Electronic Privacy

Declan McCullagh for CNET, 4/10/13:

The Internal Revenue Service doesn't believe it needs a search warrant to read your e-mail.

Newly disclosed documents prepared by IRS lawyers say that Americans enjoy "generally no privacy" in their e-mail, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and similar online communications -- meaning that they can be perused without obtaining a search warrant signed by a judge.

That places the IRS at odds with a growing sentiment among many judges and legislators who believe that Americans' e-mail messages should be protected from warrantless search and seizure. They say e-mail should be protected by the same Fourth Amendment privacy standards that require search warrants for hard drives in someone's home, or a physical letter in a filing cabinet.

An IRS 2009 Search Warrant Handbook obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union argues that "emails and other transmissions generally lose their reasonable expectation of privacy and thus their Fourth Amendment protection once they have been sent from an individual's computer." The handbook was prepared by the Office of Chief Counsel for the Criminal Tax Division and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Nathan Wessler, a staff attorney at the ACLU's Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, said in a blog post that the IRS's view of privacy rights violates the Fourth Amendment:

 Let's hope you never end up on the wrong end of an IRS criminal tax investigation. But if you do, you should be able to trust that the IRS will obey the Fourth Amendment when it seeks the contents of your private emails. Until now, that hasn't been the case. The IRS should let the American public know whether it obtains warrants across the board when accessing people's email. And even more important, the IRS should formally amend its policies to require its agents to obtain warrants when seeking the contents of emails, without regard to their age.

The IRS continued to take the same position, the documents indicate, even after a federal appeals court ruled in the 2010 case U.S. v. Warshak that Americans have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their e-mail. A few e-mail providers, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook, but not all, have taken the position that Warshak mandates warrants for e-mail.

The IRS did not immediately respond to a request from CNET asking whether it is the agency's position that a search warrant is required for e-mail and similar communications.

Before the Warshak decision, the general rule since 1986 had been that police could obtain Americans' e-mail messages that were more than 180 days old with an administrative subpoena or what's known as a 2703(d) order, both of which lack a warrant's probable cause requirement.

The rule was adopted in the era of telephone modems, BBSs, and UUCP links, long before gigabytes of e-mail stored in the cloud was ever envisioned. Since then, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Warshak, technology had changed dramatically: "Since the advent of e-mail, the telephone call and the letter have waned in importance, and an explosion of Internet-based communication has taken place. People are now able to send sensitive and intimate information, instantaneously, to friends, family, and colleagues half a world away... By obtaining access to someone's e-mail, government agents gain the ability to peer deeply into his activities."

A March 2011 update to the IRS manual, published four months after the Warshak decision, says that nothing has changed and that "investigators can obtain everything in an account except for unopened e-mail or voice mail stored with a provider for 180 days or less" without a warrant. An October 2011 memorandum (PDF) from IRS senior counsel William Spatz took a similar position.

A phalanx of companies, including Amazon, Apple, AT&T, eBay, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Twitter, as well as liberal, conservative, and libertarian advocacy groups, have asked Congress to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act to make it clear that law enforcement needs warrants to access private communications and the locations of mobile devices.

Somini Sengupta, 3/30/13:

SAY you’ve come across a discount online retailer promising a steal on hand-stitched espadrilles for spring. You start setting up an account by offering your e-mail address — but before you can finish, there’s a ping on your phone. A text message. You read it and respond, then return to the Web site, enter your birth date, click “F” for female, agree to the company’s terms of service and carry on browsing.

But wait: What did you just agree to? Did you mean to reveal information as vital as your date of birth and e-mail address?

Most of us face such decisions daily. We are hurried and distracted and don’t pay close attention to what we are doing. Often, we turn over our data in exchange for a deal we can’t refuse.

Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, studies how we make these choices. In a series of provocative experiments, he has shown that despite how much we say we value our privacy — and we do, again and again — we tend to act inconsistently.

