Deeplinks Blog posts about Transparency
At long last, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced a slew of much-needed policy changes regarding the use of cell-site simulators. Most importantly, starting today all federal law enforcement agencies—and all state and local agencies working with the federal government—will be required to obtain a search warrant supported by probable cause before they are allowed to use cell-site simulators. EFF welcomes these policy changes as long overdue.
Accountability projects that track deleted tweets from politicians and public officials suffered a critical setback this week when Twitter killed their ability to collect that information. This move comes a few months after the service shut down the U.S. version of Politwoops, the best known of these projects, and extends the ban to some 30 other jurisdictions.
Reports today in the New York Times and ProPublica confirm what EFF’s Jewel v. NSA lawsuit has claimed since 2008—that the NSA and AT&T have collaborated to build a domestic surveillance infrastructure, resulting in unconstitutional seizure and search of of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of Americans' Internet communications.
The New York Times has a story out on how San Diego police use mobile facial recognition devices in the field, including potentially on non-consenting residents who aren’t suspected of a crime. One account from a retired firefighter is especially alarming:
Stopped by the police after a dispute with a man he said was a prowler, he was ordered to sit on a curb, he said, while officers took his photo with an iPad and ran it through the same facial recognition software. The officers also used a cotton swab to collect a DNA sample from the inside of his cheek…
“I was thinking, ‘Why are you taking pictures of me, doing this to me?’ ” said Mr. Hanson, 58, who has no criminal record. “I felt like my identity was being stolen. I’m a straight-up, no lie, cheat or steal guy, and I get treated like a criminal.”
In 1991, computer scientists at the University of Cambridge pointed a camera at a coffee machine and programmed it to broadcast images of the pot levels to anyone in their building with a need for caffeine. With that, webcams and live-streaming were born, and now we live in an age of webcasting in college classrooms, teleconferencing and telepresences in the work place, and social lives and media experiences enhanced by services like Google Hangouts and Twitter Periscope.
Despite all those advancements in the commercial, industrial, and academic sectors, our local governments still lag far behind contemporary Internet trends. Sure, many city councils now live-stream their sessions, but the feeds are limited and almost always one-way modes of civic engagement.
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