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Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance

Commentary

Commentary

We Need Answers About the CIA’s Mass Surveillance

The Central Intelligence Agency has been collecting American’s private data without any oversight or even the minimal legal safeguards that apply to the NSA and FBI, an unconstitutional affront to our civil liberties. According to a declassified report released yesterday by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), the...

The angular outline of three faces as a computer might see them, colored like a rainbow

Victory! ID.me to Drop Facial Recognition Requirement for Government Services

First, the Internal Revenue Service reversed course from its recent announcement that it was partnering with ID.me, a third-party identity verification service, to use facial recognition for verification of users managing many aspects of their taxes online. Now, ID.me—which provides identity verification services for dozens of government agencies—says...

Send Surveillance Robot Dogs to the Pound, Not the Border

On February 1, 2022, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, the official research and development arm of the agency, released a cutesy press release about how robotic dogs made in collaboration with Ghost Robotics are “one step closer” to deployment on the U.S.-Mexico border. Covered...

UN Cybercrime Treaty - Civil Society Letter

Letter to the UN Ad Hoc Committee to Elaborate a Cybercrime Treaty - Fourth Session

H.E. Ms. Faouzia Boumaiza MebarkiChairpersonAd Hoc Committee to Elaborate a Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communication Technologies for Criminal PurposesYour Excellency: We, the undersigned organizations and academics, work to protect and advance human rights, online and offline. Our collective goal is to ensure that human...

Locational Privacy Urban

In 2021, the Police Took a Page Out of the NSA’s Playbook: 2021 in Review

While dragnet searches were once thought to be just the province of the NSA, they are now easier than ever for domestic law enforcement to conduct as well. This is because of the massive amounts of digital information we share—knowingly or not—with companies and third parties.
2021 numbers in retro stripes against black

Students Are Learning To Resist Surveillance: Year in Review 2021

It’s been a tough year for students - but a good one for resistance. As schools have shuffled students from in-person education to at-home learning and testing, then back again, the lines between “school” and “home” have been blurred. This has made it increasingly difficult for students to protect their...

Competition

Newspapers vs Big Tech: Antitrust Tackles the Problems That Copyright Just Can’t Fix

More than 200 newspapers have filed suit against Google and Facebook (AKA “Meta”), alleging that the tech giants colluded to rig ad markets so that they could misappropriate ad revenues that were properly owed to the publishers. Strip away all the ornamental complexity and it’s obvious that the surveillance...

The logo of the Electronic Frontier Alliance.

Restore the 4th Minnesota: Racking Up Victories in 2021

With the Snowden revelations in 2013 on NSA spying, many who were outraged sought to channel their frustrations first into mobilizing protests against state surveillance, and then into organizing local groups in defense of Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. From this initial mobilization, Restore the Fourth...

Caught in the Net Report

Facebook’s Secret “Dangerous Organizations and Individuals” List Creates Problems for the Company—and Its Users

Along with the trove of "Facebook Papers" recently leaked to press outlets was a document that Facebook has, until now, kept intentionally secret: its list of "Dangerous Organizations and Individuals." This list comprises supposed terrorist groups, hate groups, criminal groups, and individuals associated with each, and is used to filter...

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