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Mr. Acquisti, 40, sees himself not as a nag, but as an observer holding up a mirror to the flaws we cannot always see ourselves. “Should people be worried? I don’t know,” he said with a shrug in his office at Carnegie Mellon. “My role is not telling people what to do. My role is showing why we do certain things and what may be certain consequences. Everyone will have to decide for themselves.”

Those who follow his work say it has important policy implications as regulators in Washington, Brussels and elsewhere scrutinize the ways that companies leverage the personal data they collect from users. 

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Mr. Acquisti has been at the forefront, testifying in Congress and conferring with the F.T.C. David C. Vladeck, who until recently headed the agency’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said Mr. Acquisti’s research on facial recognition spurred the commission to issue a report on the subject last year. “No question it’s been influential,” Mr. Vladeck said of Mr. Acquisti’s work.

Companies, too, are interested; Microsoft Research and Google have offered Mr. Acquisti research fellowships. Over all, his research argues that when it comes to privacy, policy makers should carefully consider how people actually behave. We don’t always act in our own best interest, his research suggests. We can be easily manipulated by how we are asked for information. Even something as simple as a playfully designed site can nudge us to reveal more of ourselves than a serious-looking one.

“His work has gone a long way in trying to help us figure out how irrational we are in privacy related decisions,” says Woodrow Hartzog, an assistant professor of law who studies digital privacy at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. “We have too much confidence in our ability to make decisions.”

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Solutions to our leaky privacy system tend to focus on transparency and control — that our best hope is knowing what our data is being used for and choosing whether to participate. But a challenge to that conventional wisdom emerges in his research. Giving users control may be an essential step, but it may also be a bit of an illusion.

IF iron ore was the raw material that enriched the steel baron Andrew Carnegie in the Industrial Age, personal data is what fuels the barons of the Internet age. Mr. Acquisti investigates the trade-offs that users make when they give up that data, and who gains and loses in those transactions. Often there are immediate rewards (cheap sandals) and sometimes intangible risks downstream (identity theft). “Privacy is delayed gratification,” he warned.

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But as the Web matured and became more commercialized, he grew increasingly concerned about Web services that demanded real names. He questioned why companies should track the online behavior of users in order to tailor their ads.

These concerns led him to his one and only foray into a business enterprise. In 2002, with a pair of fellow graduate students at Berkeley, he made a cryptographic tool that would allow people to make purchases anonymously from e-commerce sites. He quickly realized, however, that even though consumers claimed to want privacy, they didn’t want to pay for it. The start-up failed. His interest in privacy economics deepened.

To think about privacy more clearly, he argues, technologists need to understand human behavior better. With that end in mind, he will teach next fall in a new, interdisciplinary one-year master’s program at Carnegie Mellon called privacy engineering.

“The technologist in me loves the amazing things the Internet is allowing us to do,” he said. “The individual who cares about freedom is concerned about the technology being hijacked, from a technology of freedom into a technology of surveillance.”

EARLY in his sojourn in this country, Mr. Acquisti asked himself a question that would become the guiding force of his career: Do Americans value their privacy?

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To Mr. Acquisti, the results offered a window into the tricks our minds can play. If we have something — in this case, ownership of our purchase data — we are more likely to value it. If we don’t have it at the outset, we aren’t likely to pay extra to acquire it. Context matters.

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Mr. Acquisti took note of the paradox: fine-grained controls had led people to “share more sensitive information with larger, and possibly riskier, audiences.” He titled the paper, which he wrote with his colleagues Laura Brandimarte and George Loewenstein, “Misplaced Confidences: Privacy and the Control Paradox.”

“What worries me,” he said, “is that transparency and control are empty words that are used to push responsibility to the user for problems that are being created by others.”

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We are constantly asked to make decisions about personal data amid a host of distractions, like an e-mail, a Twitter notification or a text message. If Mr. Acquisti is correct, those distractions may hinder our sense of self-protection when it comes to privacy.

