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Don’t Trust the Government. Not With Your Privacy, Property, or Your Freedoms
Public trust in the government to “do what is right” understandably remains at an all-time low.
After all, how do you trust a government that continuously sidesteps the Constitution and undermines our rights?
You can’t.
When you consider all the ways “we the people” are being bullied, beaten, bamboozled, targeted, tracked, repressed, robbed, impoverished, imprisoned and killed by the government, one can only conclude that you shouldn’t trust the government with your privacy, your property, your life, or your freedoms.
Consider for yourself.
Don’t trust the government with your privacy, digital or otherwise. In the more than two decades since 9/11, the military-security industrial complex has operated under a permanent state of emergency that, in turn, has given rise to a digital prison that grows more confining and inescapable by the day.
Wall-to wall surveillance, monitored by artificial intelligence, or AI, software and fed to a growing network of fusion centers, render the twin concepts of privacy and anonymity almost void.
By conspiring with corporations, the Department of Homeland Security “fueled a massive influx of money into surveillance and policing in our cities, under a banner of emergency response and counterterrorism.”
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Releases Report: The Civil Rights Implications of the Federal Use of Facial Recognition Technology
Today, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Commission) released the report The Civil Rights Implications of the Federal Use of Facial Recognition Technology, which examines concerns about the federal government’s use of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) and recommendations for regulations and best practices.
Meaningful federal guidelines and oversight for responsible FRT use have lagged behind the application of this technology in real-world scenarios.
With the advent of biometric technology and its widespread use by both private and government entities, the Commission studied how the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Housing and Urban Development are utilizing this technology, in compliance with existing civil rights laws.
Currently, there are no laws that expressly regulate the use of FRT or other AI by the federal government, and no constitutional provisions governing its use.
F.T.C. Study Finds ‘Vast Surveillance’ of Social Media Users
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said it started the study nearly four years ago to look into the business practices of some of the biggest online platforms.
The FTC said on Thursday it found that several social media and streaming services engaged in a “vast surveillance” of consumers, including minors, collecting and sharing more personal information than most users realized.
The findings come from a study of how nine companies — including Meta, YouTube and TikTok — collected and used consumer data.
The sites, which mostly offer free services, profited off the data by feeding it into advertising that targets specific users by demographics, according to the report.
The companies also failed to protect users, especially children and teens.
The FTC said it began its study nearly four years ago to offer the first holistic look into the opaque business practices of some of the biggest online platforms that have created multibillion-dollar ad businesses using consumer data.
The agency said the report showed the need for federal privacy legislation and restrictions on how companies collect and use data.
FBI Seeks Options for Facial Recognition Searches Against Online Images
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) wants to survey the market for facial recognition providers that collect facial images from open sources and public platforms and run searches against them.
The request for information (RFI) from FBI Criminal Justice Information Services states that with advances in the commercial market for facial recognition, it would like to get a better idea of its options for this kind of capability.
The agency explains the motivation behind its RFI as relating to major criminal, counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations:
“Investigative leads are often derived from open-source images posted on social media profiles, Internet sites, and the dark web; for example, individuals often use social media to communicate, coordinate, and conduct criminal activity.”
Criminals wanted by the FBI and its partners are not always American residents with driver’s licenses, passports or criminal histories that would make their face biometrics available for searching.
U.S. Discusses Ethics of Biometric Travel
As U.S. lawmakers debate the Traveler Privacy Protection Act, government agencies, including the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), are working on dispelling ethics and privacy concerns around biometrics in border control.
Transparency about the technology’s efficiency, error rate and data use is critical, says Arun Vemury, director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directorate’s Biometric and Identity Technology Center.
“We need to make sure we can do some public reporting so that people understand and have greater confidence in how the data is being handled, not only by the government but by the private sector as well,” says Vemury, adding that sharing biometric data needs to have limits.
TikTok Ban Update: ‘Spicy’ Hearing Raises Key Questions, Expert Says
TikTok’s fight for survival — in its current form at least — arrived in federal court Monday, raising key legal issues about free speech, an expert has told Newsweek.
In the case, closely watched by many of the 170 million American TikTok users, the U.S. government wants to force the sale of the social media company from its China-based parent company, ByteDance, or enforce an outright ban, citing national security issues.
When oral arguments began at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington D.C. Circuit, TikTok argued free expression outweighs those concerns.
“It’s spicy, and it’s a little bit uncertain whether it’s going to go TikTok’s way, or the speakers, the users and the company’s way, in part because the judges seem skeptical of everybody,” said Abigail Rekas, an attorney and legal expert specializing in copyright, art law, and free speech at the University of Galway, Ireland.
“They ask some pretty hard questions of both sides.”
Instagram Announces Restrictive ‘Teen Accounts’ for Users Under 16
Instagram just unveiled a much more restricted way for teens under 16 to use its app.
Known as Teen Accounts, parent company Meta says its part of a “reimagining” of their platform for teens, in light of ongoing concerns about youth safety on the app — and they plan to apply it to all Meta platforms in the future.
A Teen Account is automatically set to private, with limits on who can message and interact with them.
Accounts are placed under default content restrictions, as well, and the app will provide time limit notifications urging users to leave the app after 60 minutes.
Teen Accounts are opted-in to an automatic, do-not-disturb sleep mode between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., silencing notifications and auto-replying to DMs. Sleep mode can also be adjusted to fully block a teen from using the app.
Google Employees’ Attempts to Hide Messages From Investigators Might Backfire
Google employees liberally labeled their emails as “privileged and confidential” and spoke “off the record” over chat messages, even after being told to preserve their communications for investigators, lawyers for the Justice Department have told a Virginia court over the past couple of weeks.
That strategy could backfire if the judge in Google’s second antitrust trial believes the company intentionally destroyed evidence that would have looked bad for it.
The judge could go as far as giving an adverse inference about Google’s missing documents, which would mean assuming they would have been bad for Google’s case.
Documents shown in court regularly display the words “privileged and confidential” as business executives discuss their work, occasionally with a member of Google’s legal team looped in.
On Friday, former Google sell-side ad executive Chris LaSala said that wasn’t the only strategy Google used.
He testified that after being placed on a litigation hold in connection with law enforcers’ investigation, Google chat messages had history off by default, and his understanding was that needed to be changed for each individual chat that involved substantive work conversations.
Multiple former Google employees testified to never changing the default setting and occasionally having substantive business discussions in chats, though they were largely reserved for casual conversations.
