Location Tracking

08/30/2012

SXSW

Two More Days to Vote for ACLU SXSW Panels!

By Ateqah Khaki at 1:22pm

The ACLU is hoping to be at South by SouthWest next March, and we need your help! We’ve submitted four panel pitches (one, two, three and four) for SXSW Interactive, and there are two days left for the public to vote for and comment on the topics we’ve proposed.

08/16/2012

SXSW

Vote for the ACLU’s SXSW Panels!

By Ateqah Khaki at 1:18pm

The South by SouthWest Panel Picker has launched for the 2013 festival, and we need your help!

The ACLU has submitted two panel pitches (one and two) for SXSW Interactive, which will take place March 8-12, 2013 in Austin, Texas. (Wondering why the ACLU is going to SXSW? We work with policymakers, business and community members every day on issues related to privacy, free speech and emerging technology. And as we’ve done for the past several years, we’ll be at SXSW this year to make sure that privacy is on the agenda!)

08/02/2012

Location Tracking

Fighting for Transparency

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.

07/20/2012

Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

Friday Links Roundup

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:30pm

The New York Times and Propublica jointly published 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.

07/18/2012

Location Tracking

ACLU Seeks FBI Guidance Memos on GPS Tracking

By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:00pm

Is the FBI attaching GPS devices to cars, boats and planes and tracking them without a warrant? Even in the wake of the Supreme Court’s January decision in United States v. Jones, holding that attaching a GPS device to a car is covered by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures, we don’t know for certain. That’s why today we filed a Freedom of Information Act request for two memos the FBI has prepared setting out its guidance on the Jones decision.

07/16/2012

Location Tracking

ACLU Files Brief Opposing Warrantless GPS Searches

By Andrew Crocker, ACLU Intern / Harvard Law School Class of 2013 at 11:09am

In 2010, the FBI attached a GPS device to the car of a man named Fred Robinson and continuously monitored his whereabouts for nearly two months—all without getting a warrant. Now Robinson is on trial, and on Friday, the ACLU and its affiliate, the ACLU of Eastern Missouri, filed an amicus brief in his case, United States v. Robinson, which raises important Fourth Amendment issues about police use of GPS trackers for surveillance.

07/13/2012

Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

Friday Links Roundup

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.

07/09/2012

Cell Phones & Smartphones

Mobile Phone Surveillance by the Numbers

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.

American Civil Liberties Union