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Given his work, it is not surprising that he is cautious in revealing himself online. He says he doesn’t feel compelled to post a picture of his meals on Instagram. He uses different browsers for different activities. He sometimes uses tools that show which ad networks are tracking him. But he knows he cannot hide entirely, which is why some people, he says, follow a policy of “rational ignorance.” He has a professional page on the Carnegie Mellon Web site — if he didn’t, how would he attract students or signal his academic legitimacy? — that describes his research and includes a photograph. And it contains an intriguing bit of information: his interest in Nutella.

OUR browsing habits, search terms, e-mail communication — even our offering of our ZIP codes at the supermarket checkout — reveal bits of information that can be assembled by data companies, usually for the purpose of knowing what sorts of products we’re most likely to buy. The online advertising industry insists that the data is scrambled to make it impossible to identify individuals.

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Mr. Acquisti offers a sobering counterpoint. In 2011, he took snapshots with a webcam of nearly 100 students on campus. Within minutes, he had identified about one-third of them using facial recognition software. In addition, for about a fourth of the subjects whom he could identify, he found out enough about them on Facebook to guess at least a portion of their Social Security numbers.

Andrea Peterson for ThinkProgress, 4/5/13:

BlackBerry 10 users who like to enjoy adult entertainment on their devices may want to think twice about opting into the device’s music sharing feature. While at first glance the “Show What I’m Listening To” feature sounds like it would merely share your music listening habits with your BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) contacts, what it actually does is record all activity in the media player and tells your friends and colleagues about it, regardless of content type.

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BlackBerry users unwittingly sharing porn preferences is not just an unfortunate (if funny) accident, it’s an example of how a lack of transparency about what information we are sharing online creates a wide gap between the experiences users want and what the ones they get.

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These incidents are wildly out of line with Internet users’ preferences. As early as 2000, 86 percent of internet users favored “opt-in” privacy policies requiring sites to ask people for permission to use their personal information and 54 percent believed that tracking of users on websites was harmful because it invades their privacy. A more recent 2012 survey found that 73 percent of search engine users would not be okay with a search engine tracking their searches and using that information to personalize future search results because it feels like “an invasion of privacy,” but that is almost exactly how Google’s Personalized Search works when users are logged in.

It should be noted that users’ stated preferences do not always match their actions. While asking directly about user privacy preferences gets very straightforward answers, behavioral economists have shown that the way privacy disclosure is framed can leave consumers unaware of the trade-offs they are making, even though they place an inherent value on remaining in control of their personal data. Consumers believe they deserve privacy and control over their data, but the Internet is so riddled with seemingly unintrusive requests to give up personal information a small bit at a time, that users often wind up doling out little pieces of their privacy without fully understanding the implications. Entire industries have sprung up devoted to piecing together the zip code we gave to our supermarket, the things we searched for online, and even key words that appear in our emails, in order to build detailed profiles of who we are.

David Sirota for Alternet, 4/3/13:

But whether or not you subscribe to the police-state tautology, you have to admit there is more than a bit of hypocrisy at work when those who forward the Big Brother logic simultaneously insist such logic shouldn’t apply to them or the governmental agencies they oversee.

This contradiction is now taking center stage in New York City, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly wage a scorched-earth campaign to prevent the public from being able to monitor its own police force. And in that crusade comes the frightening assumption about how the terms “safety” and “security” are now defined.

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Yet, in now opposing the creation of an independent monitor to surveil, analyze and assess lawbreaking by police and municipal agencies after a wave of complaints about alleged crimes, Bloomberg and Kelly are crying foul. Somehow, they argue that their own Big Brother theory about surveillance supposedly stopping current crime and deterring future crime should not apply to municipal officials themselves.

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This, indeed, was precisely the argument of the spokesman for the Fraternal Order of Police when in 2011 he articulated the Big Brother case against allowing citizens to even record police actions on their own property. Police officers, he said, “need to move quickly, in split seconds, without giving a lot of thought to what the adverse consequences for them might be.” He added that “anything that’s going to have a chilling effect on an officer moving — an apprehension that he’s being videotaped and may be made to look bad — could cost him or some citizen their life.”

