Surveillance

New Orleans (LA) is making an ambitious bid to deliver WiFi to the homes of its poorest residents. Using “smart,” electronic streetlights as nodes, it wants to establish a new citywide internet service, one that will compete with existing carriers like Cox and AT&T. The city intends to include a free tier for everyone who needs it, a group amounting to at least 16 percent of the population. But the plan is being met with skepticism from the left.

China approved a sweeping privacy law that will curb data collection by technology companies but is unlikely to limit the state’s widespread use of surveillance.

Recent revelations about Trump-era data grabs by federal authorities have put the US in a tricky spot as it competes with China to lead the digital age. As the Trump Justice Department pursued leaks and critics in Congress, the media and the White House itself, it obtained court orders to scoop up data from Apple, Microsoft and other tech providers. Then courts put the companies under gag orders that blocked them from warning their customers they'd been targeted, or even revealing the existence of the gag orders themselves.

The government has interpreted a high-profile provision of the Patriot Act as empowering FBI national security investigators to collect logs showing who has visited particular web pages, documents show.

While we’ll remain vigilant for whatever a lame-duck President Donald Trump — or let’s face it, the year 2020 — might bring, we will be putting our collective energy toward repairing the damage done over the past four years, while diligently working to expand what’s possible in a Joe Biden administration and new Congress. Our immediate priorities include:

Apparently, a European Union privacy regulator has sent Facebook a preliminary order to suspend data transfers to the US about its EU users, an operational and legal challenge for the company that could set a precedent for other tech giants. The preliminary order was sent by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission to Facebook late in Aug, asking for the company’s response. It is the first significant step EU regulators have taken to enforce a July ruling about data transfers from the bloc’s top court.

Seven years after the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful – and that the US intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth. In a ruling handed down Sept 3, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.

A new fight between Facebook and Apple over the mechanics of ad tech is surfacing an industry divide over user privacy and spotlighting longstanding dilemmas about the tracking and use of personal information online. Facebook warned advertisers jAug 27 that a coming change to Apple's iOS could devastate revenue for ads that sends users straight to the App Store to install an app — an approach that's used widely by developers including mobile game makers.

On Aug 4, Federal Communications Commissioner Geoffrey Starks sent letters to AT&T and Verizon inquiring about the aggregation and monetization of sensitive consumer data that is generated for advertising placement purposes. Recent reports indicate that this data is being used to track Americans’ locations to protests and places of worship.

In comments submitted to the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee as they develop their party platforms for 2020, New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI) made recommendations on the following: