surveillance

The Future of Online Privacy Hinges on Thousands of New Jersey Cops

The Future of Online Privacy Hinges on Thousands of New Jersey Cops

LexisNexis spokesperson Paul Eckloff disputes that freezing was an overreach. The company deemed that step as necessary to honor the requests submitted by Atlas users to not disclose their data. “This company couldn’t be more dedicated to supporting law enforcement,” he says. “We would support common sense protections.” But he described Daniel’s Law as overly punitive.To Adkisson, the people being punished were the cops, judges, and other government workers he had met on his Jeep excursions through New Jersey. Among them were police officers Justyna Maloney, 38, and her husband, Sergeant Scott Maloney, 46, who work in Rahway, a tiny…
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It Seemed Like an AI Crime-Fighting Super Tool. Then Defense Attorneys Started Asking Questions

It Seemed Like an AI Crime-Fighting Super Tool. Then Defense Attorneys Started Asking Questions

In 2017, then 9-year-old Kayla Unbehaun was abducted. For years, the South Elgin, Illinois police department searched for Unbehaun and her noncustodial mother, Heather Unbehaun, who was accused of the abduction, following her trail to Georgia, where they hit a dead end. During that time, the department signed a contract with Global Intelligence, and sergeant Dan Eichholz received a Cybercheck report that placed Unbehaun and her mother in Oregon, he tells WIRED. It was a new lead, but because Cybercheck didn’t provide any evidence to support its findings, Eichholz couldn’t use the report to obtain a search warrant.Unbehaun was finally…
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License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of Political Lawn Signs and Bumper Stickers

While people place signs in their lawns or bumper stickers on their cars to inform people of their views and potentially to influence those around them, the ACLU’s Stanley says it is intended for “human-scale visibility,” not that of machines. “Perhaps they want to express themselves in their communities, to their neighbors, but they don't necessarily want to be logged into a nationwide database that’s accessible to police authorities,” Stanley says.Weist says the system, at the very least, should be able to filter out images that do not contain license plate data and not make mistakes. “Any number of times…
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Stadiums Are Embracing Face Recognition. Privacy Advocates Say They Should Stick to Sports

Stadiums Are Embracing Face Recognition. Privacy Advocates Say They Should Stick to Sports

Thousands of people lined up outside Citi Field in Queens, New York, on Wednesday to watch the Mets face off with the Orioles. But outside the ticketing booth, a handful of protesters handed out flyers. They were there to protest a recent Major League Baseball program, one that’s increasingly common in professional sports: using facial recognition on fans.Facial recognition companies and their customers argue that these systems save time, and therefore money, by shortening lines at stadium entrances. However, skeptics argue that the surveillance tools are never totally secure, make it easier for police to get information about fans, and…
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Surprise! The Latest ‘Comprehensive’ US Privacy Bill Is Doomed

Surprise! The Latest ‘Comprehensive’ US Privacy Bill Is Doomed

Dozens of civil rights organizations had been urging Democrats (some of whom had puzzlingly signed off on those changes) to sink the bill, arguing that the changes were both “immensely significant and unacceptable.”The new text, engineered to appease conservative lobbyists representing the interests of big business, omitted, for instance, a key section referencing “civil rights.” The deleted section aimed to prevent businesses from trafficking in people’s data “in a manner that discriminates in or otherwise makes unavailable the equal enjoyment of goods or services on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, or disability.” For reasons that at…
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The Mystery of AI Gunshot-Detection Accuracy Is Finally Unraveling

The Mystery of AI Gunshot-Detection Accuracy Is Finally Unraveling

This week, New York City’s comptroller published a similar audit of the city’s ShotSpotter system showing that only 13 percent of the alerts the system generated over an eight-month period could be confirmed as gunfire. The auditors noted that while the NYPD has the information necessary to publish data about ShotSpotter’s accuracy, it does not do so. They described the department’s accountability measures as “inadequate” and “not sufficient to demonstrate the effectiveness of the tool.”Champaign and Chicago have since canceled their contracts with Flock Safety and SoundThinking, respectively.“Raven is over 90 percent accurate at detecting gunshots with around the same…
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