As I wrote during that controversy, nobody wants to stop police officers from doing their much-needed job. In fact, civil liberties organizations have been pushing for oversight to make sure police are doing all of their job — including protecting individuals’ civil liberties. With police brutality a persistent and intensifying problem, we should want more officers feeling “apprehension” about breaking civil liberties laws, we should hope more of them “give a lot of thought to what the adverse consequences” will be if they trample someone’s rights and we should crave an immediate “chilling effect” on such violations.

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As Bloomberg and Kelly imply, those terms don’t seem to apply to those being targeted by police actions, however unwarranted or violent those actions are. They don’t seem to apply to the thousands of people of color stopped, frisked, harassed and jailed, nor do they seem to apply to peaceful protesters. Evidently, the Big Brother theory posits that those populations are safety and security threats — and declares that those populations are not themselves entitled to safety and security from Big Brother itself.

Ellen Nakashima for The Washington Post, 3/27/13:

Federal investigators in Northern California routinely used a sophisticated surveillance system to scoop up data from cellphones and other wireless devices in an effort to track criminal suspects — but failed to detail the practice to judges authorizing the probes.

The practice was disclosed Wednesday in documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California — in a glimpse into a technology that federal agents rarely discuss publicly.

The investigations used a device known as a StingRay, which simulates a cellphone tower and enables agents to collect the serial numbers of individual cellphones and then locate them. Although law enforcement officials can employ StingRays and similar devices to locate suspects, privacy groups and some judges have raised concerns that the technology is so invasive — in some cases effectively penetrating the walls of homes — that its use should require a warrant.

The issues, judges and activists say, are twofold: whether federal agents are informing courts when seeking permission to monitor suspects, and whether they are providing enough evidence to justify the use of a tool that sweeps up data not only from a suspect’s wireless device but also from those of bystanders in the vicinity.

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“It has recently come to my attention that many agents are still using [StingRay] technology in the field although the [surveillance] application does not make that explicit,” Miranda Kane, then chief of the criminal division of the Northern California U.S. attorney’s office, said in a May 2011 e-mail obtained by the ACLU.

As a result of that, she wrote, “effective immediately, all . . . applications and proposed orders must be reviewed by your line supervisor before they are submitted to a magistrate judge.”

The Justice Department has generally maintained that a warrant based on probable cause is not needed to use a “cell-site simulator” because the government is not employing them to intercept conversations, former officials said. But some judges around the country have disagreed and have insisted investigators first obtain a warrant.

“It’s unsettled territory,” said one U.S. law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the record.

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One of the problems is there is “scant law” addressing the issue of cell-site simulators, said Brian L. Owsley, a federal magistrate judge in the Southern District of Texas, who in June wrote a rare public ruling on the issue. He denied an application to use a StingRay, in large part because he felt the investigating agent failed to explain the technology or how it would be used to gather the target’s cellphone number.

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Moreover, the government did not explain what it would do with the numbers and otherdata “concerning seemingly innocent cell phone users” that were also picked up.

“Neither the special agent nor the assistant United States attorney appeared to understand the technology very well,” Owsley wrote. “At a minimum, they seemed to have some discomfort in trying to explain it.”

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At a recent conference on cellphone tracking issues at Yale University, Owsley said he thought that “there are magistrate judges around the country that are getting these requests and not realizing what these requests are,” in some cases perhaps because the agents are not clear about their intent to use the technology.

“By withholding information about this technology from courts in applications for electronic surveillance orders, the federal government is essentially seeking to write its own search warrants,” said Linda Lye, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Northern California.

Judges “need the opportunity to require privacy safeguards, such as rules on how to handle the data of innocent people that may be captured by the devices as well,” she said.

