Robyn Greene writes: Last week served as yet another reminder of the threats posed to Americans’ privacy by the post-Patriot Act surveillance state. According to the Department of Justice’s annual report, FISA applications to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in 2012 revealed a continued increase in the FBI’s surveillance of Americans. The report covers…
Category: U.S.
EFF and ACLU Sue LA Law-Enforcement Agencies Over License-Plate Reader Records
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California (ACLU-SC) today jointly filed suit against two Los Angeles-area law-enforcement agencies over their failure to produce records related to the use of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). Mounted on squad cars and telephone poles, these sophisticated camera systems read license plates…
Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
Glenn Greenwald’s piece in The Guardian is your must-read for this weekend. Here’s a snippet: On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between [Katherine Russell and her husband, deceased bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev]. He quite clearly insisted…
NY: Walcott defends plan to release student records to private biz
Paula Katinas reports: Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott defended a controversial plan to allow private businesses to get a look at information about public school students, telling a town hall audience in Bensonhurst that pupil’s privacy would not be violated. Read more on the Brooklyn Eagle. The fact that the schools will be providing “names, addresses, test…