Privacy Matters | Privacy SOS

Police are copying and pasting body parts in face recognition searches

05/17/2019

In two reports published this week, Georgetown University Law School’s Center on Privacy and Technology joins the ACLU of Massachusetts in calling for a moratorium on the government’s use of face surveillance technology, citing alarming new findings about law enforcement’s use of...
Who is watching your face? Absent regulation, it’s hard to know

05/15/2019

Brown University student Amara Majeed awoke on a Thursday in late April to find that she had been falsely accused of perpetrating the Easter terror attacks in Sri Lanka. Her photo was disseminated internationally and she received death threats, even though she...
Virginia judge declares Police Department’s warehousing of license plate data illegal

04/30/2019

A state judge in Virginia ruled earlier this month that license plate tracking data collected by automatic license plate reader (ALPR) systems are personally identifiable information, outlawing their storage when law enforcement has no good reason to collect and retain them. The...
Mass. high court requires warrants for stingray, GPS phone surveillance

04/23/2019

In June 2018, the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark digital privacy ruling, holding that police must obtain a warrant before asking our cellphone companies to turn over information showing where we’ve been in the past. In that case, Carpenter v....
Continuous Immigration Vetting: The Labyrinth of Government Databases Continues to Grow

02/28/2019 - Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Biometrics, Data Mining, Immigration, Mass Surveillance, Racism, Security Theater

David Mack was unprepared for a political confrontation with U.S. border agents as he reentered the United States through New York’s JFK airport. As an Australian with a U.S. work visa, he expected the usual questions from a U.S. Customs and Border...
Feds want researchers to use AI and GPS trackers to predict “risky” behavior

02/15/2019 - Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Data Mining, Drug Wars, Internet of Things, Mass Incarceration, Mass Surveillance, Racism

The National Institute for Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, has published an advertisement for a grant seeking proposals for projects that deploy artificial intelligence to reduce recidivism among the five million people under the control of parole and...
Former FBI official: Our counterintelligence mission was to keep progressives out of congress

01/22/2019 - FBI, Freedom of Speech, History, New COINTELPRO, Security Theater

Please note that by playing this clip YouTube and Google will place a long term cookie on your computer. Terry Turchie, former Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division of the FBI, went on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program and said this: “When...
Lawrence is set to expand its surveillance network. Here are the details.

12/13/2018 - Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Biometrics, Freedom of Speech, Immigration, Mass Surveillance

In September, Lawrence became the first city in Massachusetts to pass an ordinance requiring community control of police surveillance. The ordinance requires, among other things, that city agencies like the police get permission from the City Council before deploying new surveillance technologies....
Cambridge City Council passes surveillance oversight ordinance in unanimous vote

12/11/2018 - Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Data Mining, Mass Surveillance

Last night, the Cambridge City Council unanimously voted to approve an ordinance requiring community control over police surveillance. Under the ordinance, City agencies including the police are required to seek City Council permission before buying, acquiring, or otherwise using new surveillance technologies....
Amazon doubles down on face surveillance, files patent for scary new tech

12/05/2018 - Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Biometrics, Corporate Spying, Mass Surveillance, Security Theater

A new patent application filed by Amazon could enable the kind of dystopian face tracking envisioned in the movies and sci-fi books, where thousands of cameras are linked to track one person as they move through a city. The patent application, published...