Friday, December 27

Tag: surveillance

Britain Admits Defeat in Controversial Online Safety Bill
6Sep By adminNo Comments
Technology

Britain Admits Defeat in Controversial Online Safety Bill

Tech companies and privacy activists are claiming victory after an eleventh-hour concession by the British government in a long-running battle over end-to-end encryption.The so-called “spy clause” in the UK’s Online Safety Bill, which experts argued would have made end-to-end encryption all but impossible in the country, will no longer be enforced after the government admitted the technology to securely scan encrypted messages for signs of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, without compromising users’ privacy, doesn’t yet exist. Secure messaging services, including WhatsApp and Signal, had threatened to pull out of the UK if the bill was passed.“It’s absolutely a victory,” says Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, which operates the Signal messaging service. Whittake...
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The NSA Is Lobbying Congress to Save a Phone Surveillance ‘Loophole’
28Jul By adminNo Comments
Technology

The NSA Is Lobbying Congress to Save a Phone Surveillance ‘Loophole’

The US Supreme Court has previously ordered the government to obtain search warrants before seeking information that may “chronicle a person’s past movements through the record of his cell phone signals.” In the landmark Carpenter v. United States decision, the court found that advancements in wireless technology had effectively outpaced people’s ability to reasonably appreciate the extent to which their private lives are exposed.A prior ruling had held that Americans could not reasonably expect privacy in all cases while also voluntarily providing companies with stores of information about themselves. But in 2018 the court refused to extend that thinking to what it called a “new phenomenon”: wireless data that may be “effortlessly compiled” and the emergence of technologies capable of gr...
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NYPD Body Cam Data Shows the Scale of Violence Against Protesters
21Jul By adminNo Comments
Technology

NYPD Body Cam Data Shows the Scale of Violence Against Protesters

Beaten, blinded by pepper spray, corralled like animals, and indiscriminately arrested for marching against police violence and racial injustice. Such was the fate hundreds of people suffered at the hands of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers in late May and early June of 2020, as thousands of people across the United States protested the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.Three years later, a class action lawsuit has resulted in the City of New York agreeing to pay $9,950 each to some 1,380 protesters as part of a settlement. Costing taxpayers more than $13 million, it’s the largest amount paid to protesters in US history, according to the legal team behind the class action suit.Lawyers secured the settlement with the aid of a little-known tool that helped the...
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Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act Goes Back to Congress
18Jul By adminNo Comments
Technology

Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act Goes Back to Congress

Other lawmakers are alarmed by the FBI’s disclosure of having purchased location information derived from people’s cell phones. During a hearing in March, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, told senators that the bureau had “previously—as in the past—purchased some such information for a specific national security pilot project.”Americans have a reasonable expectation of privacy, the US Supreme Court says, when it comes to certain digital information, including that which could reveal “the whole of their physical movements.” Such data—which the court describes as “detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled”—need not be GPS-precise merely to justify a warrant. Nevertheless, the government has widely adopted the view that the Fourth Amendment does not apply when that same data is av...
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US Spies Are Buying Americans’ Private Data. Congress Has a Chance to Stop It
5Jul By adminNo Comments
Technology

US Spies Are Buying Americans’ Private Data. Congress Has a Chance to Stop It

A “must-pass” defense bill wending its way through the United States House of Representatives may be amended to abolish the government practice of buying information on Americans that the country’s highest court has said police need a warrant to seize. Though it’s far too early to assess the odds of the legislation surviving the coming months of debate, it’s currently one of the relatively few amendments to garner support from both Republican and Democratic members. Introduction of the amendment follows a report declassified by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—the nation’s top spy—which last month revealed that intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been buying up data on Americans that the government’s own experts described as “the same type” of information the...
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