by Michael Dean Thompson
Don’t ask Google this simple question: “Are Bengal cats legal in Australia?” That is the gist of an urgent warning on cybersecurity firm Sophos’ website. People who have clicked on the resulting links have had their personal information stolen. It is a simple enough hacker tactic ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
Police body cameras were full of promise. After several high-profile police killings, people turned to body cams for a solution. It makes sense. Cameras were already recording an increasing number of incidents as civilians witnessed events that poorly matched police reports. If the cops were wearing ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
The federal government has again discovered that its use of facial recognition technology (“FRT”) harms Americans. The agencies using the technology are often doing so with little oversight or training, which is what the Government Accountability Office told us in 2023. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
Modern computing systems constantly record when a specific event occurs. A common example of this is the timestamp applied to a document file that indicates when the file was last updated. But the timestamps can be more pernicious. Within the files can be more timestamps that ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
It should come as no surprise that anything you delete on your device is not necessarily gone. Cops using forensic software can often look into a device’s primary storage (as well as cloud storage) and pull up information that the user may have believed was permanently ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
The majority of states across the U.S. now allow people who have been convicted of some felonies to have the record of their conviction removed. The complete expungement of felony records allows the convicted person to live as if the conviction never occurred. However, very few ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
The cell-site simulator (“CSS”) is a powerful and largely unregulated device once designed for military intelligence use that has found its way onto the streets of the U.S. Today, in fact, it is even being offered to policing agencies pre-installed on unmarked police vehicles. The system ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
The Federal Aviation Administration has relaxed its rules so that drones can be flown beyond line-of-sight by certain groups such as cops, firefighters, and even construction companies. Some policing agencies are choosing drones that only point the camera down at the ground when they arrive at ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
Metadata is the data that describes data. If you make a phone call, metadata describes that call’s external characteristics: source number, destination number(s), how long the call lasted, etc. Although the metadata does not describe content, it still delivers enough information about a connection that a ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
The Black Lives Matter (“BLM”) protests ignited changes among law enforcement agencies throughout the country. Text messages from police in 2020 showed they were only enforcing curfews against protestors. Z. Williams, the director of client support and operations at the Denver-based nonprofit Bread and Roses Legal ...
