers Get More Unpredictable

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:40pm

There has been some discussion lately of whether the output of computer algorithms should be considered protected free speech, as Tim Wu discussed in an op-ed and my colleague Gabe Rottman addressed in a blog post in response.

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02/06/2012
Domestic Drones

Congress Trying to Fast-Track Domestic Drone Use, Sideline Privacy

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:39pm

Congress is poised to give final passage to legislation that would give a big boost to domestic unmanned aerial surveillance — aka “drones.”

As we explained in our recent report, drone technology is advancing by leaps and bounds, and there is a lot of pent-up demand for them within the law enforcement community. But, domestic deployment of unmanned aircraft for surveillance purposes has largely been blocked so far by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is rightly concerned about the safety effects of filling our skies with flying robots (which crash significantly more often than manned aircraft).

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07/20/2011

TSA Scanners Start Moving From Naked Bodies to Stick-Figure Outlines

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 6:43pm

The TSA announced today that it will be rolling out new software on its millimeter wave bodyscanners, which replaces the nude images created by the current machines with generic outlines of the human form. Instead of a human security screener scrutinizing an image of your nude body, a computer will process that image and highlight areas of the body where any “anomalies” are found. Here is an image provided by the TSA:

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