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“The main concern we have in Rigmaiden is the government was not being forthright with the magistrate when it was seeking to use this device,” said Lye, whose organization is one of several that have filed an amicus brief in the case.

The newly disclosed documents suggest that “Rigmaiden was not an isolated case,” she said.

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Chris Soghoian, the ACLU’s principal technologist, said cell-site simulators are being used by local, state and federal authorities.

Christopher Brook for Threat Post, 3/8/13:

Two bills introduced in Texas this week could refine mobile privacy in the state and tweak how law enforcement can request sensitive information from cell phones going forward.

Michael Kelley for Business Insider, 9/12/12:

A new Congressional research report warns domestic drones may be able to bypass constitutional privacy safeguards because of their high level of sophistication.

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The Congressional Research Service's report says drones directly raise concerns about "the extent of government surveillance authority, the value of privacy in the digital age, and the role of Congress in reconciling these issues."

Since drone surveillance (like facial recognition technology) "does not require any physical manipulation of a person or his things,"American citizens may not have the benefit of the Fourth Amendment's "unreasonable searches and seizures" protections, the report found.

From the report: 

Currently, drones can be outfitted with high-powered cameras, thermal imaging devices, license plate readers, and laser radar (LADAR). In the near future, law enforcement organizations might seek to outfit drones with facial recognition or soft biometric recognition, which can recognize and track individuals based on attributes such as height, age, gender, and skin color… and will soon have the capacity to see through walls and ceilings.

Michael Kelley for Business Insider, 3/23/13:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg considers the domestic use of military-style drones "scary" but says that there is no way to stop it.

“Everybody wants their privacy, but I don’t know how you’re going to maintain it,” Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show. “It’s just we’re going into a different world, uncharted, and, like it or not, what people can do, what governments can do, is different ... you can’t keep the tides from coming in.”

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But the mayor seems to be referring to something more omnipresent, like having drones with ARGUS technology flying 17,500 feet above the Big Apple while transmitting high resolution images of people.

"There'll be cameras every place" within five years, Bloomberg estimated. "We're going to have more visibility and less privacy. I just don't see how you could stop that."

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“It's scary. What’s the difference whether the drones up in the air or in the building?” Bloomberg said. “I mean intellectually, I have trouble making a distinction. And you know you're going to have face recognition software."

Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union told CBS that the mayor's nonchalance does nothing to quell legitimate concerns that the government could save the data to analyze it.

Adrianne Jeffries for The Verge, 3/27/13:

San Francisco’s iconic and highly-trafficked Golden Gate Bridge transitioned to all-automated toll collection just after midnight today, eliminating the toll booth workers who collected the $6 fare in favor of a new system that relies entirely on transponders and cameras.

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There are two ways to pay under the new protocol. Drivers can use the FasTrak system, which has been in use on the bridge since 2000, by opening an account and placing a transponder in their cars. The other option is tied to the vehicle’s license plate, which is captured by camera when they drive through the toll if a FasTrak tag is not detected (the new speed limit at the tollway is 25 mph, but the cameras can capture license plates at up to 100 mph). 

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Cathy Gellis, a technology attorney who drives to work over the bridge every day, used to always pay in cash. She’s uncomfortable with the idea of placing a transponder in her car that could theoretically record her movements not only over the bridge, but everywhere.

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"The Fourth Amendment arguments of ‘you should only care if you have something to hide’ are hollow," she said. "You’re entitled to privacy, and in this day and age, it’s so easy to leave a track."

Since she has no viable alternative route to work, Gellis is hoping to maximize her privacy under the current system by paying for her FasTrak transponder in cash and covering the device in Mylar when she’s not driving through the tollway to block the signal.

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Steve Bousquet for The Tampa Bay Times, 4/6/13:

When a Florida sheriff sternly accuses state legislators of protecting drug dealers and child pornographers, it has a way of getting people's attention.

