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...
Today at 1:30 PM I’ll be delivering the following testimony to the Boston City Council’s Committee on Public Safety and Criminal Justice. The Committee is meeting to vote on approving a $14 million DHS grant to the Metro Boston Homeland Security Region,...
The Boston Police Department plans to buy a $1.4 million social media surveillance tool capable of building out complex associational profiles of users, tracking posts by location, performing ‘sentiment’ analysis, and much, much more. A detailed description of what the department is looking...
Today, nearly two dozen Massachusetts academics and business leaders wrote the Bay State congressional delegation, urging them to support the Stop Mass Hacking Act. Unless Congress acts before December 1, 2016, the FBI will gain broad new hacking powers never authorized by elected...
In 2015, the ACLU of Massachusetts published a report on student privacy which included this troubling revelation: Many schools in the Commonwealth tell students they have “no expectation of privacy” when it comes to their digital information at school and on school...
Earlier this week, I had the peculiar experience of watching my colleagues try to convince the state’s highest court that when the government wrongfully convicts tens of thousands of people, it’s up to the government to right those wrongs. The prosecutors representing...
The FBI has been steadily amassing fingerprints, face images, voiceprints, iris scans, palm prints, and other biometric identifiers on tens of millions of people, pouring these sensitive records into the world’s largest biometric database, known as Next Generation Identification (NGI). Many of these records...
A lot of people are wondering what to do right now. The answers are the same as they were in October: organize and secure your digital papers and effects. Now perhaps more than ever in recent memory, the action is at the state...