News & Commentary

My name is Anthony. I’m 16 and I live in Clearwater, Florida, with my moms and three siblings. I was adopted by my parents when I was 13 years old after having spent four years in foster care.

In 2011, for the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon's declaration of America's "War on Drugs," I wrote a roundup of some of the ways in which the War on Drugs has eroded privacy. Yesterday's news about the DEA's enormous program to collect Americans' call records is a hell of an addition to the list. But with the DEA story fresh in the headlines, it's important to remember a key point about why the drug war has been so corrosive of privacy: drug use is a victimless crime.

Last June, the New York Civil Liberties Union asked the Erie County Sheriff's Office to release information to the public about how it uses stingrays, which are used to track and record New Yorkers’ locations via their cell phones, and can collect information on all cell phones in a given area as well as track and locate particular phones. The Sheriff's Office refused, so in November we sued. Last month, a New York state Supreme Court Justice ruled in our favor, telling the Sheriff’s Office that it had to hand these documents over.

Last week, Indiana brought a startling transformation: The primary tactic of opponents of LGBT equality turned instead into a driver of LGBT equality all across the country. 

Last week I wrote about how the Internet of Things will provide an opportunity for various bureaucracies (corporate and governmental) to inject not only their information-gathering functions but also their rule-imposing functions ever more deeply into the technologies that surround us, and thus into our daily lives. In short, violating our privacy and increasing their control. But the situation is actually even scarier than that, because buried within the activity of "rule imposing" lies another function that is inherently a part of that: "judgment making." And a whole lot more trouble lies there.

Discrimination in Ferguson works in not-so-mysterious ways.
As the

Discrimination in Ferguson works in not-so-mysterious ways. 

This piece originally appeared at The Washington Post's PostEverything.
Indiana isn’t the only place where p

This piece originally appeared at The Washington Post's PostEverything.