Last night I participated in a panel discussion on the WGBH television program Greater Boston. Watch the clip below. Please note that by playing this clip YouTube and Google will place a long term cookie on your computer.
The national security blog Just Security has a fantastic writeup of where we stand vis a vis the five federal court orders issued over the weekend in response to lawsuits over Trump’s Muslim ban. The Boston order, issued in response to a...
If you’re like me, you’re feeling pretty frustrated and maybe even overwhelmed. There’s a lot of bad news these days, and it seems like it just won’t stop coming. Just this morning, the New York Times reported that Trump looks likely to...
The people of Boston just scored a major victory for privacy, civil liberties, and people power. After thousands of Bostonians took action to demand the City drop a dangerous proposal to spend as much as $1.4 million on Orwellian social media surveillance software,...
As of January 5, the Boston Police Department still hadn’t signed a contract to spend as much as $1.4 million on social media surveillance software. We know this because I’ve been filing weekly public records requests seeking the winning bid for the enormous...
Police departments across the nation use a variety of policing strategies: broken windows, hot spot, and something new called “intelligence-led” or “predictive” policing. Whether or not these policing methodologies result in lower crime rates and safer communities is a subject of debate....
In 2011, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that we have the right to record the police in the public performance of their duties. But what does the right to record the police mean if you cannot exercise it? Not much....
Over the past couple of months, Twitter has cut off three separate social media surveillance software companies from access to its ‘firehose’ of data: Geofeedia, Snaptrends, and Media Sonar. The social media giant pulled the data plug on these companies after my...
Today 21 civil rights, civil liberties, religious, and community organizations sent Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and Boston Police Department Commissioner William Evans a letter calling on the city leaders to drop a controversial proposal to spend $1.4 million on social media monitoring...
Yesterday dozens of people turned out to a Boston City Council meeting hosted by the council’s Committee on Public Safety and Criminal Justice to raise their voices in opposition to the Boston Police Department’s plans to buy $1.4 million worth of social...