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Brandes, citing the importance of a constitutional right to privacy, wants to change state law to require police to obtain a warrant from a judge before searching cell phone contents. His bill would remove the current exception that allows warrantless searches of devices in what's known as a search incident to arrest, where an arrested person could hide or destroy relevant evidence.

The first-term senator, who has the support of public defenders, says a cellphone is the modern equivalent of the "papers and effects" that the Founding Fathers included in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution as safe from unreasonable search and seizure.

"The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is very clear: We are protected and the government needs to get a warrant to search your papers and effects," Brandes said. "To me, a cellphone, an iPad, those are the modern equivalents of papers and effects."

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"This is a bill that really protects people engaged in child pornography, drug dealing and murders," Gualtieri said in testimony before a House committee. "We can't collect the evidence we really need to prosecute these cases."

Brandes' bill, SB 864, passed one Senate committee on a 5-2 vote and is one of dozens of bills currently awaiting hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Tom Lee, R-Brandon. The House version, HB 797, sponsored by Rep. Carlos Trujillo, R-Miami, has cleared two House panels and is pending action in the House Judiciary Committee.

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The sheriff cites the case of a man arrested in Gulfport for driving with a suspended license who had a 14-year-old runaway girl in his car. Police took the girl into custody, and a check of the man's cellphone revealed pictures of them having sex — a felony because the girl was under age.

"Now you've got a pedophile," Gualtieri said.

Brandes said the arresting officer had no right to confiscate the man's cell phone. "Why in the world would a police officer need to search your cellphone if you're driving on a suspended license?" Brandes said.

The legislation has created some odd political alliances. Brandes' position is backed by both the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and the libertarian Cato Institute.

"Thank God there are principled conservatives in Tallahassee," said the ACLU's Howard Simon, frequently a harsh critic of Florida's Republican-controlled Legislature.

Referenda banning unmanned aerial spying by police agencies could save whole states from a future of pervasive surveillance.

Conor Friedersdorf for The Atlantic, 4/1/13:

Does anyone else feel as though a majority of Americans are unenthusiastic about living in a surveillance state yet rapidly resigning themselves to the inevitability of living in a surveillance state? This is partly due to the proliferation of smart phones with cameras and the expectation of Google Glasses in our near future. Even excepting all government surveillance, the average American enjoys much less anonymity in public than they once did, and the trend is only intensifying. 

But domestic drones used by police agencies pose an unprecedented threat to privacy rights. As the ACLU puts it, "The prospect of cheap, small, portable flying video surveillance machines threatens to eradicate existing practical limits on aerial monitoring and allow for pervasive surveillance, police fishing expeditions, and abusive use of these tools in a way that could eventually eliminate the privacy Americans have typically enjoyed in their movements and privacy."

Adds Glenn Greenwald, "The belief that weaponized drones won't be used on US soil is patently irrational. Of course they will be. It's not just likely but inevitable. Police departments are already speaking openly about how their drones 'could be equipped to carry nonlethal weapons such as Tasers or a bean-bag gun.' The drone industry has already developed and is now aggressively marketing precisely such weaponized drones for domestic law enforcement use." I fear he's right. How would the Branch Davidian standoff play out if it occurred five or ten years from today?

Greenwald argues that opposing a future of ubiquitous drone surveillance by the government "may be one area where an actual bipartisan/trans-partisan alliance can meaningfully emerge, as most advocates working on these issues with whom I've spoken say that libertarian-minded GOP state legislators have been as responsive as more left-wing Democratic ones in working to impose some limits." And federal limits on drone surveillance, like the warrant requirement before Congress, ought to be aggressively advocated by everyone who perceives the costs of failure. 

What I wonder is if it would be effective to campaign for limits at the state and local levels too, especially in states that offer voters the ability to put initiatives on the ballot to be voted on by the people. Would Californians vote for an outright ban on drone use by law enforcement in the state? Or for strict warrant requirements? Or permission to operate only in emergency circumstances? Surely there's some set of populist restrictions voters would sign onto. And I presume, at this moment, that they'd pass a ban on weaponized drones, which haven't been normalized yet for use inside the United States, though absent a ban I suspect they eventually will be. 

