By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:28pm
Reports circulated this week that Facebook’s new Timeline was placing private messages into people’s public Timeline displays. Facebook said it was certain that was not happening. According to a statement from Facebook:
Our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users' profile pages. Facebook is satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:55pm
Wired reported last week that the Apple App Store has rejected an app that compiles news reports in order to map overseas U.S. drone strikes, and provide users a pop-up notification whenever a drone strike has been reported.
Apple rejected the app several times, at first citing problems with its functionality, and then telling the developer that the app “contains content that many audiences would find objectionable.”
By Linda Lye, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California at 4:51pm
Today, the ACLU of Northern California went to court in two separate cases with the same goal: shedding light on the government's use of controversial and arguably unconstitutional surveillance techniques.
The ACLU will be out in force at DEFCON – one of the largest annual hacker conventions in the country – later this week and weekend!
We will have a table at the vendor area all weekend (with super awesome ACLU t-shirts for anyone who signs up to become a member!). In addition to trying our hardest not to end of up on the Wall of Sheep, here’s a rundown of what we’ll be up to in Las Vegas.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:30pm
The New York Times and Propublica jointlypublished an editorial last week entitled, “That’s Not My Phone, It’s My Tracker.” The authors review the sorry state of cell phone location privacy, raise and dismiss privacy-protecting options such as regularly removing the battery, or living without a phone, and conclude that what we should fight back linguistically at least, by calling these devices “trackers” rather than phones.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:26pm
Here are some links that have caught our eye recently:
The FBI’s “Next Generation Identification” biometrics database is starting to plan for the inclusion of iris scans. Iris scans raise more issues than some other biometrics (such as fingerprints) because they can be used at a distance without a subject’s participation, permission, or even knowledge. Hand-held iris scanners are being sold to police around the country for identification uses. We were assured in a meeting with the FBI last year that biometric scans in situations such as traffic stops would not be used to enroll individuals into the database, just to check their identity.
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.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:18pm
Privacy researcher Chris Soghoian gave a very nice talk at TEDx recently on “Why Google Won’t Protect You From Big Brother.” He provides a cogent overview and some useful perspective on the relationship between companies and the government, which is something we at the ACLU have been concerned about since our 2004 report on the Surveillance Industrial Complex, and before.
