Tomorrow is Election Day—finally. There’s a lot at stake in this contest, but no matter who wins, those of us who care about civil rights and civil liberties will continue to have our work cut out for us. Here are three...
On Friday October 21, 2016, the people of the United States learned two scary lessons: 1. It’s relatively easy for rogue actors to turn consumer technologies against their owners and wield them as weapons; and 2. Doing so may shut off access to...
On Friday October 28, 2016, all electronic tolling went into effect on the Massachusetts Turnpike. No longer can motorists pay tolls with change or cash. Beginning Friday, all travelers must either use an EZ-Pass or face a slightly higher toll via the pay-by-plate system. ...
Opponents of Question 4 in Massachusetts have suggested concerns about racial disparities in marijuana policing are overblown, because no one is really getting arrested or going to jail because of weed in our state. Adults who want to smoke marijuana in their...
Journalist Kenneth Lipp with the major scoop: The AT&T pay-to-play surveillance service scheme called Project Hemisphere is much bigger than original reports suggested. Lipp writes in the Daily Beast: Hemisphere is a secretive program run by AT&T that searches trillions of call...
Boston area people! Come hear ACLU of Massachusetts technologist Paola Villarreal speak about her work bringing data science into the court room, and learn about how she’s been building data visualization tools in the service of social justice. Villarreal, whose work at...
Debates about internet security and the limits of state power just got a lot more interesting. Unless you don’t use the internet, you likely know that on Friday a number of major websites were inaccessible for hours. These sites were victims of a...
In early October 2016, Reuters reported that in 2015, the US government asked Yahoo to scan all incoming email looking for particular signatures or characters, and that Yahoo complied without a fight. Since the matter became public, Yahoo has changed its tune....
A breathtaking new report from the Center for Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law School finds that one in two American adults is in a face recognition database. The numbers are so huge in large part because states are increasingly allowing the...
We’ve long known that the war on drugs is a major driver of not only mass incarceration but also excessive government surveillance and other Fourth Amendment violations. Here in Massachusetts, the latest example of government overreach in the war on drugs astounds:...