Category Archives: Privacy

Proposed Chicago Data Sensors Raise Concerns over Privacy, Hidden Bias

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Michael Holloway Liberty Image 12.12.13 CC_small   John McElligott 135px

By Michael Holloway, John McElligott

Beginning in mid-July, Chicagoans may notice decorative metal boxes appearing on downtown light poles.  They may not know that the boxes will contain sophisticated data sensors that will continuously collect a stream of data on “air quality, light intensity, sound volume, heat, precipitation, and wind.”  The sensors will also collect data on nearby foot traffic by counting signals from passing cell phones.  According to the Chicago Tribune, project leader Charlie Catlett says the project will “give scientists the tools to make Chicago a safer, more efficient and cleaner place to live.” Catlett’s group is seeking funding to install hundreds of the sensors throughout the city.  But the sensors raise issues concerning potential invasions of privacy, as well as the creation of data sets with hidden biases that may then be used to guide policy to the disadvantage of poor and elderly people and members of minority groups.

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Why Reporters Need to Learn Cryptography

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Lori Head Shot 2014 v.2 smallBy Lori Andrews, JD

Julian Assange, Feb 27th The Media Consortium conference, Chicago, IL

Julian Assange Skyped into the TMC conference to discuss “The Use and Abuse of Whistleblowers” with Juan Gonzales, Democracy Now!; Gavin MacFadyen, Centre for Investigative Journalism; and Bea Edwards, Government Accountability Project.

They use burner phones as they cross borders.  They buy old Lenovo computers because there are fewer backdoors into those computers that allow surveillance.

They are not spies or criminals.  They are investigative reporters trying to get on-the-ground stories to help us understand and sometimes change our world.

Last week, The Media Consortium and IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law joined forces to describe the challenges that reporters face in an era when intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency and corporations such as Google spy on what each of us is doing on our digital devices.  At the joint workshop, Josh Stearns of Free Press and the Freedom of the Press Foundation reported on how many journalists had been killed and jailed in last year.  And it’s not just a problem abroad.  According to the World Press Freedom Index, the United States has slipped to number 46 in a ranking of countries on how much freedom it gives its reporters, well below even countries such as Ghana and Uruguay.  amalia deloney of the Center for Media Justice described how surveillance in general disproportionately affects people of color.  She showed a slide of a police tower that one might have guessed was situated in Guatemala or another oppressive nation.  Instead, it was in a primarily African-American neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina.

What information is the NSA collecting about activists, reporters and you?  The NSA gathers the phone numbers, locations, and length of virtually all phone calls in the United States.  It collects records of nearly everything you do online, including your browsing history and the contents of your emails and instant messages.  It can create detailed graphs of your network of personal connections.  It can create phony wireless connections in order to access your computer directly.  It can intercept the delivery of an electronic device and add an “implant” allowing the agency to access it remotely. Continue reading →

California’s Revenge Porn Statute: A Start but not a Solution

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By Lori Andrews

Susan, a professional woman in her 30s, met a man she thought she’d ultimately marry.  Their relationship was sufficiently intimate that she sent him a naked photo of herself.  When she caught him cheating, she broke up with him.  He took revenge by posting that selfie on a revenge porn website, along with her name, the name of her town, and her social media contact information.  She received messages from complete strangers asking for more naked photos.  As she went about her daily life, she was afraid that one of those men would stalk her.  She worried that her co-workers might have come across the photo.  She knew that if she applied for a new job, that nude photo would come up in a Google search of her name.  She’d been branded with a modern Scarlet Letter.

Across the Web, thousands of people attack their exes by posting disgusting comments about them, warnings not to date them, or nude photos of them.  On October 1, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill criminalizing what has become known as revenge porn.  The law assesses a thousand dollar fine in a narrow situation.  It is a misdemeanor for a person to photograph “the intimate body part or parts of another identifiable person, under circumstances where the parties agree or understand that the image shall remain private, and the person subsequently distributes the image taken, with the intent to cause serious emotional distress, and the depicted person suffers serious emotional distress.” Continue reading →

Something’s Rotten in the State of California: Google’s Network “Sniffing” Fails Ninth Circuit’s Smell Test

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By Dan Massoglia

It’s a crisp afternoon on the Northwest Side of Chicago.  A white Opel Astra cruises down the block, its roof-mounted camera capturing photos dedicated to Google’s now ubiquitous Street View service.  Far more than taking pictures of streets and sidewalks, however, Google’s cars have been collecting digital information from inside homes as well, covertly sucking down data sent via unsecured wireless routers, picking up emails, passwords, and even documents and videos from the families inside.

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NSA SPYING VIOLATES FIRST AND FOURTH AMENDMENTS

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Blog Photo_Lori Blog Photo_Jake 

By Lori Andrews and Jake Meyer

The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington, D.C. in a top secret court order ordered Verizon to produce to the National Security Agency (NSA) “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

Since we’re Verizon users, this order means that the NSA knows who we called, where we called them from, and for how long.  The NSA even knows that we’ve talked to each other. Continue reading →