News & Commentary

We may have reached the point where video technology is producing a full-fledged revolution in policing. That revolution has been crystalized, or at least revealed by, the events in Ferguson.

Writing in the New Republic, Yishai Schwartz notes the confluence of two privacy stories yesterday: the theft of celebrities’ private nude photos stored in Apple’s iCloud, and my colleague Alexander Abdo’s argument before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in our challenge to the NSA’s domestic telephone metadata collection program. Schwartz argues that we and other privacy advocates are misguided to place such focus on the NSA because “the real danger to contemporary privacy isn’t government intrusion at all: It’s the weaknesses of private corporations.”

Based on initial media reports, it seems that intimate, private photographs from several celebrities' online accounts have been accessed without their consent and widely shared on the Internet. For now, many details about the breach (or breaches) remain unclear. One working theory, which is supported by anecdotal evidence, suggests that a security vulnerability in Apple's iCloud service may have been exploited to gain access to the celebrities' accounts and download their photos.

The Guardian reported last week that Miami Beach is planning on expanding the use of body cameras beyond the police to include “meter maids,” code enforcement officers, and building and fire inspectors. This use of the technology does not make sense.

In the first half of the 20th century, Americans gained a new awareness of the malleability and manipulability of the human mind, and the result was a wave of concern over “propaganda” and other techniques of influence. Today we may be seeing a new wave of similar fears as we begin to wonder whether the ways we use and rely upon technology today are making us susceptible to new, dangerous forms of manipulation.

(Update: correction below)

An article published by The Intercept this week revealed that the government has conducted surveillance of several prominent American Muslims—including a former official in the Department of Homeland Security, a professor at Rutgers University, and the executive director of the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.

Out for a run the other day along a stretch on a busy road, I saw a "for sale" sign on a house. That got me to wondering about the downsides of living on a busy road, and further wondering: do people who live on busy roads stay in their houses for shorter periods of time than people on quiet streets? Is real estate turnover higher on busy roads?

Earlier this year, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Tom Wheeler, abruptly abandoned a survey of Americans’ media information needs, which, despite its modest scope, would have provided crucial data for the FCC in its efforts to maintain viewpoint diversity in our increasingly concentrated media markets.