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.
Yesterday, we filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Court in a case called United States Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, opposing the so-called "Anti-Prostitution Pledge." The Pledge is a requirement that public health organizations who wish government funding for their work combatting AIDS and other diseases make a formal statement "opposing prostitution."
By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:14pm
I grew up in a non-Nintendo household, and so was weaned on PC games. One of my favorites was the mayor-simulator SimCity. Launched in 1989, the addictive and soon-to-be venerable title became the first name in sleepless nights for kids with limited athletic ability.
After almost a decade, Electronic Arts released a new SimCity title last week, which has drawn critical praise for the game itself and widespread condemnation for extensive EA infrastructure issues that are preventing many purchasers of the game from playing (Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe even weighed with some colorful criticism). You see, SimCity requires a persistent broadband connection to the internet, even when playing single player, and the game's servers are having difficulty handling the load. (I should note that EA claims the always-on feature is integral to the game, though many believe it is simply a form of digital rights management, or "DRM," put in place to prevent copyright infringement and piracy.)
By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 1:55pm
Nestled away in the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 (VAWA 2013), which was signed last week by President Obama and is otherwise a very good law, exists a provision that may significantly broaden the already overly expansive federal stalking law.
The original statute, interestingly enough, was the law Paula Broadwell was suspected of violating when the FBI investigation uncovered the Petraeus affair last year, which I wrote about here. Right now, the statute covers two different types of conduct.
By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU & Emma Andersson, Criminal Law Reform Project at 2:59pm
Keene, New Hampshire has a population of 23,409, except during the months of July and August when campers flock in for the summer. Keene's violent crime index? 134.4, compared to a national average of 213.6. Most common crime? Theft. Good thing the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) gave Keene money to buy a BearCat, an armored counter-attack vehicle. What is Keene using its BearCat for? Good question.
By Alex Berger, Legislative Assistant, ACLU at 3:29pm
I, like most Americans, watched in horror as the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School unfurled last December. As a former elementary school teacher, I could not stop seeing my former students as possible victims, and I was angry, confused, and eager for change to prevent another incident like this one.
Since the shooting, there’s been a lot of discussion about how to keep kids safe and how to prevent more violence. The tragedy in Newtown has sparked a national conversation about guns, mental illness, violence in the media and school safety, and over the past several weeks, there have been a number of Congressional hearings on these issues. In fact, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing Wednesday on a proposed assault weapons ban and the House Education and Workforce Committee will meet later this week for a hearing on school safety. Restricting access to certain types of firearms is one thing. But while some well-meaning policymakers might assume that putting more police in schools will make students safer, experience demonstrates otherwise. Censoring violent media or stigmatizing those with a mental illness as unusually violent won’t fix the problem either.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:06am
The PBS series NOVA, “Rise of the Drones,” recently aired a segment detailing the capabilities of a powerful aerial surveillance system known as ARGUS-IS, which is basically a super-high, 1.8 gigapixel resolution camera that can be mounted on a drone. As demonstrated in this clip, the system is capable of high-resolution monitoring and recording of an entire city. (The clip was written about in DefenseTech and in Slate.)
In the clip, the developer explains how the technology (which he also refers to with the apt name “Wide Area Persistent Stare”) is “equivalent to having up to a hundred Predators look at an area the size of a medium-sized city at once.”
On January 11, 2013, facing decades in prison on trumped up charges, my partner, Aaron Swartz, made the tragic choice to take his own life. He was only 26.
Aaron's supposed crime? He was accused of checking out too many articles (4.8 million), too fast, from an online academic library called JSTOR, to which he had authorized access. He never used or distributed the articles and later returned them. For that, he faced 35 years behind bars and endured two years of relentless persecution.
