By Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:20am
We've written extensively about CISPA over the last year, but since the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is set to mark the bill up next week, and the full House to vote on it the week after that, we're dissecting its shortcomings. Information sharing isn't offensive per se; it's really a question of what can be shared, with whom, and what corporations and government agencies can do with it. Yesterday we told you what could be shared (read: your personally identifiable information) and today we discuss where that information ends up.
By Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:05am
We've written extensively about CISPA over the last year, but since the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is set to mark the bill up next week, and the full House to vote on it the week after that, we're posting in more depth about its shortcomings. Information sharing isn't offensive per se; it's really a question of what can be shared, with whom, and what corporations and government agencies can do with it. First up:
By Alexander Abdo, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 10:23am
Update (5/7/2013): CIA Director John Brennan has replaced the acting head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, who is also the subject of this blog post. This important news hopefully signals Brennan’s commitment to enforcing the letter and spirit of President Obama's executive order banning the use of torture, abuse, and secret prisons.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit recently ruled that the Central Intelligence Agency may no longer refuse to acknowledge something that everyone knows to be true: the agency has "an interest" in the use of drones to carry out targeted killings. The CIA is unaccustomed to courts rejecting its secrecy claims, but in asking the courts to pretend that the agency might have no connection whatsoever to the targeted killing program, the agency dramatically overreached. Unsurprisingly, the appeals court was unwilling to give its "imprimatur to a fiction of deniability that no reasonable person would regard as plausible."
By Robyn Greene, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:28am
Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) made the argument last week that the privacy community’s significant concerns with CISPA, the privacy-busting cybersecurity bill, don’t stem from actual problems with the bill language, but rather from a misunderstanding of the bill itself. Speaking on behalf of himself and his co-sponsor, Representative Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), he told The Hill, “We feel that the bill clearly deals with privacy, that the checks and balances are there, but [we] know there's still a perception and we're still trying to deal with that.”
By Linda Lye, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California at 11:06am
(Update below)
A Justice Department document obtained by the ACLU of Northern California shows that federal investigators were routinely using a sophisticated cell phone tracking tool known as a "stingray," but hiding that fact from federal magistrate judges when asking for permission to do so.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:25pm
How domestic drones will affect our privacy depends on how the technology is used and deployed. And that depends on a lot of factors. Technologies never exist in isolation—their impact on society is always the result of interactions between the technology's potential, existing institutions and interests, and the law, architecture, and culture around them. We should put good privacy protections in place no matter what, but as drone technology unfolds, here are some of the factors that could influence the size and scope of their deployment within the United States:
