by Michael Dean Thompson
Corporations have turned cellphones into mobile snooping devices that monetize consumer habits and daily activity. A new service, Pretty Good Phone Privacy (“PGPP”), addresses some of the privacy concerns built into the cellular system.
The problem comes down to the architecture of the cellular networks, which were not designed with privacy in mind. Buried within the SIM card is an Internal Mobile Subscriber Identifier (“IMSI”), a globally unique code. The IMSI is used for many things, especially payment status. Essentially, the IMSI ties the device to the person.
Just about every second or so, your phone “pings” the nearby towers to discover which has the strongest signal, as well as which receives its signal best. Those pings carry the phone’s IMSI and generate a record that can be used to provide a rough triangulation of the phone’s location. While not as accurate as a GPS signal, it has found significant use by police who wish to establish the phone owner’s presence. The tower information is used by the carriers to route calls to and from the phone, as well as data requests. The carrier can tie the phone to a location when phone calls and text messages ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
Few of us would not feel violated to learn that our spouse or partner has been digging through our phone. Imagine if they were to use that data to analyze where we’ve been and who we’ve been near, and then, they were to gain access to our cloud services to examine long forgotten backups, images, and documents. Insatiably, they move on to access our social media accounts and peek into every post we and our friends have made. Most people would shudder in horror at such an intrusive sifting of our lives, even if we believed we had nothing to hide.
Emma Well, policy analyst at the technology research and advocacy organization Upturn, asserts, “At no point in human history have we collected and stored so much information about our lives in one place.”
The New York State Police, along with thousands of other agencies in the U.S., wants to dig through your digital devices in just such a nightmarish manner described above. New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul has announced a $20 million expansion on top of the tens of millions already quietly eased into 2022’s budget. Five-point-three million dollars of that set aside to modernize ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
The use of facial recognition systems was banned by the New Orleans City Council in 2020, only to be overturned in July of 2022 in response to fears of rising crime despite concerns within the affected communities about civil rights, privacy, and accuracy.
Facial recognition systems are known to have a high error rate. Much of its success depends on the quality of the image, the availability of multiple source images, and the color of the subject’s skin. Black faces are misidentified at higher rates than white faces. Since most facial recognition systems measure relative distances between cheekbones, eyes, etc., they can look over features that a human eye might find prominent.
In an effort to separate themselves, companies that make the systems each have somewhat different methods of attacking the challenges of facial identification. Those differences can lead to biases that are hidden from the user and the public, resulting in some biases that may only become apparent after millions of runs. The requirement for multiple source images creates additional Fourth Amendment issues for forensic systems with regard to both known-person images (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, etc.) and unknown-person images (e.g., surveillance of protestors, abortion seekers, ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
Over 50 years ago, fear of crime was even then associated in the minds of governing bodies with Black and brown communities. An effort to combat crime based on that fear spurred the creation of software that has since grown to become the predictive policing systems ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
The State of Arizona’s Attorney General, together with the Phoenix Field Office of the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations, has collected more than 145 million records of private financial transactions — and that number is likely still growing. The transactions were collected from companies ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
Through a series of public records requests to the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, Unicorn Riot (a non-profit, media-based organization of journalists) has obtained rare insight into how the police department responsible for George Floyd’s death uses technology to spy on its citizens. In all, they gathered ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
The January 6th Capitol riot illustrates how geofencing warrants are threatening American citizens. As part of the investigations into the events, the FBI served a geofencing warrant to Google that demanded a list of all the devices in or near the Capitol during the attack. An ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
Many courts cases hinge on whether the voice or voices on a recording belong to a specific speaker, such as the defendant or a witness, who is unknown to the listener. Misidentification of a voice can influence juries and lead to disastrous decisions carrying lengthy sentences ...
by Michael Thompson
For years now, cars have allowed us to synch our devices with their onboard computers, giving us hands-free and Wi-Fi access along with a wealth of infotainment options. A user could be forgiven for believing the data is transient, i.e., temporarily stored during use and erased when ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
The Electronic Freedom Foundation (“EFF”), working with journalism students at the University of Nevada, Reno (“UNR”), created the Atlas of Surveillance as a pilot from counties along the U.S. border with Mexico in 2019. Its task was to track how the police use technology for surveillance. ...
