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EFF – “A new report released today offers journalists tips on cutting through the sales hype about police surveillance technology and report accurately on costs, benefits, privacy, and accountability as these invasive and often ineffective tools come to communities across the nation. The “Selling Safety” report is a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation …
ProPublica: “…The source of the bad data was a Department of Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE. Once used mostly to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits, SAVE has undergone a dramatic expansion over the last year at the behest of President Donald Trump, who has long falsely claimed …
W. A. Lawrence – “Marc Andreessen’s firm bankrolled Substack and donated $39 million to Trump’s orbit. Its former executives now serve in his administration. If you publish political journalism here, you should know whose roof you’re under. That is the sentence every political writer on Substack needs to sit with, because almost none of them …
Deadline: “Claims Unconstitutional Effort “To Censor Speech” – “NewsGuard, the news media rating service, filed suit against the Federal Trade Commission and its chairman Andrew Ferguson on Friday, alleging that the agency was using its regulatory authority to stifle its speech. The service, launched in 2018 by Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, employs a team of …
The Times: “The Ministry of Justice (UK) is ordering the deletion of a large archive of court records, raising open justice concerns. Courtsdesk, a data analysis company that supports media and campaigners in monitoring court records, has been ordered by the government to delete its archive, which provides a crucial tool for journalists covering the …
NeimanLab: “In our recent rankings of web traffic at the top local newspapers and public media outlets, there’s been a consistent trend: Wherever ICE unleashes its controversial deportation tactics, the audience’s attention follows. Operation Midway Blitz sent readers to Chicago’s WBEZ, Operation Charlotte’s Web did the same for Charlotte’s WFAE, and the chaos in Minneapolis …
Fast Company: “As the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration continues, keeping up with Immigrations and Custom Enforcement can feel like navigating a maze. From stories of agents raiding worksites and taking children in broad daylight to reported plans for new detention centers, the daily onslaught of alarming news makes it difficult to see the full …
Wired – no paywall: “Filming federal agents in public is legal, but avoiding a dangerous—even deadly—confrontation isn’t guaranteed. Here’s how to record ICE and CBP agents as safely as possible and have an impact… That’s the paradox United States residents face as they decide how to resist—and record—ICE’s incursion into American cities. “Unfortunately, there is …
Wired: “ICE has used Mobile Fortify to identify immigrants and citizens alike over 100,000 times, by one estimate. It wasn’t built to work like that—and only got approved after DHS abandoned its own privacy rules.The face-recognition app Mobile Fortify, now used by United States immigration agents in towns and cities across the US, is not …
AP: Close the cover on the CIA World Factbook: “The spy agency announced Wednesday that after more than 60 years, it is shuttering the popular reference manual. The announcement posted to the CIA’s website offered no reason for the decision to end the Factbook, but it follows a vow from Director John Ratcliffe to end …
The dataindex.us team is excited to launch the Data Checkup – a comprehensive framework for assessing the health of federal data collections, highlighting key dimensions of risk and presenting a clear status of data well-being. When we started dataindex.us, one of our earliest tools was a URL tracker: a simple way to monitor whether a …
The New York Times Gift Article– “The Trump administration finalized a new policy on Thursday that would strip job protections from up to 50,000 federal workers, a move that would make it easier for President Trump to remove or discipline them, in his latest effort to dismantle the federal work force. Until now, the roughly …
