While technically unconnected to each other, recent reports about the Secret Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement playing fast and loose with rules regarding cellphone tracking and the FBI purchasing phone location data from commercial sources constitute an important wake-up call. They remind us that those handy mobile devices many people tote around are the […]
A U.S. Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s report has found the Secret Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement repeatedly failed to get required warrants before conducting cellphone surveillance. The agencies are supposed to get warrants to deploy “stingray” cellphone trackers, which have the ability to not only track a suspect’s cellphone but every other […]
Boat-tracking regulation is a warrantless search, court says. Can the government force charter boat captains to continuously transmit their location information to the authorities? It seems preposterous, but the Department of Commerce and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this privacy-infringing protocol in 2020. The rule required charter-boat captains to install—at their own expense—onboard […]
The first credit card processor to announce plans to track purchases at gun shops is Discover Financial Services. The company hints that its competitors, specifically Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, are on the same schedule to implement a controversial gun-specific merchant category code announced last year. Given that the ideologically charged bank behind the new […]
Abusive government behavior has again been found to be too sensitive to national security to face legal challenges in the court system. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a lower court’s dismissal of the Wikimedia Foundation’s lawsuit against a National Security Agency surveillance program revealed a decade ago by Edward Snowden. With […]