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“A federal judge [on June 13, 2014] ordered the Department of Justice to hand over key opinions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (also known as the “FISA court”) so the judge can directly review whether information about mass surveillance was improperly withheld from the public. The order is another victory in EFF’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit …
“World military expenditure totalled $1.75 trillion in 2013, a fall of 1.9 per cent in real terms since 2012, according to figures released [April 14, 2014] by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The comprehensive annual update of the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database is accessible from today at www.sipri.org. The fall in the global total …
EFF – “It has been one year since the first Snowden disclosure and in lieu of this first anniversary, world privacy expert and publisher of The Privacy Surgeon, Simon Davies, conceived and published a report titled “A Crisis of Accountability: A global analysis of the impact of the Snowden revelations.” The report includes contributions from individual countries, summarizing the extent to …
Beard, Jack M., Autonomous Weapons and Human Responsibilities (June 9, 2014). 45 Georgetown Journal of International Law 617 (2014). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2447968 “Although remote-controlled robots flying over the Middle East and Central Asia now dominate reports on new military technologies, robots that are capable of detecting, identifying, and killing enemies on their own …
Patrick C. Toomey, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project News release:” “In an era of too-big-to-fail banks, we should have known it was coming: An intelligence agency too big to rein in — and brazen enough to say so. In a remarkable legal filing on Friday afternoon, the NSA told a federal court that its spying operations are …
“Most uses of CCTV will be covered by the Data Protection Act. This gives you the right to see information held about you, including CCTV images of you, or images which give away information about you (such as your car number plate). The Data Protection Act sets rules which CCTV operators must follow when they gather, …
DAVID E. SANGER and NICOLE PERLROTH – Google is encrypting more data as it moves between servers “Internet companies like Google and Facebook are working to keep governments and especially their spy agencies out of their servers after revelations from Edward J. Snowden that they had been invaded…As fast as it can, Google is sealing …
“Bulk surveillance violates our fundamental rights and makes free speech risky. This guide will teach you a basic surveillance self-defense skill: email encryption. Once you’ve finished, you’ll be able to send and receive emails that are coded to make sure that a surveillance agent or thief can’t intercept your email and read it. Even if you …
Alexander Howard – The Tow Center for Journalism, June 2014. “Journalists have been using data in their stories for as long as the profession has existed. A revolution in computing in the 20th century created opportunities for data integration into investigations, as journalists began to bring technology into their work. In the 21st century, a revolution in …
“For the past few years, EFF has been working on promoting the universal use of encryption for Internet protocols. We started by pushing major sites to switch from HTTP to HTTPS, and gave individual users ways to pull things along. Last November, we launched our Encrypt the Web Scorecard, which in addition to Web encryption, added a second focus on …
“The Federal Trade Commission testified before Congress on the Commission’s efforts to address the privacy concerns raised by the tracking of information about consumers’ location, as well as proposed legislation to protect the privacy of geolocation data. Delivering testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee for Privacy, Technology and the Law, Jessica Rich, Director of the FTC …
“A Florida judge has sided with the ACLU to order release of information about police use of “stingrays,” which are invasive surveillance devices that send out powerful signals to trick cell phones into transmitting their locations and identifying information. The Tallahassee judge’s pro-transparency decision stands in contrast to extreme secrecy surrounding stingray records in another …
