By Naomi Gilens, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:28pm
This morning, faced with the threat of criminal and civil contempt, Twitter turned over information about Occupy Wall Street protester Malcolm Harris to a New York criminal court judge. This development follows Twitter’s months-long effort to challenge the Manhattan District Attorney Office’s subpoena for Harris’s information, which was issued as part of the D.A.’s disorderly conduct prosecution of Harris stemming from his participation at an Occupy event last fall.
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 Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:14pm
Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) announced late yesterday that he will bring legislation before the committee requiring law enforcement to use a probable-cause warrant to access all non-public internet communications such as email. This legislation is a key piece of efforts to reform the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), first passed in 1986 and not substantially updated since.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:55pm
Wired reported last week that the Apple App Store has rejected an app that compiles news reports in order to map overseas U.S. drone strikes, and provide users a pop-up notification whenever a drone strike has been reported.
Apple rejected the app several times, at first citing problems with its functionality, and then telling the developer that the app “contains content that many audiences would find objectionable.”
By Aden Fine, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:44pm
Twitter just filed its brief appealing a June decision by a New York criminal court judge requiring the company to give the Manhattan District Attorney detailed information on the communications of Twitter user Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street protester charged with disorderly conduct in connection with a march on the Brooklyn Bridge.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:36pm
On July 30, the Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia announced a review of license plate scanning programs by law enforcement in the province. If the United States had an analogous institution embodying /enforcing our privacy values, maybe we’d see something like that here instead of untrammeled expansion and retention of license data. We’re still waiting for the “missing in action” Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) to turn into something real. From 2007 until late 2011, neither President Bush nor President Obama even nominated anyone to fill the independent oversight board; we finally now have four members—but still no chair.
By Devon Chaffee, Legislative Policy Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:51pm
I was scheduled to return from my summer vacation at 6 a.m. Sunday morning flying out of Vermont’s Burlington International Airport in a state most often thought to be ahead of the civil liberties curve. If you’ve ever had a crack-of-dawn flight, you can relate to my blurry eyed exhaustion after waking up at 3:30 a.m. to make it to the airport with enough time for what we now consider to be the standard, if annoying, airport security rigmarole. I expected to have to strip off my belt and sweatshirt, take off my shoes, show my ID, and be subjected to a naked body scan or all-too-personal pat down. What I didn’t expect was a full-on TSA interrogation about my summer vacation before I even reached the identification checkpoint.
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.)
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).
