By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 1:17pm
In 1954, German-American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published the now infamous Seduction of the Innocent, a book chronicling the supposed harm caused to America's youth by comic books. Wertham's book prompted a wave of hand-wringing around the nation.
Now, we're seeing a new round of the same hysteria directed at video games — old wine in new digital bottles. And, the history of comic book censorship is directly relevant for the contemporary debate over "violent video games."
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:46pm
The FTC on Monday released a staff report on Face Recognition, offering “best practices for common uses of facial recognition technologies.” The report resulted from a workshop the agency held on the issue last year. Face recognition is in some ways the ultimate biometric identifier, and its potential to finally and decisively put an end to the possibility of anonymity in public is very real.
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.
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.
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.
By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:34pm
The New York Times Sunday Review included a striking op ed suggesting that universities could one day deploy software to analyze students’ internet usage for the purpose of assessing their mental health. The writers, Sriram Chellappan and Raghavendra Kotikalapudi, support their argument by explaining that they conducted a study on university students that demonstrated a correlation between depression and certain patterns of internet usage (for example, “very high e-mail usage”). The study involved screening 216 students at Missouri University of Science and Technology for depression and then having “the university’s information technology department provide us with campus Internet usage data for our participants . . . . This didn’t mean snooping on what the students were looking at or whom they were e-mailing; it merely meant monitoring how they were using the Internet” (so, for example, if they were surfing the web, checking email, using p2p programs, etc.).
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:54pm
The American Library Association has created an excellent public education resource on the privacy issues facing our society – a web site called privacyrevolution.org.
The ALA has long been a staunch defender of privacy and free speech, and a frequent ally of the ACLU on those issues. In fact, libraries have been the scene of many free speech battles in recent years. If you think about it, librarians are our natural allies since libraries exemplify the democratic ideal of citizens’ access to information, while protecting those citizens’ right to keep their inquiries and interests private. As the site explains:
By Brian Hauss, Legal Fellow, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:30am
(Updated below)
In another round of the legal battle over the records of Twitter users sought by the government in connection with its WikiLeaks investigation, the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are appearing before a federal appeals court in Richmond this morning, arguing that the public has a right to know about secret court orders and other documents related to government efforts to obtain Internet users’ private information without a warrant.
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.”
