Digital Surveillance
50 Articles
Data and Democracy: Three Things the Biden-Harris Administration Should Do to Tackle Big Tech
The monetization of personal data poses a direct threat to civil rights and democracy. The good news: the Biden-Harris administration has an opportunity to check this destructive…
App Stores as Back-Doors for Government Regulation of End-to-End Encryption
App stores make natural chokepoints for de facto government regulation, without the long and politically expensive process of legislation. But the privacy and security implications…
WhatsApp v. NSO Group: State Immunity and Cyber Spying
WhatsApp claims NSO implanted spyware on phones of human rights activists, lawyers, and religious figures. NSO says it can't be sued if it did so on behalf of (undisclosed) foreign…
How to Think About the Right to Privacy and Using Location Data to Fight COVID-19
"Government officials need to listen to stakeholders and technologists who are not trying to promote private companies’ interests in infection control programs."
Correcting the Record: Wiretaps, the CLOUD Act, and the US-UK Agreement
Over at Stanford CIS blog, Albert Gidari takes aim at the wiretap-related provisions in the US-UK CLOUD Act Agreement – which Peter Swire and I wrote about separately here. He…
Why the Ghost Keys ‘Solution’ to Encryption is No Solution
The use of applications such as Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, and Facebook Messenger for communications secured by end-to-end encryption has exploded over the past few years. Two…
CTRL+HALT+Defeat: State-Sponsored Surveillance and the Suppression of Dissent
A new lawsuit in Israeli court seeks accountability for the export of malicious spyware used for digital surveillance of human rights defenders, journalists, and political dissidents.…
CBP’s New Social Media Surveillance: A Threat to Free Speech and Privacy
U.S. Customs and Border Protection's efforts to map out the networks and activities of American activists and journalists through link analysis and social media monitoring pose…
Give Up the Ghost: A Backdoor by Another Name
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ,) the UK’s counterpart to the National Security Agency (NSA), has fired the latest shot in the crypto wars. In a post to Lawfare…
Trump Declassifying Page, Ohr Records Will Have Broader Effects
President Donald Trump plans to declassify documents as early as this week about the FBI’s surveillance of campaign advisor Carter Page pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance…
Why the CLOUD Act is Good for Privacy and Human Rights
Above: Lawyer Joshua Rosenkranz and Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer of Microsoft, speak to reporters following oral arguments in the U.S. v. Microsoft case at the…
Four Common Sense Fixes to the CLOUD Act that its Sponsors Should Support
Congress is quietly but intensively debating the CLOUD Act, a bill which would have a serious impact on privacy rights, and it may be attached to an omnibus spending bill this…