On June 28, 2018, a man shot and killed five people at the Annapolis, Maryland newspaper the Capital Gazette. After law enforcement apprehended the suspect on the scene, they say, they used facial recognition technology to identify him as Jarrod Ramos. The...
French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu has insisted that naming is an exertion of power. Powerful elites have long used naming and classifying not only to legitimize knowledge, but also to perpetuate and reproduce harmful and oppressive historical practices. Language can liberate, but it can...
Big tech companies are the beneficiaries of hundreds of millions of dollars of government contracts, many of which involve surveillance and law enforcement operations. Over the past few years, workers at large tech firms have begun flexing their civic muscles, and ringing...
Midday yesterday, activists affiliated with immigrants rights groups NWDC Resistance and Mijente donned Jeff Bezos masks outside Amazon’s Seattle Spheres building to protest the tech giant’s collaboration with ICE. The activists demanded Amazon stop marketing and selling its face surveillance technology, Rekognition,...
The use of face surveillance technologies is fast becoming the norm in government and the private sector, but a new survey by the Brookings Institution shows agencies and companies deploying this technology are out of step with the desires of most Americans...
A showdown between data privacy advocates and major tech firms is heating up in Congress, with one side arguing for robust regulations outlawing data discrimination and other exploitative practices, and the other pushing for a federal law to wipe out state level...
Over the objections of civil libertarians including the ACLU, President Trump last week signed the Preventing Emerging Threats Act, a dangerous law enabling the federal government to disable and wiretap drones whenever officials deem a device a “credible threat.” The provision on...
A few weeks ago, on Thursday September 13th, 2018, a series of violent explosions and billowing fires tore through Lawrence, Andover and North Andover, Massachusetts. The explosions, which have since been connected to gas line problems, have impacted at least 8,000 people...
After spending years attacking cell phone privacy and encryption in the courts and in Congress, the FBI has used an Ohio man’s face to unlock his phone after obtaining a warrant to search his home. Since Apple announced its face recognition unlocking...
Last week, tech industry giants testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation about how the federal government should safeguard consumer privacy—and not a single consumer advocate was invited. Apparently fearful of meaningful state action that could tie the hands...