Free Future
04/05/2013
Domestic Drones

Report Details Government’s Ability to Analyze Massive Aerial Surveillance Video Streams

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:15am

Yesterday I wrote about Dayton Ohio’s plan for an aerial surveillance system similar to the “nightmare scenario” ARGUS wide-area surveillance technology. Actually, ARGUS is just the most advanced of a number of such “persistent wide-area surveillance” systems in existence and development. They include Constant Hawk, Angel Fire, Kestrel (used on blimps in Afghanistan), and Gorgon Stare.

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01/15/2013
Facebook

New Facebook Search Means It’s Time to Review Your Privacy Settings (Again)

By Chris Conley, Technology and Civil Liberties Fellow, ACLU of Northern California at 5:08pm

This morning’s media event was Facebook’s announcement of “Graph Search,”...

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07/09/2012
Cell Phones & Smartphones

Mobile Phone Surveillance by the Numbers

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:56am

Wow.  Sometimes one word says it all.  The New York Times reports that in response to letters from Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), mobile phone providers disclosed that they received approximately 1.3 million law enforcement requests for customer records last year alone. What an extraordinary number: more than a million accounts subject to at least some level of law enforcement investigation just in 2011. As we have discussed elsewhere, beyond what is reported by carriers in these letters, there is absolutely no reporting or tracking regarding how these numbers are handled.  

Even more amazing, as you dig into the article and read the underlying letters it becomes clear that this is actually a vast undercount of the number of Americans who have been affected by this tracking.  Sprint disclosed that it received approximately 500,000 subpoenas in 2011 (a subpoena is a written request for information from law enforcement that isn’t reviewed by a judge) and that “each subpoena typically requested subscriber information on multiple subscribers.” In addition, several carriers disclosed that they sometimes provide all the information from a particular cell tower or particular area.   Metro PCS for example charges:

$50 for Cell Tower Dump per tower for a 2 hour period
$100 for an Area Dump (if you know the location but do not know the cell towers that affect the area) for a maximum of 2 cell towers for a 2 hour period per cell tower search

Everyone whose phone has been used by a particular cell tower over a particular time period—likely hundreds or thousands of people—could have their data examined by investigators.  And these dragnet data requests are on the rise.  Verizon estimates that over the last 5 years it has seen an average increase of 15% annually, and T-Mobile reported increases of approximately 12%-16%.  This has also led to at least some possible abuse; T-Mobile disclosed that in the last three years it has referred two inappropriate law enforcement requests to the FBI. 

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01/16/2013
Location Tracking

Justice Department Refuses to Release GPS Tracking Memos

By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:12am

Two key memos outlining the Justice Department’s views about when Americans can be surreptitiously tracked with GPS technology are being kept secret by the department despite a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU to force their release. The FBI’s general counsel discussed the existence of the two memos publicly last year, yet the Justice Department is refusing to release them without huge redactions. (You can see the heavily censored versions sent to the ACLU here and here, and our original FOIA request here.)

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04/25/2012
Data Mining

Eight Problems With “Big Data”

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:06pm

The idea of “Big Data” is in the air. At the South by Southwest Interactive conference last month, it was probably the hot topic, dominating or surfacing in numerous panels, including one on which I spoke, on “Big Data: Privacy Threat or Business Model?”

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04/16/2013
IRS

IRS Says It Will Respect 4th Amendment With Regard to Email, But Questions Remain

By Nathan Freed Wessler, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 4:07pm

With tax day behind us, taxpayers may soon have something else to celebrate from the IRS. In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee today, IRS Acting Commissioner Steven Miller was questioned aggressively about documents released by the ACLU last week that indicate that the IRS does not think it needs a warrant to read all emails and other electronic communications during criminal investigations. Under pressure from senators, Miller agreed to update IRS policy documents within 30 days to state that a warrant is required for access to all emails, regardless of their age.

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02/20/2013
CISPA

Government Doesn’t Need Your Private Info for Cybersecurity—But Members of Congress Still Want It

By Robyn Greene, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 1:33pm

Last Thursday, the House Intelligence Committee held a hearing that focused on...

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01/08/2013
Government Surveillance

US Surveillance Law May Poorly Protect New Text Message Services

By Chris Soghoian, Principal Technologist and Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:44am

Internet-based text message apps are one of the most common means of communicating today. But when it comes to this relatively new technology, surveillance law is behind the times in important ways, and as is so often the case when the law lags technology, our privacy suffers as a result.

Text messages have for some time been a cash cow for the wireless carriers—back in 2007, annual global SMS revenue was estimated to be 60 billion dollars. Charging consumers 25 cents per 140 character text message is a great way to make money, but when those same consumers are already paying for internet connectivity to their smartphones, the market was ripe for disruption. In recent years, a number of internet companies have entered the text message market. In some cases, they have offered low-cost or free SMS services that interoperate with the carriers’ existing SMS system. In other cases, large companies like Facebook, Apple and WhatsApp have offered closed text message services to their smartphone using customers. Often seeking to reduce their monthly telephone bills, millions of consumers have migrated from smartphone text message services provided by the wireless carriers to smartphone text message services provided by internet companies.

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12/20/2012
Video Games

Worst Facts Make Worst Law with Violent Video Games

By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 2:43pm

It’s perfectly understandable that after the tragedy in Newtown, Conn., everyone is casting about for an answer to a singular question: why?

As past is prologue, we shouldn’t be surprised that several members of Congress have settled on media violence as the possible culprit, noting stories that Adam Lanza may have “obsessively” played Starcraft and Call of Duty. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) is reportedly circulating legislation mandating a study on youth exposure to violent video games.

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04/12/2013
Voices on Human Gene Patents

Voices on Human Gene Patents: It's Time to Free Our Genes

By Christopher E. Mason, Assistant Professor of Computational Genomics, Weill Cornell Medical College, Affiliate Fellow, Information Society Project of Yale Law School & Jeffrey Rosenfeld, Assistant Professor of Medicine, New Jersey Medical School at 12:29pm

Even though they’ve been in our families since the dawn of man, our genes do not belong to us. They’ve been claimed by companies that hold patents on the DNA from our cells. Over the past 20 years, at least 41 percent of our genes have become the intellectual property of corporations. These patent claims contradict an intuitive sense that our DNA is no less ours than our lungs or kidneys. More importantly, these patents, covering thousands of human genes, restrict our doctors’ ability to look at our DNA and plan ahead for our medical treatment.

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