Digital Surveillance
66 Articles
Rethinking Surveillance on the 20th Anniversary of the Patriot Act
20 years ago, Congress enacted the PATRIOT Act. It's time to move on from that outmoded model of surveillance.
What Biden Needs to Say About Surveillance Tech and Foreign Policy
Western countries have critiqued China's use of surveillance tech while continuing to export these tools. It's time to align human rights and trade policies.
Encryption Originalism
Encryption originalism views strong encryption as the modern reemergence of Founding Era practice of employing—often unbreakable—ciphers.
Protect Communications Privacy for All of Us—Not Just Lawmakers and Reporters
It’s Time for Congress to Finish What It Started After the Snowden Revelations.
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…