The United States Senate reauthorized a surveillance law that grants the government expanded authority to collec communications of foreign persons outside the US. It also is believed to permit the government to engage in dragnet surveillance of Americans’ communications. The program under the FISA Amendments Act is shrouded in immense secrecy, with there being very [...]

A surveillance law that granted the government expanded authority to collect the communications of foreign persons outside the United States four years ago is set to expire in four days unless reauthorized. On Thursday, senators concerned about how the law has been interpreted in secret and how these secret interpretations permit the collection or interception [...]

The increasingly omniscient and omnipresent corporation that is Google has released its latest transparency report on requests from government authorities around the world to take down content and hand the data of users over to agencies. The report indicates “authorities worldwide made 20,939 requests for access to personal data from Google users, including search results, [...]

Documents and surveillance video obtained by the Massachusetts chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) show the Boston Police Department (BPD) and the city’s Homeland Security fusion center, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), have been spying on peace groups and local leaders. The documents show law enforcement [...]

A scathing report released days ago by a Senate subcommittee concluded Department of Homeland Security fusion centers at the state and local level had not “produced useful intelligence to support federal counterterrorism efforts.” It also found “DHS-assigned detailees” have “forwarded ‘intelligence’ of uneven quality—oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act [...]

Newly released documents from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) show warrantless surveillance of Americans’ electronic communications by federal law enforcement agencies through pen register and trap devices sharply increased. Notably, because of how easy it is for government to intercept communications, government now regularly exercises the authority to intercept “to” and “from” addresses of email messages, [...]

A recently released report from the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic of Stanford Law School and the Global Justice Clinic at the New York University School of Law explores what it is like to live under drones and features firsthand testimony from civilians in Pakistan. The report, called “Living Under Drones,” is the [...]

The Sixth Circuit US Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents who tracked a suspect’s phone without a warrant did not violate the suspect’s privacy because he had “no reasonable expectation of privacy in the data emanating from his cell phone that showed his location.” The court also found because the [...]

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York Police Department (NYPD) Chief Ray Kelly, the NYPD, and Microsoft unveiled software yesterday that, with new developed capabilities, transforms the department’s already expansive network of surveillance cameras in Manhattan into a supercomputer system that seems like something straight out of a 1970s science fiction movie. Described in [...]

(update below) The Senate Intelligence Committee passed an intelligence authorization bill yesterday. The legislation, according to committee chairwoman Senator Dianne Feinstein, would fund measures to “counter terrorist threats, prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, enhance counterintelligence, conduct covert actions and collect and analyze intelligence around the globe.” All of which is expected from [...]