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.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:37pm
The NSA is refusing to tell two U.S. Senators how many Americans the agency has eavesdropped upon. According to a letter obtained by Wired, the NSA claims that “dedicating sufficient additional resources” to gather that information “would likely impede the NSA’s mission.” (For all the billions that the NSA spends, they cannot spare the money to answer a key civil liberties oversight question posed by elected civilian officials? Shameful.)
The Court held 9-0 that the government violated the Fourth Amendment when it placed a GPS tracking device to Antoine Jones's car to track his movements for a month.
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 12:58pm
Automatic license plate readers don’t pose much of a threat to our privacy if there aren’t very many of them. Like surveillance cameras, they really only become a problem when the data they collect are situated in a broader context of pervasive monitoring. One data point showing that your car drove past a stationary license plate reader on one highway doesn’t tell the government very much. But the data points begin to pile up when the surveillance cameras and license plate readers are on every street corner and police cruiser. And absent commonsense limits, that means police and prosecutors (and anyone else who gets at the database) can map your movements with the click of a button.
The ACLU welcomed the bill summary released late last night by a bipartisan group of key senators – ‘the Gang of 8', and we eagerly await the introduction of complete bill text, expected later today.
For over 90 years the ACLU has defended the rights of all Americans, whether born in this country or somewhere else, because the Constitution protects the civil liberties and civil rights of all people. We will continue to serve in this critical role as the debate over the immigration reform bill begins. Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU, said:
By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:05pm
On Monday the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision protecting privacy in the digital age. In U.S. v. Jones, a unanimous Supreme Court held that the police and FBI violated the Fourth Amendment when they attached a GPS device to Antoine Jones’s car and tracked his movements for 28 days. While the case turned on the fact that the government physically placed a GPS device on Mr. Jones’s car, the implications are far broader. A majority of the justices acknowledged that advancing technology, like cell phone tracking, gives the government unprecedented ability to collect, store, and analyze an enormous amount of information about our private lives.
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 Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:03pm
I was at a Target store recently and threw a bottle of wine in my cart to bring as a gift to a party. Later, when I got to the register, the cashier asked to see my ID. That in itself was silly, because it’s safe to say I’m a few years past the point where anyone might mistake me for someone under 21. But whatever; alcohol age-enforcement has gotten bureaucratic beyond all reason.
I held the ID up for her to see. Before I could react, she took my license from my fingers, held it up to a scanner, and BEEP!
