Jaikumar Vijayan reports: The battle to find a balance between privacy concerns and the beneficial use of drones for commercial and law enforcement purposes is in sharp focus in a bill that’s winding its way through the Texas legislature. The Texas Privacy Act (HB 912), sponsored by Rep. Lance Gooden (R-District 4), would make it [...]
Timothy B. Lee writes: Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder declared his support for requiring the government to get a warrant before reading Americans’ e-mail. It’s about time. Read more on WonkBlog on Washington Post.
Ryan Gallagher reports: If you are a customer of Verizon Wireless, you might want to consider switching carriers in light of the Associated Press phone snooping scandal. When the feds came knocking for AP journalists’ call records last year, Verizon apparently turned the data over with no questions asked. The New York Times, citing an AP employee, reported [...]
sosadmin writes: Did you know that a private company which hoards detailed information about your driving habits also has plans to create the largest private sector law enforcement database in the world, by combining plate reads with commercial databases, face recognition technology and more? Vigilant Video is a private corporation. It maintains a database called [...]
Tony Romm writes: Federal law enforcers say they have their hands full with criminals who skirt legal surveillance by using hard-to-wiretap services like Google and Facebook. Now they’re about to inherit a new foe in the fight: Capitol Hill. Some of the top lawmakers closely aligned with civil liberties and Silicon Valley interests are expressing [...]
Mark Sherman of the Associated Press broke the story yesterday: The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news. The records obtained by the Justice Department [...]
Angela Martin of CBS-DFW follows up on a story mentioned previously on this blog: Nordstrom is no longer collecting information from the smart phones of its customers. Earlier this week, CBS 11 told you about the technology being used at 17 Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack stores across the country, including the NorthPark store in Dallas. [...]