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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.

Border Agents Can Search Phones Freely Under New Circuit Court Ruling

February 12, 2021 Adi Robertson, The Verge. , , ,
A US appeals court has ruled that Customs and Border Protection agents can conduct in-depth searches of phones and laptops, overturning an earlier legal victory for civil liberties groups. First Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch declared that both basic and “advanced” searches, which include reviewing and copying data without a warrant, fall within “permissible constitutional grounds” at the American border. Lynch ruled against a group of US citizens and residents objecting to invasive searches of their electronic devices. The group includes Sidd Bikkannavar, a NASA scientist who was detained and pressured to unlock a secure government-issued phone.

Scheer Intelligence: Wrestling Back Privacy From The Jaws Of Big Tech

October 13, 2020 Robert Scheer, ScheerPost.com. , , ,
Over the course of just a few decades, technology has come to play a role in nearly every single aspect of our lives. While there have been undeniable benefits to technological advances, one of the main concerns that has grown alongside its presence in daily life is how tech companies collect, use and profit from our data in ways we’re often unaware of. James Steyer, a professor at Stanford University and the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, a leading consumer advocacy group that promotes safe media and technology for families, joins Robert Scheer on this week’s installment of “Scheer Intelligence” to discuss how we can fight back against tech companies’ encroachments on our privacy.

New Effort To Give People More Control Over Online Privacy

October 7, 2020 DuckDuckGo, Spread Privacy. , ,
We believe online privacy should be simple and accessible to everyone, period. With the introduction of privacy regulations worldwide, consumers are gaining more rights to limit the sale and sharing of their personal data. While this is a great idea in theory, it doesn't amount to much if it is hard for consumers to take advantage of their rights. At present, consumers must invoke most all online privacy rights manually, website by website. That's why we're proud to be a founding member of a new effort to create a simple browser-oriented setting for users to more easily express their preference for privacy, called Global Privacy Control (GPC).

Private Prison To Pay $3.7 Million After Recording Attorney-Client Conversations

August 7, 2020 Equal Justice Initiative. , , ,
Private prison company CoreCivic and communications company Securus Technologies agreed on Friday to pay $3.7 million to settle federal claims that they illegally recorded attorney-client conversations in a private pre-trial detention facility and shared those recordings with law enforcement and others. In 2016, a federal court in Missouri found that detention facilities including CoreCivic’s Leavenworth Detention Center in Kansas had installed devices that could record communications between attorneys and detained clients, Law360 reported.

The State’s Use Of Technology: An Issue For The Movement

July 27, 2020 By Ben Carroll, Workers World. , , ,
Data are everywhere. In 2020, technology is a ubiquitous part of everyday life for many workers in this country and around the world. We use social media and email to keep in touch with family and friends.  We watch live streams of events and activities that take place across the globe.  We text and stream music on our commutes to work.  The list goes on.  Technology has increased capital’s ability to put workers into direct competition with one another for jobs — and drive their wages downward and worsen their working conditions, irrespective of the country in which they reside.  It has given rise to higher levels of automation and led to many other developments.  On the other hand, technology has given the working class the ability to communicate and organize itself on a global basis; that was not possible even a short time ago.  Driving down wages and working conditions lays the objective basis for the further politicization of the multinational working class.

While Pandemic Destroys So Many Lives, The Surveillance State Celebrates

May 8, 2020 Lee Camp, Consortium News. , , ,
If we don’t fight back against the secretive surveillance state growing steadily around us, your wife/husband may find out you love a Cinnabon more than you love her/him. And that might be just the beginning of it. While many of us remain quarantined — inexorably welded to our home/apartment/RV in an abandoned Walmart parking lot — the surveillance state is actually stretching its legs, brought out for a run by our friendly neighborhood oligarchs like a young golden retriever let off its leash on a nice day. Unfortunately, in this case what it’s retrieving is all of our information, movements, thoughts and desires. Right now violations of American’s privacy rights do not hold many people’s attention. We’re too busy adapting to a new, confusing, and anxiety-filled form of existence.

Assange’s Partner Speaks Out After Threat From Judge

April 12, 2020 Consortium News. , , ,
he mother of Assange’s two boys speaks of meeting the WikiLeaks‘ publisher and of their relationship after Assange’s lawyers first tried to protect her and their sons from harm. In the 11-minute video, released by WikiLeaks late on Saturday night, his partner explains how attempts were made to steal the DNA of one their children. On the video she identifies herself as Stella Morris and their children are Gabriel and Max. At Assange’s case management hearing last week, Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that there was no reason not to reveal her identity, despite threats made to her and the children. In releasing the video on the first anniversary of Assange’s arrest in the Ecuador Embassy in London, WikiLeaks has one-upped Baraitser, neutralizing her questionable tactic.

Stop COVID-19 Without Violating Human Rights

March 26, 2020 Take This Seriously , ,
The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health crisis. We need to take warnings from medical professionals seriously and do everything we can to slow down the spread of the virus and save lives. We must also ensure that governments and corporations do not endanger us further by increasing surveillance, censoring speech, and detaining people indefinitely without trial. There will be a world after this coronavirus outbreak. It’s up to us to make it a world worth living in.

Forty Organizations Call For Ban On Facial Recognition On College Campuses

February 20, 2020 Fight for the Future, Medium.com. , , ,
On behalf of leading consumer, privacy, and civil liberties organizations, we are calling on administrations to commit to not using facial recognition technology (for non-personal reasons, e.g. when used to unlock personal phones) in schools. This invasive and biased technology inherently violates the liberty and the rights of students and faculty and has no place in our educational institutions. Facial recognition technology isn’t safe. It’s biased and is more likely to misidentify students of color, which can result in traumatic interactions with law enforcement, loss of class time, disciplinary action, and potentially a criminal record. The data collected is vulnerable to hackers, and we’ve seen that schools are ill-equipped to safeguard this data.

Alexa Everywhere – Homes, Cars, Phones, Body – Raises Privacy Alarms

September 28, 2019 By Jason Del Rey, Vox.com , ,
During an event at its Seattle headquarters on Wednesday, Amazon unveiled 15 new gadgets — many of which are integrated with its artificially intelligent voice assistant Alexa — including a pretty ridiculous Alexa-enabled ring (yes, for your finger) called Echo Loop, a kind of intriguing set of Alexa earbuds dubbed Echo Buds, and a pair of Alexa eyeglasses called Echo Frames. But the day’s keynote presentation, delivered by top Amazon executive Dave Limp, began on a now-familiar note for Big Tech companies adjusting to a new era of media and regulatory scrutiny...
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