by Jayson Hawkins
Video footage from security cameras is common fare in a variety of modern movies and television shows, but depictions in popular culture rarely offer an accurate portrayal of the state of surveillance technology or the way police or other security personnel utilize it. Gone are the days ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Police shootings across the country in recent years have raised questions about how cops are trained and their attitudes toward the local communities they are supposed to protect and serve. Under what circumstances are uses of force deemed excessive?
According to an independent report of an incident ...
by Jayson Hawkins
When George Orwell imagined the dystopian society of 1984, humanity simply did not possess the technology to bring his vision of the omnipresent surveillance state to life, even if there was no shortage of governments that wanted to do just that. The simple fact is that collecting, ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Proposed legislation coming in the wake of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot would add “domestic terrorism” to the long list of federal crimes. Amid the unsettled atmosphere in Washington, D.C., the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021 sounds, on its face, more like a common-sense measure ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Law enforcement agencies, like all bureaucratic institutions, generate extraordinary numbers of documents, records, and data. As calls for greater police accountability have grown across the country, one of the primary obstacles to building consensus about the problems in policing or any possible solutions has been an inability ...
by Jayson Hawkins
As modern society grows increasingly dependent an electronic devices, it is not surprising that there has been a corresponding rise in the reliance on encryption to maintain privacy. But as recent investigations by the DOJ and FBI have revealed, most encryption does not offer the level of ...
by Jayson Hawkins
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have recently engaged in a series of very public quarrels with tech companies over the inability to unlock and search the smartphones of suspects in high-profile murder and terrorism cases. Companies like Apple have refused to give police unfettered ...
by Jayson Hawkins
In the fast-paced digital world of ever-increasing convenience, few people can be bothered with reading the fine print. Yet the devil lurks in the details, and by clicking “I agree” to the terms of a phone app, an always-on device, or array of other tech, users potentially ...
by Jayson Hawkins
A study published in Nature Human Behavior found that the allocation of surplus military equipment (“SME”) to local police agencies had no effect on crime rates. Researchers also discovered that the Department of Defense records of the agencies that received SME, which included everything from office equipment ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Political efforts have been underway to withdraw troops and bring an end to America’s military involvement in Afghanistan. While this two-decade old conflict is considered by many to be the longest war in U.S. history, that ignores a much costlier and deadlier battle that has been waged ...
