Recent reporting from Los Angeles highlights the urgent need for city councils across the United States to take control of local government surveillance operations, subjecting police spying to democratic control, oversight, transparency, and public accountability. On November 10, Boston residents have an...
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...
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...
Across the country, state and local police departments endanger immigrant communities by collecting and sharing information about residents with federal immigration authorities. Oftentimes this information is captured using high-tech surveillance equipment like license plate trackers and biometric fingerprint readers. But communities across...
The ACLU, Digital Fourth, Cambridge residents, and other advocates have been organizing to pass a strong surveillance oversight ordinance in Cambridge, Massachusetts since the fall of 2016. This summer, we are close to crossing the finish line. On August 13, 2018, the...
Last week, the ACLU of Northern California revealed that Amazon’s Rekognition face surveillance software identified 28 members of Congress as people who have been previously arrested for a crime. The only problem? They were false matches. Unsurprisingly, the 28 members of Congress...
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...
Last night, Cambridge residents and city leadership met to discuss next steps for a surveillance oversight ordinance. The vibe in the room was optimistic. It was a rare moment of political harmony in a country beset by division. The Police Commissioner, the...