Deeplinks Blog posts about Transparency
While California may be home to some of the most aggressively forward-thinking tech companies in the world, that enthusiasm for innovation hasn’t carried over to the public sector. State and local governments have been frustratingly slow to make public data available online. There hasn’t been anything close to a statewide standard, leaving individual agencies to voluntarily develop open data policies, often in an inconsistent and piecemeal fashion, or not at all.
That would change if the California legislature passes two bills, S.B. 573 and S.B. 272, which would put state and local government bodies respectively on the path to open data.
Digital liberties groups across the country have both celebrated and criticized the recent passage of the USA Freedom Act. Here at EFF, we did a little bit of both. While USA Freedom will undoubtedly impact the court cases challenging the NSA’s mass surveillance, the full scope of this law and how the courts and even the government will interpret it remains unclear.
EFF, along with eight other consumer-focused privacy advocacy organizations has backed out of the National Telecommunications Information Administration’s multi-stakeholder process to develop a privacy-protective code of conduct for companies using face recognition. After 16 months of active engagement in the process, we decided this week it was no longer an effective use of our resources to continue in a process where companies wouldn’t even agree to the most modest measures to protect privacy.
EFF was joined by ACLU; Center for Democracy & Technology; Center for Digital Democracy; Consumer Action; Consumer Federation of America; Consumer Watchdog; Common Sense Media; and Alvaro M. Bedoya, the executive director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University Law Center.
In her new podcast, Mystery Show, Starlee Kine launches hilariously meandering investigations into the types of quirky, personal mysteries that, while seemingly inconsequential, tend to eat at the edges of a person’s mind. This week, Starlee pursues the question: what’s the story behind the “ILUV911” vanity license plate she once noticed on the back of a Buick during a really long traffic light a few years back?
Here’s where you deserve a spoiler alert. A big one. (You should listen to "Case #4 Vanity Plate" before proceeding.)
Starlee solves her mystery. But, in the process, she also destroys the chief defense made by the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) industry to counter criticisms that ALPR technology violates personal privacy.
Noted eagle eye and EFF Investigative Researcher Dave Maass happened on an interesting item from earlier this week on FedBizOpps, the site for government agencies to post contracting opportunities. The Navy put up a solicitation explaining that the government wants “access to vulnerability intelligence, exploit reports and operational exploit binaries affecting widely used and relied upon commercial software,” including Microsoft, Adobe, Android, Apple, “and all others.” If that weren’t clear enough, the solicitation explains that “the vendor shall provide the government with a proposed list of available vulnerabilities, 0-day or N-day (no older than 6 months old). . . .The government will select from the supplied list and direct development of exploit binaries.”
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