By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:42pm
CNET’s Declan McCullaugh reported Friday that the CALEA II proposal is alive and well within the Justice Department. This is a proposal to radically expand the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, a law passed in the 1990s that requires the phone companies to affirmatively design their systems so that law enforcement can eavesdrop on them. The new proposal would expand that requirement from the telephone system to computer programs such as those that run social-networking sites, VoIP, instant messaging, and webmail.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:53pm
A quick note to our New York City-area readers: the ACLU's Catherine Crump, author Ken MacLeod, Cato's Julian Sanchez and others will be appearing at Cooper Union this Saturday for a panel on "Life in the Panopticon: Thoughts on Freedom in an Era of Pervasive Surveillance.” The panel is sponsored by the ACLU and Cooper Union as part of the PEN American Center’s Festival of International Literature.
A week ago, on a Friday afternoon, a reporter called us with news that the Seattle Police Department (SPD) had received permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to employ two unmanned aerial drones it had purchased. The news came not from city officials, but via the fruits of a public records request by our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:48pm
In my post earlier today on the nightmare scenario for drones, I described various technological improvements that are likely to happen, which could enable pervasive drone surveillance. One key avenue of technology progress I didn’t mention is the development of quieter drones.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:05pm
In our drones report, we discuss the coming onslaught of domestic drones and the weak state of the privacy laws that should protect us, and we outline our recommendations for protections that Congress and local governments should put in place.
But if nothing is done, how might things go? Let’s take a look at how police drone use could unfold:
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:54pm
The American Library Association has created an excellent public education resource on the privacy issues facing our society – a web site called privacyrevolution.org.
The ALA has long been a staunch defender of privacy and free speech, and a frequent ally of the ACLU on those issues. In fact, libraries have been the scene of many free speech battles in recent years. If you think about it, librarians are our natural allies since libraries exemplify the democratic ideal of citizens’ access to information, while protecting those citizens’ right to keep their inquiries and interests private. As the site explains:
By Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 8:37am
Last night the House of Representatives passed HR 3523, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA. We’ve written about the many privacy problems with this bill, but here I would like to focus on one of its biggest and most fundamental flaws: it empowers the military, including agencies like the NSA, to collect the internet records of Americans’ everyday internet use.
CISPA is a dangerously overbroad bill that would allow companies to share our private and sensitive information with the government without a warrant and without proper oversight.
By Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:12am
This week is “Cybersecurity Week” in the House of Representatives, and members will vote on a handful of bills intended to protect cybersecurity — the ability to prevent and respond to threats from foreign governments, terrorists and criminals over the Internet. Some of the bills are civil-liberties-neutral but, as usual when addressing a security issue, Congress is considering a bill that overreaches — this time by allowing companies to share private and sensitive information with the government without a warrant and without much oversight.
