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.
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The judgment by the Court of Justice for the European Union has provoked a hostile reaction from U.S. national security and privacy experts. But it’s a wake-up call for how Americans should understand national security and surveillance in a world of global information networks.
Digital contact tracing once seemed like a beacon of hope for pandemic management. That optimism has long since faded.
My new paper examines three critical issues in the NSA’s collection of Call Detail Records.
Facial recognition software has recently attracted scrutiny for its adoption by some police departments across the United States. Very few U.S. states and localities have laws to adequately protect against abuse of the technology.
The Supreme Court’s landmark Fourth Amendment decision in Carpenter could impose new limits on aerial surveillance.
The German Constitutional Court ruled that German espionage activity must conform to the country’s constitution, even if conducted overseas on non-German citizens. What’s in the ruling?
With the right safeguards, aggressive disease surveillance is likely permissible under the Fourth Amendment.
To contain the coronavirus outbreak, the U.S. should look to the cell-phone tracking employed by countries like Singapore and South Korea.
Determining whether surveillance will help combat the virus requires understanding how the coronavirus spreads and how cellphone tracking works.
In this moment of true national emergency, how does the public know whether new surveillance programs are necessary?