by Michael Dean Thompson
The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab investigated weaknesses in the manner with which cellphones and their locations are passed from tower to tower. What they found was that it was remarkably easy for a state agency, telephone company, and others to track cellphones using the archaic technologies that enable cellphones to be truly mobile.
As a cellphone travels between cell towers, sometimes at high rates of speed, cell towers must pass messages back and forth that identify the subscriber. It allows the cell tower awaiting the mobile user to make certain connections that are available in anticipation of the customer’s needs. However, each cell tower may have a different owner or operator. For that reason, a common exchange has been created that gives the towers the ability to share information and verify subscriber information irrespective that the phone and tower originate from different networks.
The IP Exchange (“IPX”) is a network that assists cellphone companies to share data about their customers. The IPX, however, is vulnerable to bad actors who wish to track cellphone users anywhere in the world. Anyone hooked into the IPX can monitor a cellphone’s movements with ease. And getting access is not ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
About a year after the New Orleans Police Department (“NOPD”) performed its first facial recognition scan under a new policy that reauthorized its use, they have little to show for it. That is according to NOPD’s own data, which was analyzed by Politico. The new policy reintroducing automated facial recognition (“AFR”) was instituted in response to a jump in the crime rate. Businesses, police, and the mayor supported AFR use as an “effective, fair tool to identifying criminals quickly,” according to Politico. Instead, the data show AFR use is focused on Black people, and it has been associated with comparably few arrests, giving it a low effectiveness.
It makes sense that police departments would reach to tools to help them with recognizing faces because people tend to be fairly bad at it, especially with regard to identifying people of other “races” than themselves. What the NOPD data show, however, is that AFR has amplified the underlying human biases they are trying to correct.
New Orleans Councilmember At-Large J. P. Morrell, a Democrat who voted against using the technology, told Politico, “The data has pretty much proven that [civil rights] advocates were mostly correct” and added, “It’s ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
One hundred petabytes is a difficult quantity to comprehend. In plain English, that is about 113 quadrillion or 113 followed by 15 zeroes. According to ProPublica, that is the rough data equivalent of 25 million copies of the movie Barbie. One hundred petabytes is also approximately the volume of bodycam video held by Axon’s cloud storage system. In that sense, then, even the comparison to Barbie does not quite capture the magnitude of the data, as the bodycam data is not as prolific a bit generator as a high-definition movie. For that reason, it is far more than the 5,000 years of high-definition video the Barbie comparison implies. New York City alone generates millions of hours of bodycam video per year. The numbers continue to grow. And the majority of it remains unwatched.
Police bodycams came about as an intended solution to a problem. It was hoped that the tools would help build back public trust after several high-profile police killings. It is certainly true that transparent use of video footage can reveal what actually happened during a disputed encounter. In 2020, Louisiana State Police arrested Antonio Harris, during which the troopers kneed, slapped, and punched ...
Michael Dean Thompson
Modern medical science has delivered some remarkable lifesaving technologies. Included in the list of modern marvels are pacemakers equipped with telemetry systems that permit remote monitoring but also remote modification of their operating parameters. With such a pacemaker, a technician can monitor how the patient’s heart responds to their daily routine and modify the settings as needed. Similar technologies exist for those who no longer produce their own insulin. Nevertheless, significant personal habits can be inferred from both what a person’s body finds to be normal and how often it deviates from those norms.
We live in a society that collects large volumes of information about its individual members. Not all of that collected data serves an obvious purpose. For example, why does a car manufacturer track GPS coordinates with each “event,” such as a door opening, a gear shift, and a press of the brake? Does a game downloaded onto a cellphone really need to track the user’s location and search history? All that tracked information comes at a price to civil liberties. In essence, anything in the possession of corporate servers is likely accessible to the government. Many corporations sell their users’ raw data on ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
Introduction
After 9/11, authorities determined the event was possible due to a failure of the various intelligence agencies to communicate with each other and share their information, data, insights, and discoveries. In 2007, Eben Kaplan wrote for the Council on Foreign Relations that a clear example ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
The framers of the Constitution attempted to guarantee defendants a fundamentally fair trial. They did so, however, at a time when modern science and the scientific method was in its infancy. For that reason, scientific forensic evaluations and standards were not mentioned, leaving the Supreme Court ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
Drones as a first responder are the latest cop fad in America. They hope that drones will be able to arrive on the scene faster than a patrol officer and provide the lay of the land for arriving cops. Across the country, more than 1,400 police ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
Policing agencies throughout the country continue to find new ways to secretly surveil Americans. Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, has discovered yet another way the cops are working in the dark to scrutinize the behaviors of every single American. The program was called Hemisphere ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
Police are increasingly looking to corporations for help solving crimes. Google is accustomed to providing lists of users who happened to be physically near a crime. In addition, it has provided the identities of people who had misfortune to search for certain keywords to law enforcement. ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
Cell-site simulators (“CSS”), also known by the brand name Stingray and more generically as IMSI Catchers, have permitted governments to spy on each other, hackers to install zero-click malware, and stalkers to track the location of their targets. They work by taking advantage of some of ...
