By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:37pm
The New York Times has a story today about gunshot location systems, which use microphones installed around a city to detect, and triangulate the location of, gunshots, so that police can be sent to the scene. We have been asked what we think of this technology from time to time since at least 2004.
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.”
By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office & Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 7:44am
Last week Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) and the House of Representatives drew an important line in the sand. Holt offered an amendment to the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations bill to bar any DHS funding for “the purchase, operation, or maintenance of armed unmanned aerial vehicles.” (The amendment was adopted and the bill has passed the House.) While moves to arm domestic drones are widely seen as beyond the pale and have not really been contemplated (with the exception of one sheriff in Texas who mused about mounting less-lethal weapons like rubber bullets on unmanned aircraft), we believe it’s crucial to get ahead of any possible trend.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:42am
Recently I wrote about an ACLU of Michigan report that highlighted the problem of police cameras being installed outside of people’s private homes. Last week I learned from my colleague Doug Bonney of the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri about an even more egregious incident involving video surveillance of a private home in Missouri. Bonney described the situation to me:
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:26pm
Salon has a nice piece on how research shows the difficulty of detecting lies—the impossibility, really—and how people consistently overestimate their ability to do so. And, how people consistently misidentify signs of stress (from a variety of causes) as proof of lying. Of course, an entire TSA program has been built on the premise that people can be trained to detect lies with a reasonable level of certainty.
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 1:46pm
Back in the fall of 2010, I was perusing the Massachusetts state public safety website when I came upon an interesting notice. The state had received nearly a half a million dollars from the federal Department of Transportation for the purchase and distribution of automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) systems for state and local police. And there was one detail there that really surprised me.
By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:51pm
Sen. Al Franken (D- MN) is trying to get some answers to straightforward questions about cell-phone location tracking. Today, using our recent nationwide FOIA as a jumping off point, he sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking them to provide basic information about a practice that, in the words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, “generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”
By Linda Lye, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California at 10:06am
Shortly before next week’s one-year anniversary of the Oakland Police Department’s brutal crackdown on Occupy Oakland, Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern announced that he was seeking funds to purchase a drone to engage in unspecified unmanned aerial surveillance.
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.
