News & Commentary

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.

Monday morning, a federal appeals court released a government memorandum, dated July 16, 2010, authorizing both the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Anwar al-Aulaqi, a U.S. citizen, in Yemen.
The public

This was originally posted on Just Security.
In respons

For the second time in just one month, late last night the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed legislation – this time as an amendment to an appropriations bill that will now move to the Senate – aimed at reining in NSA abuse.

This past Memorial Day weekend, New Yorkers who happened to look up may have seen the words EXISTENCE OR NONEXISTENCE appear across the skyline in synchronized bursts of white smoke. 

On the evening of June 28, 2012, Claudia Valdez called the police for help. An argument with her husband at the time had turned physical and she feared for her safety and that of her three young children. She ran to her neighbor’s house with her kids in tow and asked for help. Police arrived and ended up arresting Claudia, who is an undocumented immigrant, on a misdemeanor domestic violence charge which was dismissed soon after.

The Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, however, refused to release Claudia. Instead, she was kept in jail because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), a division of the Department of Homeland Security, had requested that the sheriff hold Claudia in detention while it investigated her immigration status.   

The sheriff’s office, like most others in Colorado at the time, chose to comply with the federal government’s request, imprisoning Claudia for three additional days without a warrant and without probable cause. Those were three anguished days for Claudia who had never had a run-in with the law apart from minor traffic offenses, and who never dreamed that calling the police for help would land her in a cold jail cell apart from her children. Still, years after the incident she does not believe she can trust the police.

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.

Last night marked the first executions in this country since the horrifically botched execution of Clayton Lockett in April.