An anonymous reader shares a report: On Tuesday, Sept. 10, the Total Choice Credit Union in Laplace, Louisiana was robbed. At approximately 3:06 pm, a man in his early thirties walked in wearing jeans, a white shirt, sunglasses, and a brown dreadlock wig, according to a now-unsealed complaint filed last month in US federal court. He passed a handwritten note to…
Tag: civil liberties
EFF Wins Access To License Plate Reader Data To Study Law Enforcement Use
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California (ACLU SoCal) have reached an agreement with Los Angeles law enforcement agencies under which the police and sheriff’s departments will turn over license plate data they indiscriminately collected on millions of law-abiding drivers in Southern California….
Motorola, Known For Cellphones, is Fast Becoming a Major Player in Government Surveillance
Jon Schuppe, reporting for NBC News: The surveillance tools have been installed in schools and public housing, deployed on roads and public transit, and worn by police officers. They’ve been developed by an array of technology firms competing for government business. And many are now owned by a company seeking to grab a bigger piece of a booming market. Motorola, a…
New Federal Rules Limit Police Searches of Family Tree DNA Databases
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released new rules yesterday governing when police can use genetic genealogy to track down suspects in serious crimes — the first-ever policy covering how these databases, popular among amateur genealogists, should be used in law enforcement attempts to balance public safety and privacy concerns. The DOJ…
Home Depot and Lowe’s Accused of Scanning Millions of Customers Faces
JustAnotherOldGuy tipped us off to this story. The Daily Mail reports: Home Depot and Lowe’s are secretly using facial recognition technology to track customer movement in their stores, violating privacy laws in Illinois, plaintiffs in two class action lawsuits say. The plaintiffs, who are Illinois residents, allege the two big box retailers are using the technology without properly notifying customers or…
Feds Forced Google To Reveal All Google Users Within 100 Feet of a Bank Robbery
Federal investigators asked Google for help finding two men who’d robbed a Wisconsin bank in October of 2018: They left the bank at 9:09AM, just seven minutes after they entered, carrying the bag full of cash, three drawers from the vault and teller station, and the keys to the bank vault itself. In the months since, police and federal agents have…
FBI Seeks To Monitor Facebook, Oversee Mass Social Media Data Collection
The FBI is planning to aggressively harvest information from Facebook and Twitter. Citing the The Wall Street Journal, ZDNet reports that the FBI “has recently sought proposals from third-party vendors for technological solutions able to harvest publicly-available information in bulk from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets.” From the report: The law enforcement agency says the data collected will be…
Cambridge, Massachusetts Moves To Ban Facial Recognition
Citing threats to free speech and civil rights, the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts on Tuesday moved to prohibit local government from using facial recognition. Three other cities in the country have already instituted such bans over concerns that the technology is biased and violates basic human rights. Gizmodo reports: In December of last year, the Cambridge City Council passed the Surveillance…
Emotion-Detection Applications Are Built On Outdated Science, Report Warns
maiden_taiwan writes: Can computers determine your emotional state from your face? A panel of senior scientists with backgrounds in neuroscience, psychology, computer science, electrical engineering, biology, anthropology, psychiatry, pediatrics, and public affairs spent two years reviewing over 1,000 research papers on the topic. Two years later, they have published the most comprehensive analysis to date and concluded: “It is not possible…
America’s FBI Wants To Build a Social Media-Monitoring Tool
America’s FBI “wants to gather more information from social media,” reports Engadget. Friday, it issued a call for contracts for a new social media monitoring tool. According to a request-for-proposals (RFP), it’s looking for an “early alerting tool” that would help it monitor terrorist groups, domestic threats, criminal activity and the like. The tool would provide the FBI with access to…