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....
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...
A new study examining a face surveillance program implemented by the South Wales police finds the system is wrong 50 percent of the time. The Financial Times reports: The facial recognition technology used by South Wales Police was developed by Japanese company...
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...
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...
In a hearing last week at the Boston City Council, police leaders signaled that they would support a measure to require community control over police surveillance, and community advocates highlighted extreme racial disparities in policing in Boston as a primary driver of...
In response to internal and external protest and expressions of revulsion, Google yesterday announced it would stop contracting with the Department of Defense to provide artificial intelligence technology to the US military. Google’s move is a rare instance in which one of...
There’s been a lot of important technology and civil liberties news over the past week. Here’s what you may have missed. Civil Liberties Groups Caution Against Use of Facial Recognition on Body Worn Cameras Dozens of groups including the ACLU and NAACP...
Over the weekend, the City of Cambridge released a draft surveillance oversight ordinance. Today at 2pm the Public Safety Committee of the City Council will hold a hearing on the draft, and take comments from the public and interested organizations. The ACLU...
Communities across the nation are fighting for control over police surveillance, and now’s the time to act in Cambridge to pass a strong local law requiring it. Facial recognition, drones, license plate readers, biometric finger print readers, surveillance cameras, social media monitoring...