In a February 20, 2017 letter to DHS Secretary John Kelly, Oregon democrat and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee Ron Wyden voiced alarm at media reports of Customs Border Patrol (CBP) agents demanding device and social media passwords of travelers at...
Earlier this week, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told Congress the Trump administration may soon require that visitors to the United States provide their social media passwords and internet activity history to DHS agents before entering the country. In response to a...
Last night I participated in a panel discussion on the WGBH television program Greater Boston. Watch the clip below. Please note that by playing this clip YouTube and Google will place a long term cookie on your computer.
If you’re like me, you’re feeling pretty frustrated and maybe even overwhelmed. There’s a lot of bad news these days, and it seems like it just won’t stop coming. Just this morning, the New York Times reported that Trump looks likely to...
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...
Over the past couple of months, Twitter has cut off three separate social media surveillance software companies from access to its ‘firehose’ of data: Geofeedia, Snaptrends, and Media Sonar. The social media giant pulled the data plug on these companies after my...
Today 21 civil rights, civil liberties, religious, and community organizations sent Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and Boston Police Department Commissioner William Evans a letter calling on the city leaders to drop a controversial proposal to spend $1.4 million on social media monitoring...
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...