Matt Stroud for The Verge, 3/22/13:

On the top floor of the immense Merchandise Mart in Chicago, a company called CityScan operates with the goal of helping cities enforce some of perhaps their arguably least enforceable laws.

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Orlando Saez, a serial entrepreneur and the company’s COO, explains CityScan’s genesis this way: a real estate developer (who Saez would not name) was contacted by a billboard company that wanted to plant a sign on his property in Chicago. The developer attempted to go through the Byzantine process of getting permission to do so through the city’s proper channels. But he ran into problems; he couldn’t get callbacks, couldn’t find out who was in charge of the permitting, and generally encountered a predictable haze of municipal bureaucracy.

Though Saez says the developer eventually got his permit, he talked with others who claimed "it was better to ask for forgiveness later than permission now" when it came to putting up billboards. Though tracking data for this kind of thing is dubious, Saez claims that this bureaucratic permitting haze leads to a large number of illegal signs —between 25 and 30 percent of all billboards in the city, he says.

But what if the city could work toward automating this permitting process? What if the city could use mapping technology to figure out where unpermitted billboards and other code violations were cropping up? It wouldn’t solve problems related to bureaucratic sluggishness, but it would at least allow the city to enforce code violations without having to regularly send city employees out to inspect its 4,300 miles of roadways.

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Why would the developer want to pay for billboard permits when he doesn’t need to? Saez says it’s a matter of supply and demand: if the city can eliminate 25 to 30 percent of all billboards, the remaining legal billboards — those owned mostly by major companies who can easily afford the permit fees — will see the value of their signage increase.

The developer pitched his idea to entrepreneurs associated with 1871, a co-working center for digital startups in Chicago. More than a year later, the result is CityScan. The company has a "strategic partnership" with Nokia, whose mapping division has offices in Boeing's headquarters just across the river. CityScan takes that mapping information and, with the help of the Joliet, Ill.-based engineering surveying firm Ruettiger, Tonelli & Associates, identifies the location — "to within two centimeters accuracy," Saez says — of awnings, road signs, and anything else a city might want to keep track of.

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"Working with government is not easy," he says. He should know: after a series of very successful and not so successful entrepreneurial adventures, he worked for nearly two years as the Deputy Director of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology for the State of Illinois. This put him face to face with governance, and showed him that even the best ideas can face serious pushback. But he’s confident CityScan will catch on — and the company’s attracted $1.5 million from venture capitalists who agree with him.

Eric Lichtblau for The New York Times, 3/31/12:

Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.

The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. 

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One police training manual describes cellphones as “the virtual biographer of our daily activities,” providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.

But civil liberties advocates say the wider use of cell tracking raises legal and constitutional questions, particularly when the police act without judicial orders. 

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The internal documents, which were provided to The New York Times, open a window into a cloak-and-dagger practice that police officials are wary about discussing publicly. While cell tracking by local police departments has received some limited public attention in the last few years, the A.C.L.U. documents show that the practice is in much wider use — with far looser safeguards — than officials have previously acknowledged.

Joshua Kopstein for The Verge, 12/2/12:

A street artist who hung satirical posters criticising police surveillance activities has been arrested after an NYPD investigation tracked him to his doorstep. With the help of a small crew, the artist now identified as Essam Attia had placed the fake Big Brother-style adverts in locations throughout Manhattan, using a fake Van Wagner maintenance van and uniforms to avoid detection

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In a video interview with Animal New York prior to his arrest, a voice-scrambled and silhouetted Attia explained that he placed the provocative ads to "create a conversation" about disturbing trends in police surveillance, alluding to recent efforts by the Department of Homeland Security to "facilitate and accelerate the adoption" of unmanned aerial drones by local police departments.

