The many ways the government is watching us with an emphasis on digital spying
In a sign-on letter, 28 groups are calling on some of the world’s largest companies – including Facebook, Google and Amazon, as well as digital advertisers like Nestle, Walmart and JPMorgan Chase – to use Europe’s impending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regime as a baseline standard worldwide for all of their services, including in the U.S.
Continue reading 28 Privacy Groups Tell Companies US Residents Deserve a GDPR
Two dozen civil rights and liberties groups rose above party-based partisanship to insist Congressional Democrats including Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, John Warner and Adam Schiff stop trying to weaken congressional oversight of intelligence agencies. Continue reading 24 Civil Rights Groups Write To Dems Demanding Intelligence Oversight
14 Prominent Law and Technology experts have issued a letter supporting Senate Bill 1186 and surveillance transparency.
The letter states: Whether local law enforcement agencies should deploy surveillance technology, and the conditions under which they deploy it, raise important legal and public policy questions. For this reason, local law enforcement agencies seeking to further
community public safety goals should not unilaterally decide what surveillance technology they acquire and deploy. It is important that elected representatives—and through them, members of the public—have an opportunity to weigh in on whether and how surveillance technology is used, holistically considering its impact on civil rights and liberties and the overall safety needs of the community.
Letter signers include Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean at the UC Berkeley School of Law, Susan Freiwald, Interim Dean at the University of San Francisco School of Law and L. Song Richardson, Dean at the UC Irvine School Law, Jennifer King, Director of Consumer Privacy at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford School of Law and Robert Fellmeth, Executive Director of the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego Law School. Continue reading CA Law School Deans Support Surveillance Transparency
By Tracy Rosenberg. Originally published on Medium.
I didn’t grow up in California. Instead I grew up in the relatively staid brick-lined streets of the Northeast, where history looks like pilgrim hats.
I understood Blazing Saddles better than Stagecoach.
But life can take you in some unexpected directions. I grew up to become a privacy advocate on the West Coast. And when I started to lobby my local government about the ways law enforcement surveillance and high-tech gadgetry were colluding to erode civil rights, I ran into the legacy of the autonomous sheriff in the “frontier” states.
Continue reading Taming High Tech Law and Order in the Wild Wild West
Rust Belt Radio features researcher James Kilgore and organizer Miyaisha Hayes (Center for Media Justice) talking about how mass incarceration is morphing into high-tech wall-less detention directed at black and brown people under the guise of replacing physical prisons with digital ones.
Continue reading Rust Belt Radio: E-Carceration and Digital Prisons
35 civil rights organizations (including Media Alliance) joined a sign-on letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, also the owner of the Washington Post newspaper, to desist from marketing facial recognition technology to the government.
Public records requests reveal that the company has developed and sold a prototype product called “Rekognition” to police departments in Florida and Oregon. Continue reading 35 Civil Rights Organizations Tell Amazon To Get Out Of The Facial Recognition Business
On May 15th, the City Council of Richmond, CA voted 6-1 to enact a Sanctuary City Contracting ordinance, sponsored by Councilmembers Jovanka Beckles and Ada Recinos.
The Sanctuary City ordinance (model legislation can be found here) was developed by the 19-member Deport ICE coalition which seeks to strengthen sanctuary protections in California cities.
