By Chris Soghoian, Principal Technologist and Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 1:04pm
Can using privacy-enhancing tools (such as Tor or a Virtual Private Network) actually expose you to warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency? This week, the ACLU sent off four FOIA requests to federal agencies in order to try and answer this question.
To understand why we think that may be the case, we have to go back to the passage of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) in 2008. That act was not a high-point for civil liberties or the rule of law. It included a provision giving immunity to the telecom companies that violated the law by assisting the NSA with its warrantless wiretapping program. Although the get-out-of-jail-free card given to the phone companies is the most well-known aspect to the FAA, there is much more to the law, and many other things that give privacy advocates reason to worry.
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
By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 9:57am
For the past year, the ACLU has been gathering information on local law enforcement agencies’ use of cell phone location tracking. (We’ve written about what we’ve learned here, here, here, here, and here.) In addition to everything we’ve discovered about location tracking itself, we’ve also learned about a number of other techniques law enforcement and the telcos can use when they work together. Sometimes the information came to light because, as with this telecom data retention chart, the information on the other techniques was mingled with the information on cell phone location tracking. Sometimes it was because law enforcement agencies misunderstood our public records requests and sent us everything they had related to telephones.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:26pm
Salon has a nice piece on how research shows the difficulty of detecting lies—the impossibility, really—and how people consistently overestimate their ability to do so. And, how people consistently misidentify signs of stress (from a variety of causes) as proof of lying. Of course, an entire TSA program has been built on the premise that people can be trained to detect lies with a reasonable level of certainty.
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.”
By Adrienne Lucas, Legal Intern, Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 3:32pm
Today the ACLU filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to force the FBI to release two memos guiding the bureau’s policy on GPS tracking. The memos were written in the wake of the Supreme Court’s January decision in U.S. v. Jones, which held that the Fourth Amendment applies when the government secretly attaches a GPS device to a car and tracks its movements. (See today’s legal complaint, our original FOIA request (made July 18), and a blog post we wrote about that request).
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:34pm
Some of the Wikileaks-fueled swirl of stories about the TrapWire program appear to have been overhyped, as my colleague Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts noted in her excellent roundup of the story yesterday. Others writing about the program have followedsuit.
By Alexander Abdo, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 5:14pm
A few days ago, we highlighted the drastic privacy implications of new guidelines issued to govern data-mining by the National Counterterrorism Center (“NCTC”). Yesterday, we testified to Congress about the problems with the guidelines, and we filed three Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) requests to learn more about how the guidelines will affect the privacy of millions of Americans.
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 Aden Fine, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:07pm
A New York criminal court judge has issued a decision denying Twitter’s motion to quash a court order requiring it to produce information about one of its users pursuant to a subpoena that the District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan issued in connection with the prosecution of an Occupy Wall Street protester.
