By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:23am
Professor Tim Wu at Columbia had an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday arguing against First Amendment protections for “automated” speech. Here’s the argument distilled:
As a matter of legal logic, there is some similarity among Google, Ann Landers, Socrates and other providers of answers. But if you look more closely, the comparison falters. Socrates was a man who died for his views; computer programs are utilitarian instruments meant to serve us. Protecting a computer’s “speech” is only indirectly related to the purposes of the First Amendment, which is intended to protect actual humans against the evil of state censorship. The First Amendment has wandered far from its purposes when it is recruited to protect commercial automatons from regulatory scrutiny.
Guest blogger Agatha M. Cole is a J.D. candidate, Cardozo Law School, Class of 2013
The ongoing controversy surrounding domain name seizures under "Operation In Our Sites" seems to be reaching new heights. DHS launched Operation In Our Sites in 2010 to combat online piracy and the proliferation of counterfeit goods on the Internet. Since then, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has shut down over 758 websites allegedly involved in the sale or distribution of counterfeit goods or illegal copyrighted works.
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 5:47pm
A roundup of some items that caught our eye recently, but we haven’t had a chance to write about.
San Francisco’s MUNI train system is installing new “intelligent” cameras that will track and monitor commuters, raising an alarm when it spots “anomalous activities,” which it will identify by learning over time what is “normal.” It always surprises me when cutting-edge surveillance technologies are introduced in the Bay Area (see BART, phone cutoffs in, and bar cameras). Don’t people know that Northern California is home to perhaps the most tech-savvy and privacy-aware population in the country?
By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office & Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 7:44am
Last week Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) and the House of Representatives drew an important line in the sand. Holt offered an amendment to the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations bill to bar any DHS funding for “the purchase, operation, or maintenance of armed unmanned aerial vehicles.” (The amendment was adopted and the bill has passed the House.) While moves to arm domestic drones are widely seen as beyond the pale and have not really been contemplated (with the exception of one sheriff in Texas who mused about mounting less-lethal weapons like rubber bullets on unmanned aircraft), we believe it’s crucial to get ahead of any possible trend.
By Aden Fine, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:52pm
We filed a friend-of-the-court brief today in New York state court in support of Twitter’s efforts to protect the constitutional rights of one of its users. As we posted earlier this month, Twitter took a great step to defend its users’ rights by filing a motion to quash a subpoena that the District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan issued in connection with the prosecution of an Occupy Wall Street protester.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 10:20am
A few links that have caught our eye this past week:
The Citynewswatch blog in Charlotte, NC has a nice post on that city’s new license plate reader program, among other surveillance systems (pity any city that hosts a major national or international event these days). Among many other good points, Citynewswatch highlights the fact that they are being funded via our deeplytroubling civil asset forfeiture laws. I didn’t mention it in my blog the other day but the ALPR program being pushed in Utah by the DEA is being similarly funded.
By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:24pm
We haven’t pulled punches in our criticismof the HolderJusticeDepartment, so it’s especially important that we give credit where credit is due. In support of an important case brought by the ACLU of Maryland defending the right to record, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division forcefully and unequivocally endorsed our view in an unusual (but welcome!) 11-page letter to the Baltimore Police Department.
By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:55pm
One of the very few pleasant things about being an attorney is that even some of the most boring cases have wacky backstories. This post is about one of the wackiest--though the issues raised illustrate certain constitutional concerns with a very short section in the very long Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act, which just passed the House yesterday over ACLU opposition.
In February of last year, a federal judge in Maryland issued a criminal complaint against one William Lawrence Cassidy. Mr. Cassidy, it seems, had allegedly infiltrated a Maryland area Buddhist community by claiming to be a “tulku,” a high-ranking Buddhist religious figure who, unlike lay Buddhists and the lesser-ranked “lamas,” gets to choose the form of his reincarnation. Through this alleged ruse, Mr. Cassidy attempted to gain the trust of Jetsunna Ahkon Lhamo (born Alyce Louise Zeoli), the first Western woman to legitimately be enthroned as a tulku.
By Aden Fine, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:59pm
Twitter has filed a motion in state court in New York seeking to quash a court order requiring it to turn over information about one of its users and his communications on Twitter. This particular case involves a Twitter user, Malcolm Harris, who is being prosecuted by the District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan for disorderly conduct in connection with the Occupy Wall Street protest that occurred on the Brooklyn Bridge last year.
