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Privacy

Journalist Could Face Prison For Refusing To Give Passwords To Police

January 3, 2025 Stefania Maurizi, Il Fatto Quotidiano. , , , ,
It is an unprecedented case. And it risks triggering an unprecedented threat to journalism. The UK police have repeatedly tried to obtain the passwords to the phones of the British independent journalist, Richard Medhurst, the first reporter arrested in London under Section 12: his analyses and comments on Israel’s bloodbath in Gaza – which Amnesty International has characterised as genocide – have been interpreted by the police as support for organisations banned from the UK, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. The son of two UN peacekeepers, Medhurst was arrested last August at London’s Heathrow Airport

Cellphone Seizures And The Courts

December 24, 2024 John Kiriakou, Consortium News. , , ,
After years of conflicting decisions by federal district courts across the country on whether Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents can search your cell phone and laptop at ports of entry, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that, “the routine inspection and search of a traveler’s electronics, or for that matter, any other type of property, at the border may be conducted without a warrant, probable cause, or even individualized suspicion of wrongdoing.” In reaching the decision, the court agreed with several other circuit courts, but put itself at odds with others and many (lower) federal district courts around the country.

Chris Hedges Report: Surveillance Education

November 24, 2024 Chris Hedges, Consortium News. , , , ,
Surveillance tools have become ubiquitous in schools and universities. Technologies, promising greater safety and enhanced academic performance, have allowed Gaggle, Securly, Bark, and others to collect detailed data on students. These technologies, however, have not only failed to deliver on their promises, but have eviscerated student privacy. This is especially true in poor communities, where there is little check on wholesale surveillance. This data is often turned against students, especially the poor and students of color, accelerating the school-to-prison pipeline. When students and teachers know they are being watched and monitored it stifles intellectual debate, any challenging of the dominant narrative and inquiry into abuses of power.

The White House Is Wrong: Section 702 Needs Drastic Change

April 9, 2024 Brendan Gilligan and Matthew Guariglia, Electronic Frontier Foundation. , , , , ,
With Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act set to expire later this month, the White House recently released a memo objecting to the SAFE Act—legislation introduced by Senators Dick Durbin and Mike Lee that would reauthorize Section 702 with some reforms. The White House is wrong. SAFE is a bipartisan bill that may be our most realistic chance of reforming a dangerous NSA mass surveillance program that even the federal government’s privacy watchdog and the White House itself have acknowledged needs reform.

Tell Congress: Stop The TikTok Ban

March 13, 2024 EFF Action Center. , , , , , ,
The “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” would give the President the power to designate an application under the control of a country considered adversarial to the U.S. to be a national security threat. TikTok would be deemed a threat, meaning that the application would effectively be banned unless it cuts all ties with the foreign adversarial country within 180 days through a forced sale. The same could be true for other applications, like WeChat. It’s a massive problem that current US law allows for all the big social media platforms to harvest and monetize our personal data, including TikTok.

US Government Treats Use Of Privacy Tools As Criminal Activity

February 2, 2024 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. , , , , ,
In Espionage Act prosecutions involving leaks, attorneys at the United States (DOJ) consistently treat the use of privacy tools as evidence of criminality. This tendency should alarm journalists and news media organizations that rely on such tools for newsgathering. A jury convicted former CIA programmer Joshua Schulte of disclosing CIA cyber warfare materials to WikiLeaks in July 2022. Schulte is scheduled to be sentenced in the U.S. Southern District Court of New York on February 1. The U.S. government’s sentencing memo [PDF] asserted that “between April 18 and May 5, 2016, Schulte took a number of steps to transmit the stolen CIA files to WikiLeaks.

Update On Lawsuit Against Alleged CIA Spying On Assange Visitors

November 20, 2023 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. , , , , ,
A United States court held an extraordinary hearing on November 16, where a judge carefully considered a lawsuit against the CIA and former CIA director Mike Pompeo for their alleged role in spying on American attorneys and journalists who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Judge John Koeltl of the Southern District of New York pushed back when Assistant U.S. Attorney Jean-David Barnea refused to confirm or deny that the CIA had targeted Americans without obtaining a warrant. He also invited attorneys for the Americans to update the lawsuit so that claims of privacy violations explicitly dealt with the government’s lack of a warrant.

Young People Should Oppose The Kids Online Safety Act

July 23, 2023 Jason Kelley, Electronic Frontier Foundation. , , ,
Next week, Congress plans to move a bill forward that is opposed by dozens of organizations, digital rights protectors, LGBTQ+ activists, and human rights defenders: the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). As we’ve written before, KOSA would lead to censorship and privacy invasions for all social media users. But the most impacted groups will be young people, who the bill purports to help by banishing to a second-class internet. What’s often been left out of the debate over KOSA is how young people feel about this. In fact, many teenagers already oppose the bill. Young TikTok users have been rallying one another to call and email legislators to push back on the bill, and videos describing what’s wrong with KOSA have received hundreds of thousands of views.

