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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
by Michael Dean Thompson
NSO Group is an Israeli firm started by former Israeli intelligence officers that produced some remarkably infamous software. The company’s software has become notorious for its use by governments with little regard for human rights violations against their own citizens. One of its products, …
by Michael Dean Thompson
Global Positioning Satellite (“GPS”) systems began as a tool to help the American military prosecute wars. Among its many uses today is to help the American criminal justice system prosecute its citizens. Not too long ago, the government was forced to tag vehicles with …
by Michael Dean Thompson
While it is true that Americans tend to carry their cellphones as grafted appendages, it may be that their cars know even more about them than their cellphones. Consider the following scenario: Jane sees that her car is iced over, so she uses her …
by Michael Dean Thompson
Over 50 years ago, fear of crime was even then associated in the minds of the 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 …
by Michael Dean Thompson
The breaching of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, shocked many Americans. Government filings uncovered since then suggest that even as the unrest raged, law enforcement had begun filing geofence warrants. We now understand that 1,535 names associated with phones using Google’s Location …
by Michael Dean Thompson
The 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (“FAA”) Section 702 (codified as 50 U.S.C. § 1881A) exists to facilitate the capture of the communications of foreign actors as they pass through American facilities and hardware. However, in the process, the communications of American citizens …
