By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:38pm
A few links that have caught our eye this past week:
Paul Rosenzweig has posted a nice piece on Lawfare on the reasons to be skeptical of the need for cybersecurity regulation. He breaks cybersecurity down into its constituent parts (as we have urged) of cybercrime, cyber espionage, and truly catastrophic “digital Pearl Harbor” attacks. He suggests that the first two do not justify regulation, and (like us) is skeptical about the degree of risk of the third. In explaining that skepticism, he provides an elegant analysis of the electric grid, the taking down of which is a frequent cyber-attack scenario, and makes the point that the pro-regulation viewpoint “mistakes vulnerability for risk”—in other words, there can be a vulnerability in a system, but still a low risk that anyone will actually be able to or try to exploit it.
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 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 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.
