Free Future
07/26/2012
Photographers' Rights

Sympathizing With The Police (Up to a Point) On Photography

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.

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07/24/2012
Photographers' Rights

Photographing Police: What Happens When the Police Think Your Phone Holds Evidence of a Crime?

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:27am

The Washington, DC chief of police on Friday issued a new “General Order” to members of the police department on “Video Recording, Photographing, and Audio Recording of Metropolitan Police Department Members by the Public.” The order, which was part of the settlement of an ACLU lawsuit, includes some very interesting, groundbreaking provisions.

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02/27/2013
Domestic Drones

New Documents Reveal U.S. Marshals’ Drones Experiment, Underscoring Need for Government Transparency

By Naomi Gilens, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 8:12am

The use of surveillance drones is growing rapidly in the United States...

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02/26/2013
Cell Phones & Smartphones

New Document Sheds Light on Government’s Ability to Search iPhones

By Chris Soghoian, Principal Technologist and Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project & Naomi Gilens, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 10:11am

Cell phone searches are a common law enforcement tool, but up until now, the public has largely been in the dark regarding how much sensitive information the government can get with this invasive surveillance technique. A document submitted to court in connection with a drug investigation, which we recently discovered, provides a rare inventory of the types of data that federal agents are able to obtain from a seized iPhone using advanced forensic analysis tools. The list, available here, starkly demonstrates just how invasive cell phone searches are—and why law enforcement should be required to obtain a warrant before conducting them.

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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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01/14/2013
Location Tracking

If It’s Reasonable in Denver: Lessons in Location Tracking from Colorado

By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 12:00am

 

In April, ACLU of Colorado filed public records requests seeking to learn about their local law enforcement agencies’ policies, procedures, and practices for tracking cell phones, bringing the total count of ACLU-filed cell phone location tracking public records requests to over 400. (We’ve written about what we’ve learned nationwide here, here, here, here, and here, and our findings were featured in a front page story in the New York Times in April). What Colorado learned is particularly interesting because a remarkable number of law enforcement agencies in Colorado are getting probable cause warrants before tracking cell phone location information—Arvada, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Denver, and El Paso County always get warrants in investigative circumstances—and because Denver’s practices pretty much follow existing legislative proposals, proving these bills totally workable.

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01/11/2013
TSA

TSA Once Again Considering Using Commercial Data To Profile Passengers

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:09am

The TSA has issued a “Market Research Announcement” in which the agency expresses a desire to expand its Pre-Check whitelist program by allowing private companies to carry out risk analysis of Americans that would determine whether they are “trusted” enough to participate in the trusted traveler program. This would be a major step toward turning the agency’s Pre-Check whitelist into the insidious kind of passenger profiling system that was proposed under the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11, and a confirmation of our longstanding warnings that the logic of the risk-assessment approach to security will drive the government toward the use of more and more data on individuals. It would be the most significant of the new initiatives the TSA is looking at this year.

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12/03/2012
Artificial Intelligence

Telemarketing Calls and the Blurring Human-Computer Divide

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 7:14pm

I’ve written before about how talking on the phone to a telemarketer or customer-service agent is often more like dealing with a computer than a human being. Even though the person on the other end is human, their discretion is often tightly circumscribed by the computer in front of them—often including the words they say, which are confined to computer-generated scripts. I got a political telemarketing call recently that reshaped my understanding of this dynamic in very interesting ways and raised some new questions in my mind.

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11/30/2012
TSA

The TSA’s First 11 Years

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:21pm

November 25 marked the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Homeland Security Act, which created the sprawling Department of Homeland Security. Included in this new behemoth agency was another agency that had been created a year earlier, the Transportation Security Administration. It’s worth taking a look back at the short history of this agency.

The first and biggest conclusion we can reach is that the vast bulk of the increased security that we’ve obtained since 9/11 has been due to two factors: the securing of airplane cockpit doors, and the fact that no planeload of passengers in a hijacked aircraft will ever again sit back placidly and wait to land in Cuba or whatever. We’ve been saying this for years and it remains true. It’s hard to believe in light of all that has followed, but a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the ACLU issued a press release with the headline, “ACLU Applauds Sensible Scope of Bush Airport Security Plan.” What we were reacting to was a set of commonsense steps the administration had taken such as increased baggage screening and securing those cockpit doors.

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11/21/2012
Internet Free Expression

Hamas, Twitter and the First Amendment

By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:25pm

With one major exception, the Roberts Court has been quite protective of unpopular (and even revolting) speech under the First Amendment. That exception, however, is a doozy. It involves a statute criminalizing “material support” for terrorism, and the danger of the law was on stark display this week with reports of a petition to hold Twitter responsible for allowing Hamas to use the service.

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