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.

Follow @JayCStanley on Twitter »
09/13/2011
9/11 Blog Series

The Government's 9/11 Secrecy Obsession

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project & Michael German, Senior Policy Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:16pm

Our government lost its way after 9/11 in many different respects. One of them was to worsen what had already been long apparent as one of the most significant problems with our security establishment: its out-of-control habit of secrecy.

The secrecy problem had been studied and decried for decades before 9/11, with nearly every government panel, commission, and committee that examined the issue concluding that the amount of information kept secret was far out of proportion to what was justifiable, and was harming our nation.

Read More»
05/28/2010

Reviving the Fourth Amendment and American Privacy

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:59pm

I started working on privacy issues for the ACLU about five weeks before 9/11. What a wild ride it’s been for privacy since that terrible day. The privacy rights of Americans have come under a sustained assault that would have been hard to imagine in the languid days of August 2001. Since 9/11 we have seen two wars, a constant stream of revolutionary new technologies, greatly expanded powers for our security agencies, and a relentless political drumbeat pounding on the supposed need to give those agencies even more powers to peer into our lives without due process or meaningful oversight.

Read More»
05/17/2010
TSA

Getting Naked with Strangers May Be More Dangerous Than Suspected

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:29pm

In a post about body scanners last month, I noted that the health effects of these machines has been a "muted part of the debate." The issue just got less muted. NPR is reporting that a group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, has raised concerns over the health effects of backscatter X-ray body scanners, which is one of the two types being deployed (the other being millimeter wave). The scientists' concerns over backscatter are disputed by the TSA and others, and we at the ACLU do not pretend to be scientists. But, the scientists' brief letter (PDF), which they sent on April 6 to President Obama's science advisor John P. Holdren, is worth looking at.

Read More»
02/01/2013
Employee Rights

Enterprise Omniscience

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:35pm

NBC’s Bob Sullivan published a very nice piece of reporting Wednesday on an Equifax company called The Work Number, which collects detailed information about the paychecks of 30 percent of the U.S. workforce and then uses it for various purposes, including selling it to debt collectors and financial services firms wanting to do “risk management” of their customers.

Read More»
01/22/2013
Consumer Online Privacy

US Government Busy in Europe Defending Interests of Advertisers, Security Agencies, But Not Americans' Privacy

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

My colleague Ben Wizner and I are in Brussels this week, partly to meet with European lawmakers and others about the new privacy regime that the EU is in the process of putting into place. Unlike the United States, Europe has a set of basic rules and institutions in place to protect individuals’ privacy, and is trying to update its existing rules and institutions for the digital age.

The United States needs similar protections—a basic, overarching privacy law, and institutions with the teeth to enforce it. We are an outlier in the world in lacking those things. However, some U.S. companies seem to be terrified at the prospect of basic, fair privacy rules being put into place in Europe. Not only are companies such as Facebook and Google furiously lobbying against those rules, but the U.S. government has “shocked” Europeans by also lobbying hard against many elements of this update.

Read More»
08/20/2012
Artificial Intelligence

Video Analytics: A Brain Behind the Eye?

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 10:14am

One of the central elements in last week's Trapwire story involves the application of “behavioral recognition,” also known as “video analytics,” to camera feeds. What are we to make of this technology?

In essence, video analytics is a form of artificial intelligence that tries to automatically derive meaning from a video feed. Face recognition, license plate recognition, and red light cameras are each examples of the automated extraction of meaning from a video feed, but what I’m focused on here are technologies that aim to offer more general analysis of behaviors that are taking place in a camera’s field of view. Examples include the tracking of people throughout an area, zone or perimeter protection, determination of (and detection of deviations from) “normal” patterns of movement in an area, and the detection of abandoned objects. (This article at EE Times offers an extensive introduction to the technology.) 

Read More»
07/13/2012
Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

Friday Links Roundup

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:26pm

Here are some links that have caught our eye recently:

The FBI’s “Next Generation Identification” biometrics database is starting to plan for the inclusion of iris scans. Iris scans raise more issues than some other biometrics (such as fingerprints) because they can be used at a distance without a subject’s participation, permission, or even knowledge. Hand-held iris scanners are being sold to police around the country for identification uses. We were assured in a meeting with the FBI last year that biometric scans in situations such as traffic stops would not be used to enroll individuals into the database, just to check their identity.

Read More»
07/03/2012
Artificial Intelligence

Privacy, Computers, and Consequences (Computers vs. Humans Part 2)

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 1:09pm

In a post yesterday I discussed the belief that as long as our behavior and communications are only scrutinized by a computer, our privacy has not been invaded. Many people have that sense because computers are so much dumber than human beings.

Read More»
05/09/2012
Government Surveillance

A Glimpse at the World of Digital Forensics

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:33pm

A gathering of cyber-crime specialists in Massachusetts last week provided a glimpse into the tactics used by prosecutors and police to access digital data. Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts has done a nice writeup of the conference. As she points out, the event was closed to the press and the public, but the schedule of events was posted online, and included sessions with titles such as:

Read More»
04/23/2012
Location Tracking

Why Does the Cell Phone Association Oppose Location-Tracking Warrant Requirement?

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:13pm

CTIA, the industry association representing wireless phone carriers, is opposing proposed California legislation that would require the police to get a warrant before accessing a person’s location records from a cellphone company.

The association opposes the warrant requirement, and also opposes a requirement that carriers publicly disclose how often and why they share information with law enforcement.

Read More»
Statistics image