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The NYPD's response seems to have proven Attia's point: months after forensics teams and a "counter-terrorism" unit was spotted on the scene, the NYPD last Wednesday successfully tracked down and arrested the 29-year-old art school vandal, who identified himself in the video as a former "geo-spatial analyst" serving US military operations in Iraq.

Joshua Kopstein for The Verge, 2/1/13:

As unmanned aerial vehicles continue to populate the skies above battlefields and college campuses faster than anyone can count them, the US government has taken a keen interest in equipping them with an increasing number of state-of-the-art surveillance technologies. The latest to be revealed is DARPA’s frightening ARGUS-IS, a record-setting 1.8 gigapixel sensor array which can observe and record an area half the size of Manhattan. The newest in the family of "wide area persistent surveillance" tools, the system can detect and track moving objects as small as six inches from 20,000 feet in the air.

But what’s most terrifying about ARGUS (fittingly named after Argus Panoptes, the 100-eyed giant of Greek myth) is what happens afterward: the system gives its owner (and eventually, DARPA says, a well-programmed A.I.) the ability to scan an entire city for all sorts of "suspicious" activity, not just in real-time but after the fact. It all adds up to around 6 petabytes (6,000 terabytes) worth of 12 frames-per-second video per day.

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What's really interesting is that the system is kind of a hack-job. Its massive resolution comes from chaining together 368 5-megapixel cellphone cameras — something similar doesn't seem like it would be impossible to reproduce on a civilian scale. The image processing, however, is another story. ARGUS' real-time surveillance capabilities rely on both on-board and ground-based processing, which need to transmit to the tune of 600 gigabits per second, though DARPA won't disclose exactly how they'd be able to run that kind of network from the air.

Matt Sledge for The Huffington Post, 3/13/13:

The ring of steel is expanding. New York City Police Department Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly announced a "major project" at a budget hearing on Tuesday to install license plate reader cameras "in every lane of traffic on all of the bridges and tunnels that serve as entrances and exits to Manhattan."

Soon, no one will be able to drive onto or off of the island without potentially being recorded.

Currently, Kelly said, the NYPD has "complete" coverage on the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges and the Battery and Holland Tunnels. License plate readers will be commissioned for additional bridges by this summer. The devices can quickly scan license plate numbers and submit the time and place they were captured to a database.

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Kelly did not state the cost of the license plate reader program. But along with data from other major NYPD electronic surveillance initiatives -- the Argus camerasmounted on streets in neighborhoods and the Lower Manhattan Security Initiativethat integrates private cameras from banks and other institutions -- the license plate data will be fed into a $30-40 million comprehensive dashboard produced by Microsoft called the Domain Awareness System.

While the new measures could arguably come in handy if the city ever faces another terrorist attack, privacy advocates are raising questions about what sort of safeguards the NYPD uses to protect the data it collects.

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As license plate readers have exploded as a technology used by police (and repo men),privacy advocates are increasingly concerned that they represent a surveillance dragnet. Police can easily find out whether an ordinary citizen has visited a strip club, a school or a mosque. Civil libertarians argue that this represents a quantum leap in intrusiveness from the ordinary cop on the beat taking down a plate number.

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AP in USA Today, 2/7/13:

Seattle's mayor on Thursday ordered the police department to abandon its plan to use drones after residents and privacy advocates protested.

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The decision comes as the debate over drones heats up across the country. Lawmakers in at least 11 states are looking at plans to restrict the use of drones over their skies amid concerns the vehicles could be exploited to spy on Americans.

The Seattle Police Department previously said it would use drones to provide an overhead view of large crime scenes, serious accidents, disasters, and search and rescue operations. It had conducted demonstrations of the drones to show the public their capabilities.

The program drew strong criticism from residents Wednesday at a meeting of the City Council, which was considering an ordinance giving police the authority to use drones.

The proposed measure would have allowed the use of drones for data collection but barred police from using them over "open-air assembly of people" or for general surveillance. The drones would have carried no weapons, but the proposal would have allowed police to use face-recognition software in them.