Eileen Guo reports: The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is looking into ways it might use facial recognition technology to track the identities of migrant children, “down to the infant,” as they age, according to John Boyd, assistant director of the department’s Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM), where a key part of his…
Category: Surveillance
Privacy Protections of the Stored Communications Act Gutted by California Court
Stephanie Pell and Richard Salgado of the Lawfare Institute write: On July 23, the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth District issued a whopper of a decision that looks to upset decades’ long understandings of how users’ data is protected from disclosure by providers under the Stored Communications Act (SCA). It eviscerates the SCA’s prohibitions that prevent communication…
Turning Food Delivery Workers into Spies
PPSA writes: Imagine this scenario: It’s early evening, and you and your special someone are on the couch preparing to binge-watch your favorite streaming show. Ding-dong. You answer the door and, as you hoped, it is the dinner delivery person. He hands you your prepaid, pre-tipped meal and you start to shut the door when…
Federal Appeals Court Finds Geofence Warrants Are “Categorically” Unconstitutional
Andrew Crocker writes: In a major decision on Friday, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” Closely following arguments EFF has made in a number of cases, the court found that geofence warrants constitute the sort of “general, exploratory rummaging” that the drafters of the Fourth Amendment intended to outlaw. EFF…