Category «Civil Liberties»

What is your digital footprint and how can you protect it?

Proton VPN Blog: “Whenever you do something online, you leave a trail of information behind that can be used to uniquely identify and track you. This is your digital footprint(new window). In this article, we’ll look at: What is a digital footprint? Digital footprint examples Why does your digital footprint matter? How to check your …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Commerce, Internet, Legal Research, Search Engines, Social Media

BirdVoxDetect: Large-Scale Detection and Classification of Flight Calls for Bird Migration Monitoring

V. Lostanlen et al., “BirdVoxDetect: Large-Scale Detection and Classification of Flight Calls for Bird Migration Monitoring,” in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 32, pp. 4134-4145, 2024, doi: 10.1109/TASLP.2024.3444486. “Sound event classification has the potential to advance our understanding of bird migration. Although it is long known that migratory species have a …

Subjects: AI, Civil Liberties, Environmental Law

American Autocracy Threat Tracker

State Democracy Defenders Action: “President-elect Donald Trump has said he will be a “dictator on day one.” Our American Autocracy Threat Tracker comprehensively catalogs all of Trump’s and his allies’ Project 2025 and other specific plans and promises. We also catalog potential bipartisan solutions to address the threat both now and should it come to …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Congress, Economy, Financial System, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Legal Research, Legislation

Rebel Yell

Tablet – Part I: Donald Trump broke the back of the GOP establishment by driving blue-collar and lower-middle-class politics in a Southern direction. His gentry Republican critics have only themselves to blame. Donald Trump’s first and in many ways most enduring political accomplishment is not the humiliation of the Democratic Party he has toppled in …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Congress, Economy, Education, Free Speech, Freedom of Information

Beyond Fairness in Computer Vision: A Holistic Approach to Mitigating Harms and Fostering Community-Rooted Computer Vision Research

Timnit Gebru and Remi Denton (2024), “Beyond Fairness in Computer Vision: A Holistic Approach to Mitigating Harms and Fostering Community-Rooted Computer Vision Research”, Foundations and Trends® in Computer Graphics  and Vision: Vol. 16, No. 3, pp 215–321. DOI: 10.1561/0600000102. “The field of computer vision is now a multi-billion dollar enterprise, with its use in surveillance …

Subjects: AI, Civil Liberties, Education, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Internet, Legal Research

Guide to Abortion Privacy – Digital Defense Fund

Keep Your Abortion Private & Secure –  This page is organized into different security-related threats. You can jump to the ones that most concern you. Along with each scenario is a list of digital security tips to neutralize the threats. These are possible concerns you might have: Seeing advertisements related to pregnancy/abortion Tech companies like …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, E-Records, Health Care, Internet, Legal Research, Medicine, Privacy, Social Media

Location data firm helps police find out when suspects visited their doctor

Ars Technica: “A location-tracking company that sells its services to police departments is apparently using addresses and coordinates of doctors’ and lawyers’ offices and other types of locations to help cops compile lists of places visited by suspects, according to a 404 Media report published today. Fog Data Science, which says it “harness[es] the power …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Defense, Health Care, Legal Research, Medicine, Privacy, Search Engines

The Ocean Investigations Guide

Via Ian Urbina:  “Investigative reporting about activities at sea is a unique specialty requiring distinct tools and tactics. How can I find open-source footage evidence of human rights abuses or illegal fishing on ships? Is it possible to connect ships to the specific seafood buyers?  Is there a way to track ships even when they …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Economy, Environmental Law, Food and Nutrition, Legal Research, Transportation

Searchable archive of DOJ Civil Rights Division reports and findings letters

Tyler McBrien. DOJ Police Department Pattern or Practice Reports and Findings Letters. A searchable archive of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division reports from investigations into patterns and practices of excessive force, biased policing, and other unconstitutional practices by law enforcement.

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Government Documents, Legal Research, Search Engines

Deportation Defense Manual

“The purpose of this manual is to provide information, resources and a guide to create a plan of action to protect targeted communities against hyper enforcement perpetuated by ICE (“la Migra”). It is important to remember when we act together, we have the power to protect one another even when immigration laws and agents do …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Legal Research

How Much Do I Need to Change My Face to Avoid Facial Recognition?

Gizmodo: “Our biometric data is freely available to anybody with an AI model and a camera. Facial recognition software is such a pervasive technology that we submit our data whenever we go through airport security or walk into a drug store. You start to wonder if it’s possible to hide our facial features or—on the extreme end—change our …

Subjects: AI, Civil Liberties, Government Documents, Legal Research, Privacy, Transportation