News & Commentary

Today is the Transgender Day of Visibility, which is a moment to take stock of what “visibility” actually means in the day-to-day lives of transgender people around the world. As we become more visible in society, what is also visible is how much work remains to be done to create positive change for all transgender people.

We’re starting to get questions about the use of body cameras by “school resource officers,” a.k.a. police officers stationed in schools.

On any given day in America there are 80,000 people in solitary settings, not counting youth in juvenile facilities and people in jails.

The U.N. Human Rights Council voted today to establish a watchdog to monitor the state of privacy rights worldwide. That watchdog, called a special rapporteur, was created by a consensus vote of all members of the council. That’s very good news, and it’s been a long time coming. As we noted recently, it’s been clear for a while that privacy has been one of the most widely violated rights not to have its own, dedicated rapporteur.

Despite the popularity of the show “Mad Men,” we are no longer living in the 1960s, but the current gender wage gap doesn’t reflect that. Ongoing wage inequity should be a thing that’s in the past.

This post was first published on TED.com.

For all its interest in promoting human rights around the world, you’d think the United States would be more sensitive to the ways its own surveillance policies undermine those very rights.

This piece originally appeared in The Hill's Congress Blog.

Police body-worn cameras are a subject about which many people have differing intuitions. Some activists tell us they worry we are mistaken in conditionally supporting the technology; that it will become a tool for increasingly police power, but not oversight. Others point to situations in which the cameras have been crucial in bringing justice—or at least in exposing injustice. In light of such debates, the troubled police department in Albuquerque provides an interesting case study.