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 Linda Lye, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California at 4:51pm
Today, the ACLU of Northern California went to court in two separate cases with the same goal: shedding light on the government's use of controversial and arguably unconstitutional surveillance techniques.
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 Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 12:31pm
Today the ACLU is launching a nationwide effort to find out more about automatic license plate readers (ALPR). By snapping photographs of each license plate they encounter—up to three thousand per minute—and retaining records of who was where when, license plate readers are fundamentallythreatening our freedom on the open road.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:52pm
A few links that have caught our eye this past week:
Earlier this month in response to the Pauls’ Internet Manifesto I pointed out that the internet “was created by the government.” Monday Gordon Crovitz wrote a column arguing that this was an “urban legend,” and that the internet “reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government.” Since his column went to print, it has been thoroughly debunked by many experts, including Vint Cerf, Robert Metcalfe, Tim Berners-Lee, and even internet history expert Michael Hilzik, whom Crovitz quotes in his column. Media Matters, summing it up, asks whether the WSJ will issue a correction lest a nation full of Journal readers be left with a falsehood.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 1:00pm
This past week we saw a strong step forward on photographers’ rights in Washington DC: a groundbreaking General Order issued by the DC police chief as part of the settlement of an ACLU lawsuit. This is the latest in the ACLU’s ongoing effort to fight for the rights of photographers—especially the right to record police—in courts (and courts of public opinion) around the country.
By Nathan Freed Wessler, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 12:28pm
This morning a federal judge ruled that the government is free to continue pretending that the contents of State Department diplomatic cables already disclosed by WikiLeaks are secret. The case concerns an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request seeking 23 embassy cables that had been previously released by WikiLeaks, posted online, and widely discussed in the press. The government had responded by releasing redacted versions of 11 cables and withholding the other 12 in full.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:30pm
The New York Times and Propublica jointlypublished an editorial last week entitled, “That’s Not My Phone, It’s My Tracker.” The authors review the sorry state of cell phone location privacy, raise and dismiss privacy-protecting options such as regularly removing the battery, or living without a phone, and conclude that what we should fight back linguistically at least, by calling these devices “trackers” rather than phones.
By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:00pm
Is the FBI attaching GPS devices to cars, boats and planes and tracking them without a warrant? Even in the wake of the Supreme Court’s January decision in United States v. Jones, holding that attaching a GPS device to a car is covered by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures, we don’t know for certain. That’s why today we filed a Freedom of Information Act request for two memos the FBI has prepared setting out its guidance on the Jones decision.
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.
