Frank Askin, who is a professor of law and director of the Constitutional Litigation Clinic at Rutgers Law School-Newark, writes: Twenty-five years ago, Congress passed and President Gerald Ford signed the Federal Privacy Act. In an effort to end the abuses committed by the FBI against anti-war and civil rights activists that director J. Edgar…
Category: U.S.
DOJ takes swipe at EFF over encryption passphrases
Declan McCullagh reports: The U.S. Department of Justice took a thinly veiled swipe at an online civil liberties group that’s arguing a Colorado woman can’t be forced to decrypt her laptop for police inspection. In a legal brief filed yesterday in what is likely to be a precedent-setting case, the Justice Department claimed that the…
Wyden and Udall Call for Informed Debate of Domestic Surveillance Law
The following press release was issued by Senator Ron Wyden on July 14: Congress has until late 2012 to extend the FISA Amendments Act of 2008’s expiring new authorities and U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Col.) say Congress should use the time to thoroughly consider how the law has been interpreted and implemented. In a letter…
The FBI’s Next Generation Identification: Bigger and Faster but Much Worse for Privacy
Jennifer Lynch writes: This week, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and several other organizations released documentsfrom a FOIA lawsuit that expose the concerted efforts of the FBI and DHS to build a massive database of personal and biometric information. This database, called “Next Generation Identification” (NGI), has been in the works for several years now. However, the documents CCR posted show…