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Lifting the Cloak of Secrecy From NYPD Surveillance Technology For too long, the New York Police Department has secretly deployed cutting-edge spy tech, without notice to the public. Many of these snooping devices invade our privacy, deter our free speech, and disparately burden minority and immigrant communities. Fortunately, a proposed ordinance (“the POST Act”) would lift the cloak of secrecy, and help the people of New York City better control police surveillance technology. Why New York Needs the POST Act For decades the NYPD has committed to righting a legacy of unwarranted surveillance . Yet court proceedings continue to find the Department’s surveillance practices in violation of political, religious, and other fundamental freedoms. Against this troubling historical backdrop, images from more than eight thousand public and privately owned surveillance cameras feed into the Department’s Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center (LMSCC) each day. In the words of Police ...

Documents Bare How Federal Researchers Went to Absurd Lengths to Undo Problematic Tattoo Recognition Research Well, this is a first. In response to an EFF investigation that uncovered deeply troubling research practices by the National Institute for Technology & Standards (NIST), a senior federal scientist stripped off his clothes, had another scientist draw all over his skin with washable markers, and then posed for the camera. Those images—obtained by EFF through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit—illustrate federal officials’ absurd reaction to an EFF investigation that showed the research exploited prisoners while bypassing ethical oversight measures. As EFF revealed in 2016, NIST researchers partnered with the FBI on a multi-year program to advance the state of the art of tattoo recognition technology—computer algorithms that automatically identify someone by their tattoos and even identify the meaning of those tattoos. NIST documentation explicitly stated t...

The Crucial Next Few Days In the EU’s Copyright Filter and Link Tax Battle As we reported last week, JURI, the key European Parliamentary committee working on copyright reform, voted on June 20th to support compulsory copyright filters for media platforms ( Article 13 ), and to create a new requirement on websites to obtain a license before linking to news stories ( Article 11 ). That vote marked the last chance for the democratically-elected members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to submit fixes to the directive — under the usual procedures. But this is not an ordinary regulation, and there still remains a couple of unusual procedures that would let them throw out these disastrous two articles. The first of these happens next week. Generally, the text agreed by the JURI committee would immediately become the basis of a “Trilogue” negotiation between the Parliament, the European Commission (the EU’s executive) and the European Council (representatives of its member sta...