by Anthony W. Accurso
Data brokers exist to buy bulk user data collected by advertising tech companies and resell it to other companies, government agencies, and the public. They claim this practice is harmless since the data has been “anonymized”—meaning a user’s name has been replaced by a random advertising ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The Supreme Court of Michigan ruled that the Legislature intended that no person be punished under both the state’s second-degree murder statute, MCL 750.317, and the involuntary manslaughter statute, MCL 750.329, when both convictions result from the death of a single person.
In the early morning ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
PenLink, a Nebraska company, is filling the void in the U.S. of private companies that help law enforcement agencies—mostly federal, but some local as well—accomplish the digital equivalent of wiretapping communications that occur over social media messaging services.
The company got its start in 1987 by ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
A report from Business Insider made public an internal Chicago Police Department (“CPD”) presentation that emphasizes the increasing use of facial recognition to identify suspects in investigations.
Law enforcement agencies have been making a lot of noise about end-to-end encryption (“E2EE”) of private messaging applications, all ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
Illinois recently passed the Protecting Household Privacy Act (“PHPA”), which limits state law enforcement access to data stored by third parties, i.e., companies like Google and Facebook, requiring warrants in most circumstances, and establishing disclosure and retention limitations.
Both the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
Maryland Detective Nick Jerman was featured in a July 2021 episode of the Street Cop Podcast in which he teaches officers to use subterfuge and publicly available facial recognition tools to identify people during traffic stops.
The Street Cop Podcast, hosted by its founder Dennis Benigno, ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
Recent FOIA disclosures revealed two contracts for law enforcement agencies under the U.S. Treasury—the IRS and Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”)—which will allow the agencies to obtain location data about persons being investigated, an action that circumvents legal requirements.
Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
On January 7, 2021, the FBI published a document entitled “Lawful Access,” detailing what information is available from various online messaging platforms and providing guidance to various law enforcement agencies on how such data can be obtained through procedures already authorized for investigative purposes.
The document ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The Supreme Court of Kentucky held that a police officer impermissibly extended a traffic stop when he suspended the completion of writing a traffic citation to assist other officers conducting a vehicle sniff using a drug-detection dog.
Just before midnight on April 21, 2017, Officer Ryan ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
Transparency and accountability in law enforcement make for better relationships between police and the communities they serve, but a growing reliance on tech provided to police by private companies is reducing transparency.
An October 2021 report in the journal Science highlighted this trend of outsourcing police ...
