By Alexander Abdo, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 5:14pm
A few days ago, we highlighted the drastic privacy implications of new guidelines issued to govern data-mining by the National Counterterrorism Center (“NCTC”). Yesterday, we testified to Congress about the problems with the guidelines, and we filed three Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) requests to learn more about how the guidelines will affect the privacy of millions of Americans.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:42pm
I recently came across a very nice essay on “The Stupidity of Computers” by David Auerbach, which is really much more interesting than that truism of a headline might suggest.
Auerbach starts with the observation that computers “are the undisputed chess champions of the world, but they can’t understand a simple English conversation.” The point is a commonplace, almost clichéd one—but Auerbach quickly builds on it, slowly moving to a stunning punch line of a thesis that is thought-provoking and fresh.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:24pm
Yesterday I posted about the debate over profiling Muslims at the airport, and how Bruce Schneier persuasively argued that the concept, which seems so intuitively sensible to so many Americans, is a terrible idea even just from a security point of view. He also commented on the other, less tangible costs that such a scheme would impose, such as the alienation of Muslims from American life, and the corruption of our values.
By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:00pm
Buried on page A25 of Thursday’s New York Times is a tiny story on what’s likely to become a big problem after the recent horrific mass shooting. According to the report, top intelligence officials in the New York City Police Department met on Thursday to explore ways to identify “deranged” shooters before any attack. One of these tactics would involve “creating an algorithm” to identify keywords in online public sources indicative of an impending incident. In other words, they seek to build an algorithm to constantly monitor Facebook and Twitter for terms like “shoot” or “kill.”
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 3:18pm
British Airways made headlines in Britain last week with reports that it is planning to do internet searches on customers in order to provide them with a “personal touch.” As a BA spokesperson explained,
We’re essentially trying to recreate the feeling of recognition you get in a favourite restaurant when you’re welcomed there, but in our case it will be delivered by thousands of staff to millions of customers. This is just the start—the system has a myriad of possibilities for the future.
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.)
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:40pm
There has been some discussion lately of whether the output of computer algorithms should be considered protected free speech, as Tim Wu discussed in an op-ed and my colleague Gabe Rottman addressed in a blog post in response.
By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:34pm
The New York Times Sunday Review included a striking op ed suggesting that universities could one day deploy software to analyze students’ internet usage for the purpose of assessing their mental health. The writers, Sriram Chellappan and Raghavendra Kotikalapudi, support their argument by explaining that they conducted a study on university students that demonstrated a correlation between depression and certain patterns of internet usage (for example, “very high e-mail usage”). The study involved screening 216 students at Missouri University of Science and Technology for depression and then having “the university’s information technology department provide us with campus Internet usage data for our participants . . . . This didn’t mean snooping on what the students were looking at or whom they were e-mailing; it merely meant monitoring how they were using the Internet” (so, for example, if they were surfing the web, checking email, using p2p programs, etc.).
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:47pm
A roundup of some items that caught our eye recently, but we haven’t had a chance to write about.
San Francisco’s MUNI train system is installing new “intelligent” cameras that will track and monitor commuters, raising an alarm when it spots “anomalous activities,” which it will identify by learning over time what is “normal.” It always surprises me when cutting-edge surveillance technologies are introduced in the Bay Area (see BART, phone cutoffs in, and bar cameras). Don’t people know that Northern California is home to perhaps the most tech-savvy and privacy-aware population in the country?
