On May 9, the Public Safety Committee of the Oakland City Council voted unanimously to approve a proposed “Surveillance and Community Safety Ordinance.” The measure, passed on to the Council by the city’s Privacy Advisory Commission, is modeled on a law enacted in spring 2016 by Santa...

Recent events in Providence, RI demonstrate both how a sustained grassroots campaign can create opportunities for civil rights and civil liberties, and also how quickly those opportunities can be derailed by institutional actors. While the latest City Council decision delayed reform efforts and frustrated community members,...

The FBI is the country’s top law enforcement agency and serves the public, not the president. As defenders of the rule of law, we have deep concerns about President Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey. We disagreed with the director on many issues, including his consistent push for backdoors...

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has proposed a plan to eliminate net neutrality and privacy for broadband subscribers. Of course, those protections are tremendously popular, so Chairman Pai and his allies have been forced to pay lip service to preserving them in “some form.” How do we know it’s...

Intel’s CPUs have another Intel inside.
Since 2008, most of Intel’s chipsets have contained a tiny homunculus computer called the “Management Engine” (ME). The ME is a largely undocumented master controller for your CPU: it works with system firmware during boot and has direct access to system memory,...

Oakland could become the next community in California to adopt an open and rigorous vetting process for police surveillance technology.All too often, government executives unilaterally decide to adopt powerful new surveillance technologies that invade our privacy, chill our free speech, and unfairly burden communities of color. These intrusive and proliferating...