With the rise of modern technologies, the scope and scale of government surveillance has exploded. The use of digital communication has made communication more efficient, but also much more vulnerable. Governments, meanwhile, are increasing their capacity to exploit these vulnerabilities, and companies, their ability to thwart them. Both the PATRIOT act and the Snowden disclosures pushed the issue to the front of the national conversation. Today, the legal and policy debate—over what kind of surveillance tools are acceptable, against whom, and with with whose authorization—continues in full force.
Latest in Surveillance
Courts are split on whether telephone pole camera surveillance of a house violates the Fourth Amendment, and the First Circuit just added to the confusion.
An EU proposal on combating child sexual abuse material online relies on technology not yet invented and, even worse, would create significant national security risks.
If Roe is overturned, criminal investigations into women’s reproductive decisions enabled by modern technologies and the sensitive, intimate data these technologies capture would constitute an unique extension of the state’s powers of observation and coercion.
Here is an explainer of the data presented in three intelligence community reports released in April regarding the continuing decline in the use of national surveillance authorities over the past two years.
This week on Chatter, Shane Harris speaks to artist Trevor Paglen, who explores themes of surveillance, security, and secrecy.
While the court in Orich granted the Israeli police some judicial leeway, recent developments may have presented new challenges for the ruling.
Israel reinstated contact-tracing activities by the Israel Security Agency to track carriers of the omicron variant of the coronavirus. Five days later, it halted the ISA’s contact-tracing activities, due to a lack of parliamentary support.
What are the legal and policy questions raised by gig surveillance work?
The limits on congressional surveillance vary from those on other, more common forms of government surveillance. As a whole, they raise difficult questions around the convergence of individual privacy and the separation of powers.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, claimed that the NSA’s “Upstream” surveillance program captures its international communications and is a violation of its First Amendment free-speech rights and its Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.