Federal Study Acknowledges Failures in Police Surveillance Oversight For years researchers have called out the Wiretap Report for being outdated and incomplete By: Alfred Ng There are major flaws in how the federal government monitors police surveillance of Americans, a new government report found, representing the first time the federal court system has acknowledged its…
Category: U.S.
This Is Not the Privacy Bill You’re Looking For
Hayley Tsukayama writes: Lawmakers looking for a starting place on privacy legislation should pass on The Uniform Law Commission’s Uniform Personal Data Protection Act (UPDPA). The Uniform Law Commission (ULC) seeks to write model legislation that can be adopted in state legislatures across the country to set national standards. Sadly, the ULC has fumbled its consumer privacy…
The Worrying Expansion of the Social Media Surveillance-Industrial Complex
Sinclair Cook and Michael DelRossi are doing a deeper dive into the proliferation of social media surveillance tools, with a special focus on their use by government agencies. They write, in part: That’s why we are submitting FOIA requests to CID and the FBI today. CID has contracted for Clearview AI and acknowledged its use publicly, but how and…
Murder defendant challenges police use of ‘tower dump’
Shira Schoenberg reports: In 2018, law enforcement officers were investigating five armed robberies and a sixth attempt in Dorchester, Mattapan, and Canton, one of which led to a fatal shooting. The police believed the same perpetrator, with a getaway driver, committed all the robberies, but they didn’t have a suspect. So they obtained search warrants for cell phone data from the towers closest to the robberies,…