By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:22am
In an effort to rein in overreaching law enforcement practices, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) yesterday re-introduced the GPS Act, which would require a warrant for location tracking and create a critical check on the growing use of these invasive searches.
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 12:58pm
Automatic license plate readers don’t pose much of a threat to our privacy if there aren’t very many of them. Like surveillance cameras, they really only become a problem when the data they collect are situated in a broader context of pervasive monitoring. One data point showing that your car drove past a stationary license plate reader on one highway doesn’t tell the government very much. But the data points begin to pile up when the surveillance cameras and license plate readers are on every street corner and police cruiser. And absent commonsense limits, that means police and prosecutors (and anyone else who gets at the database) can map your movements with the click of a button.
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 3:58pm
The DEA wants to capture the license plates of all vehicles traveling along Interstate 15 in Utah, and store that data for two years at their facility in Northern Virginia. And, as a DEA official told Utah legislators at a hearing this week (attended by ACLU of Utah staff and covered in localmedia), these scanners are already in place on “drug trafficking corridors” in California and Texas and are being considered for Arizona as well. The agency is also collecting plate data from unspecified other sources and sharing it with over ten thousand law enforcement agencies around the nation.
The IACP is to be applauded for addressing this issue, and for issuing recommendations that are quite strong in some areas. Based on what the chiefs support, it should now be seen as a broad consensus and starting point for further conversation that:
Maryland may be positioned to lead the nation in tracking the location and movements of innocent people through Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs). That is why the ACLU of Maryland joined with ACLU affiliates in 38 other states to file public records requests seeking information about the law enforcement collection and retention of ALPR data. Maryland seems to be (or claims to be) one of the national leaders in the troubling centralized aggregation and storage of ALPR data, which raises significant privacy concerns.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:56am
The ACLU of Michigan recently put out an interesting report on surveillance cameras. Like other ACLU reports on cameras (such as those by our affiliates in Illinois and Northern California, and the materials on our national site) it summarizes the policy arguments against cameras. But it also focuses on a uniquely disturbing application of surveillance cameras: their deployment in residential neighborhoods.
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 2:29pm
This summer ACLU affiliates all around the country filed open-records requests seeking information about how government agencies are using automated license plate readers. One set of records, released this week to the ACLU of Massachusetts by the police department here in Boston, provides a snapshot of the data-collection practices that are taking place around the nation.
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:00am
While Congress has been considering the idea of regulating domestic drone use for some time, yesterday kicked off the debate in earnest when Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) called a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee on "The Future of Drones in America: Law Enforcement and Privacy." Considering everything the committee has on its plate right now—from immigration reform to gun regulations—the fact that the senators prioritized this hearing underscores how important and timely they believe the issue is, and how much impact drones have had on the American psyche.
By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 1:02pm
A recent cell phone tracking case from New York is both a win and loss for privacy. In People v. Moorer, police officers submitted an emergency or “exigent circumstances” request to a phone company asking it to ping (locate) a cell phone—but the court concluded that the circumstances were not exigent at all. The Stored Communications Act (18 USC 2702) permits the voluntary disclosure (without any kind of court order) of customer records to the government, but only if “the provider, in good faith, believes that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure without delay of information relating to the emergency.”
