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....
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...
New Washington Post reporting describes disturbing pre-crime technology in place at the Fresno, California police department’s “real-time crime center.” The NCIC-like cop-cave plays host to license plate tracking databases, feeds from innumerable surveillance cameras, and government and corporate databases, which contain information about...
The Future of Privacy Forum has published new survey results on parent attitudes toward digital student privacy issues. Harris Poll worked with the group to survey over 1,000 US adults with children ages 0-17 during March and April 2015. Here are some of the findings:
You might have read lately that elementary, middle, and high school administrators are using high-tech tools to track and monitor students as they move through public school systems. But that tracking doesn't end when students graduate high school, if they go on to university.
