By Aden Fine, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:07pm
A New York criminal court judge has issued a decision denying Twitter’s motion to quash a court order requiring it to produce information about one of its users pursuant to a subpoena that the District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan issued in connection with the prosecution of an Occupy Wall Street protester.
By Alexander Abdo, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 2:27pm
Google's transparency report reveals that the U.S. government asked Google for data on its users 6,321 times during the second half of 2011—a 75% increase from two years ago.
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?
By Sarah Roberts, Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:39pm
Today the ACLU filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to force the government to disclose information about the circumstances in which it accesses the contents of Americans’ private electronic communications without obtaining a warrant based upon probable cause. Such communications can include email, text messaging, and private conversations on social networks. While there is reason to believe this practice is widespread, there is much we don’t know about this government eavesdropping: when it happens, how often it’s done, who they’re watching, how long they monitor these communications, and what policies they have established regarding this monitoring. Through the lawsuit filed today, we hope to find out much more.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:28am
Tuesday I posted about the controversy over Do Not Track and the advertising industry’s objections to pro-privacy default settings. One thing I didn’t comment on was that the Interactive Advertising Bureau trotted out the usual argument against any steps to prevent the full force and fury of modern American capitalism from figuring out how to spy on us most thoroughly:
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:10pm
Microsoft’s welcome announcement that it plans to leave a “Do Not Track” flag turned on by default for its users has been very revealing in a number of respects. It also risks distracting from more important issues in the debate over commercial online surveillance.
By Aden Fine, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:52pm
We filed a friend-of-the-court brief today in New York state court in support of Twitter’s efforts to protect the constitutional rights of one of its users. As we posted earlier this month, Twitter took a great step to defend its users’ rights by filing a motion to quash a subpoena that the District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan issued in connection with the prosecution of an Occupy Wall Street protester.
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.
By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 6:06pm
Today Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Representative Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and a number of cosponsors filed the Password Protection Act of 2012 in the Senate and House to prevent employers from strong-arming employers and job applicants into sharing information from their personal social networking accounts. It’s an important idea and one that we’ve been pushing for more than a year, but the bill itself doesn’t go as far as we think it should.
