News & Commentary

I’ve always found radar speed signs to be interesting indicators of our relationship with technology, and I think how we relate to these signs can tell us something about privacy and technology.

The Washington Post recently ran some amazing articles on the safety record of drones. The three-part series focuses on the more than 400 large U.S. military drones that have crashed overseas, domestic U.S. crashes of military drones inside and outside military airspace, and the record of incidents of small drones coming dangerously close to civilian aircraft within the United States. Fortunately nobody has been killed in any crashes yet, but it all makes for gripping reading.

In the last few years, we’ve seen an unprecedented number of privacy battles being waged in state legislatures. Today we’re launching an interactive web map that shows the privacy laws in place across the country on four of those issues:

Privacy advocates are celebrating the Supreme Court’s recognition in yesterday’s Riley v. California ruling that, as some have succinctly put it, “digital is different.” Chief Justice Roberts’s 9-0 opinion in the case is straightforward and persuasive. But a case that the ACLU argued last year shows just how differently things could have turned out.

The debate over network neutrality is misguided, Robert McMillan argues in Wired, because amid dismay over the FCC’s proposal to allow ISPs to sell “fast lanes” to companies, people don’t understand that giant internet companies like Google, Facebook, and Netflix already enjoy preferential delivery of their bits to end-users. This takes place, he points out, through “peering connections,” in which giant web companies pipe data directly to ISPs on their own private connections rather than through the internet backbone, and through “content delivery networks,” or CDNs, which are servers run by web companies deep inside the bowels of the ISPs.

The debate over network neutrality is misguided, Robert McMillan argues in Wired, because amid dismay over the FCC’s proposal to allow ISPs to sell “fast lanes” to companies, people don’t understand that giant internet companies like Google, Facebook, and Netflix already enjoy preferential delivery of their bits to end-users. This takes place, he points out, through “peering connections,” in which giant web companies pipe data directly to ISPs on their own private connections rather than through the internet backbone, and through “content delivery networks,” or CDNs, which are servers run by web companies deep inside the bowels of the ISPs.

The Department of Commerce has convened a “multistakeholder process” between civil society groups (like the ACLU) and industry groups, with the aim of limiting face recognition as a tool of surveillance in our society by establishing common ground and creating agreement on core principles that would allow face recognition to be used in a controlled and responsible way.

As we suspected, local law enforcement officials are borrowing cell phone tracking devices known as “stingrays” from the U.S. Marshals Service—and police are deliberately concealing the use of stingrays in court documents submitted to judges in criminal investigations.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision today in Jones v. Dirty World Entertainment, a case in which the ACLU filed an amicus brief alongside other organizations urging the Sixth Circuit to reverse a lower court’s decision holding a website and its editor accountable for defamatory posts submitted by the website’s users. (Here is our prior blog post explaining the case, and the website itself, TheDirty.com.)