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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Big news dropped yesterday in Reuters: In 2015, the US government asked Yahoo to scan all incoming email looking for certain, unknown characters in emails or attachments; unfortunately, Yahoo agreed to do it—without putting up a fight. The demand came in the form of a...
It might sound paranoid. It might sound anti-government. But as famous civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate says, it’s actually just practical advice: Don’t talk to the FBI without your lawyer present, ever. You may think you have nothing to hide. You may...