‘Driver’s Licenses For All’ Bill A Model For Data Privacy Protections

April 21, 2023 Marjaan Sirdar, Unicorn Riot. , , ,
An attorney who worked with Minnesota Democrats to craft the new ‘Driver’s Licenses For All’ bill, recently signed into law, spoke to Unicorn Riot about the bill’s privacy provisions that reportedly prevent driver data from being shared with the feds. On March 2, the Democrat-controlled Minnesota state legislature passed the “Driver’s Licenses For All” bill, restoring driving privileges to all Minnesota residents regardless of immigration status. Democratic Governor Tim Walz signed the bill into law on March 7. This legislation comes after a 20-year struggle. In 2003, GOP Governor Tim Pawlenty unilaterally revoked the right of some Minnesotans to obtain a driver’s license by mandating proof of legal residency in the United States, such as a Social Security Number from applicants.

Democrats Are Failing On Net Neutrality And Other Digital Rights

April 11, 2023 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , ,
In 2014-15, a broad social movement won net neutrality, but that victory was taken away by the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, under the Trump administration. President Biden, promising to restore net neutrality, appointed a favorable chairperson, Gigi Sohn, but his administration and Democrats in Congress failed to defend her from a successful attack by the Telecommunications industry. Clearing the FOG speaks with Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, about the current campaign to push for a new FCC commissioner, what is behind the assault on Tik Tok, including a dangerous piece of legislation called the RESTRICT Act, and how corporations are using facial recognition technology for their own agendas.

CIA Pushes To Dismiss Lawsuit Against Alleged Spying On Assange Visitors

January 14, 2023 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. , , ,
The Central Intelligence Agency and former CIA director Mike Pompeo notified a federal court in New York that they intend to push for the dismissal of a lawsuit that alleges that they were involved in spying against attorneys and journalists who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Ecuador’s London embassy. Both the CIA and Pompeo maintain that the “allegations in the complaint do not establish a violation of the Fourth Amendment [right to privacy].” In August 2022, four Americans who visited Assange in the embassy sued the CIA and Pompeo in his individual capacity: Margaret Ratner Kunstler, a civil rights activist and human rights attorney; Deborah Hrbek, a media lawyer, represented Assange or WikiLeaks; journalist John Goetz, who worked for Der Spiegel when the German media organization first partnered with WikiLeaks; and journalist Charles Glass, who wrote articles on Assange for The Intercept.

Google’s Quest To Digitize Valuable Military Tissue Samples

January 2, 2023 James Bandler, Propublica. , , , ,
In early February 2016, the security gate at a U.S. military base near Washington, D.C., swung open to admit a Navy doctor accompanying a pair of surprising visitors: two artificial intelligence scientists from Google. In a cavernous, temperature-controlled warehouse at the Joint Pathology Center, they stood amid stacks holding the crown jewels of the center’s collection: tens of millions of pathology slides containing slivers of skin, tumor biopsies and slices of organs from armed service members and veterans. Standing with their Navy sponsor behind them, the Google scientists posed for a photograph, beaming. Mostly unknown to the public, the trove and the staff who study it have long been regarded in pathology circles as vital national resources: Scientists used a dead soldier’s specimen that was archived here to perform the first genetic sequencing of the 1918 Flu.

Privacy Is The Entry Point For Our Civil And Basic Rights’

July 28, 2022 Janine Jackson, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. , , ,
From the outset, the gutting of Roe by Dobbs is so devastating for, of course, the constitutional reasons, that at one time, Roe codified and really affirmed that abortion was a basic right. Dobbs, in overruling that, overturning that, has laid open states to pick and choose whether they will allow abortion providers and individuals that kind of right. But we’re in a very different moment now in 2022 than we were in the 1970s, and that’s really because of the rise of the digital age. With it, as you mentioned in your opening, is that the Internet is our primary pathway for almost everyone, I think, to information, to healthcare to, you know, telehealth appointments. And so there are these huge questions now about how people will access both just information, and then who is going to have access to that data that we are all of us engaging in and creating a footprint for.

Board Must Consider First Amendment In FBI Terrorism Investigations

April 26, 2022 Defending Rights & Dissent. , , ,
Defending Rights & Dissent (DRAD) is a national civil liberties organization founded in 1960 and based in Washington, DC. Our mission is to strengthen our participatory democracy by protecting the right to political expression. The right to free speech faces enumerable threats, but we have long identified FBI counterterrorism authorities as a significant detriment to the First Amendment. In 2019, we published a report, Still Spying: The Enduring Problem of FBI First Amendment Abuse, documenting FBI abuses of First Amendment rights since 2010. The overwhelming majority of abuses documented were carried out pursuant to counterterrorism authorities. More often than not, these were related to domestic terrorism, not international terrorism.

US Collected 4.8 Million Biometric Records Of Afghans

September 4, 2021 Margaret Hu, Consortium News. , , ,
In the wake of the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul and the ouster of the Afghan national government, alarming reports indicate that the insurgents could potentially access biometric data collected by the U.S. to track Afghans, including people who worked for U.S. and coalition forces. Afghans who once supported the U.S. have been attempting to hide or destroy physical and digital evidence of their identities.
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