Collaborate Disseminate
We love the cloud. We store our documents there. Our e-mails travel through cloud or other third-party providers. Now the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to decide whether the physical location of both the communications or documents themselves, or the lo… Continue reading Supreme Court to Decide Major Internet Privacy and Jurisdiction Case
New York Times reporter Charlie Savage writes about some bad statistics we’re all using: Among surveillance legal policy specialists, it is common to cite a set of statistics from an October 2011 opinion by Judge John Bates, then of the FISA Court, about the volume of internet communications the National Security Agency was collecting under the FISA Amendments Act ("Section… Continue reading What the NSA Collects via 702
The US Supreme Court is deciding a case that will establish whether the police need a warrant to access cell phone location data. This week I signed on to an amicus brief from a wide array of security technologists outlining the technical arguments as why the answer should be yes. Susan Landau summarized our arguments. A bunch of tech companies… Continue reading Do the Police Need a Search Warrant to Access Cell Phone Location Data?
Last week, the Department of Justice released 18 new FISC opinions related to Section 702 as part of an EFF FOIA lawsuit. (Of course, they don’t mention EFF or the lawsuit. They make it sound as if it was their idea.) There’s probably a lot in these opinions. In one Kafkaesque ruling, a defendant was denied access to the previous… Continue reading The Dangers of Secret Law
Interesting law-journal article: "Surveillance Intermediaries," by Alan Z. Rozenshtein. Abstract:Apple’s 2016 fight against a court order commanding it to help the FBI unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists exemplifies how central the question of regulating government surveillance has become in American politics and law. But scholarly attempts to answer this question have suffered from a serious… Continue reading Surveillance Intermediaries
Fitbit evidence is cited in an arrest warrant, stating that the device monitored steps by the victim after the suspect claimed she died…. Continue reading Fitbit Evidence Used in Murder Investigation
The Department of Justice is dropping all charges in a child-porn case rather than release the details of a hack against Tor…. Continue reading FBI’s Exploit Against Tor
The New York Times reports that Uber developed apps that identified and blocked government regulators using the app to find evidence of illegal behavior: Yet using its app to identify and sidestep authorities in places where regulators said the company was breaking the law goes further in skirting ethical lines — and potentially legal ones, too. Inside Uber, some of… Continue reading Uber Uses Ubiquitous Surveillance to Identify and Block Regulators
Here’s a story about data from a pacemaker being used as evidence in an arson conviction. EDITED TO ADD: Another news article. BoingBoing post. EDITED TO ADD (2/9): Another article…. Continue reading Pacemaker Data Used in Arson Conviction
It’s not hard to imagine the criminal possibilities of automation, autonomy, and artificial intelligence. But the imaginings are becoming mainstream — and the future isn’t too far off. Along similar lines, computers are able to predict court verdicts. My guess is that the real use here isn’t to predict actual court verdicts, but for well-paid defense teams to test various… Continue reading Malicious AI