Mara Hvistendahl reports: The killing of George Floyd last May sparked renewed scrutiny of data-driven policing. As protests raged around the world, 1,400 researchers signed an open letter calling on their colleagues to stop collaborating with police on algorithms, and cities like Santa Cruz, New Orleans, and Oakland variously banned predictive policing, facial recognition, and voice recognition. But elsewhere, police chiefs worked to…
Category: U.S.
Police Say They Can Use Facial Recognition, Despite Bans
Alfred Ng reports: Mere hours after supporters of former president Donald Trump forced their way into the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, sleuths, both amateur and professional, took up the task of combing through the voluminous videos and photos on social media to identify rioters. Facial recognition technology—long reviled by police reform advocates as inaccurate…
Immigration lawyer sues over seizure of his cellphone at airport
Debra Cassens Weiss reports: Texas immigration lawyer Adam A. Malik has sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for seizing and retaining his iPhone when he returned to the United States from a trip to Costa Rica. Malik’s Jan. 25 lawsuit says the government seized his phone and searched the contents absent reasonable suspicion that it contained…
First appellate-court ruling on COVID-19 travel restrictions
From Papers, Please!: Last week, the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston issued the first ruling by a Federal Federal appellate court concerning restrictions on the right to travel imposed on the basis of the COVID-19 pandemic. There have been other Federal District Court rulings on COVID-19 travel restrictions, as we have reported previously. But so far…