By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:17pm
One of the problems we have long had with some cities’ red light camera systems is the role of the private sector, which sometimes assumes inherently governmental functions such as deciding who gets a traffic ticket—as well as collecting a slice of the revenue. The Birmingham News recently posted a series on the issue of private companies assuming traditionally governmental functions. In Alabama, private companies have been involved not only with traffic enforcement but also such things as tax collection and auditing and probation administration. In one town this led to what a judge condemned as a “debtor’s prison” and a “judicially sanctioned extortion racket.” As Jim Williams, executive director of the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama, put it, “We expect the private sector to be aggressive. The responsibility to set limits and make rules lies with the government.” Unfortunately, all too often when government makes use of the private sector, it does not structure the deals carefully enough to ensure that the profit motive does not trample rights. And (as I am quoted as saying in the piece) private companies are not subject to checks and balances such as open-records laws that have evolved over time for government. With privatization a continuing craze—and local hunger for revenue at an historic high—we can unfortunately expect to see more of such misguided efforts, especially in the technology area where innovation comes from the private sector.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:13pm
I wrote last week about how the ad industry is going on the attack against Do Not Track. Then yesterday, as the New York Times reported, the Direct Marketing Association kicked off a $1 million public relations campaign to try to persuade policymakers and the public that privacy protections from the data mining industry are not needed. Unfortunately, those who are advocating on behalf of the public do not have $1 million to throw into a counter-campaign. The outcome will be a test of the degree to which money can trump the public good in our political system right now. And that highlights one of the dynamics that it seems to me is at work when it comes to regulating commercial privacy: delay is deadly.
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 3:24pm
Imagine a searchable database that would enable police or federal agents to instantly track everywhere you’ve ever driven in your car, like a “Google search” of your location over a period of months or even years. According to a law enforcement data manager speaking at a 2010 National Institute of Justice conference, that’s where the government is headed.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:16pm
During the Cold War, as I argued last week, the totalitarian governments of the Soviet bloc functioned as a standing warning to Americans of the dangers of unchecked surveillance—lessons that we would do well to remember despite the fall of the Iron Curtain.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:33pm
The advertising industry continues to mount a strong attack on the Do Not Track concept for protecting online privacy. As my colleague Chris Calabrese described last week, the industry threw an “epic hissy fit” (in the words of Ed Bott at ZDNet) over Microsoft’s laudable decision to turn on Do Not Track by default in Internet Explorer.
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 Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 10:05am
Sometimes the constant news on the surveillance front makes me wonder: would it be easier to fight new surveillance programs if the Soviet Union were still around?
On the one hand the Cold War was a bonanza for the military and for our three-letter security agencies, which were invested with a mission of world-historical importance at a time when the nation was truly facing an existential threat (nuclear war). These agencies saw their budgets and powers expand dramatically in ways that were unprecedented in a country that had always held a deep suspicion of government power in general and “standing armies” in particular. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, these institutions faced an existential crisis of their own.
By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:44pm
On Monday an extraordinary letter went out from a who’s who of major corporations claiming a mandate to track all of us on the internet. In tone and substance, it is an amazing, over-the-top screed against efforts to give consumers even modest controls over who watches us as we surf online.
The letter was triggered by Microsoft’s announcement in May that when it ships its new browser, IE 10, the browser’s default setting will be Do Not Track. Microsoft heard the vast preference of its users and is giving them the default setting they want—no tracking of their movements and habits online. Consumers who want to get targeted ads will still be able to do so—and in fact will get a chance to turn that preference on when the program loads. As we said at the time, this is exactly the right decision, a powerful tool for giving back American’s their privacy online.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:56am
The ACLU of Michigan recently put out an interesting report on surveillance cameras. Like other ACLU reports on cameras (such as those by our affiliates in Illinois and Northern California, and the materials on our national site) it summarizes the policy arguments against cameras. But it also focuses on a uniquely disturbing application of surveillance cameras: their deployment in residential neighborhoods.
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.
