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 GPS monitoring ...

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 remote key ...

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 the predictive ...

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 History technology ...

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 are being captured ...

by Michael Dean Thompson

AI is having its moment. And though 
 much of what has been slapped with the AI label is generally a far cry from the large language models you may have experienced at Bing and Google, it can still be terrifying. These new generations of tools are enabling a surveillance state far beyond an Orwellian fever dream. And, it is not just the government watching you. Rather, the voyeurs are also corporations like Moderna and the NFL.

Maybe the most terrifying is something called correlation analysis. It turns out, your friends have a lot to say about you, even without opening their mouths. Using biometrics like facial recognition to identify you and your friends (who “co-appear” with you in images and videos), they analyze the amount of time you spend together and how often you meet. The system can then cross-reference other data and create a surprisingly accurate picture of you. The same type of technology has been put to use in China to track dissidents and protestors. Now, a company called Vintra has brought the concept to the U.S. and counts the Lee County Sheriff’s office among its clients. The Los Angeles Times queried several police ...

by Michael Dean Thompson

Most of us would feel violated to learn that our spouse or partner had been digging through our phone. Imagine if they were to use that access to determine where we have been and who we have been near and then 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 by people we love and hold most intimate, even if we believed we had nothing to hide.

Emma Well, a 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 law enforcement agencies in the U.S., wants to dig through your digital devices in such a manner. New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul has announced a $20 million expansion on top of tens of millions already quietly eased into the state’s budget. Five-point-three million dollars ...

by Michael Dean Thompson

The reduction of biases in criminal justice is an ongoing problem that does not lend itself to easy solutions. Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) may one day be that solution, though Boston University associate professor of law and assistant professor of computing and data sciences Ngozi Okidegbi points out that day is not here yet. The problem, as it is in all of criminal justice, is how pervasive and pernicious the issue of race can be. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, for every 100,000 adults within the U.S., there were 1,186 Black incarcerated adults in 2021. Similarly, there were 1,004 American Indians and Alaskan Natives per 100,000 that same year. In contrast, only 221 incarcerated per 100,000 that same year identified as white. Those extraordinary numbers highlight the severity of the problem but say little about underlying causations.

There has long been a call to increase the use of algorithms in all aspects of criminal justice, from policing to parole and everything in between, with the hope that a purely data-driven solution would eliminate human prejudice. Unfortunately, the systems put into place are often “black boxes” that its users have no real understanding of how the ...

by Michael Dean Thompson

Within the past several decades, police have acquired a new tool so secretive that prosecutors were told to either plea out cases or repress evidence rather than permit the public to know about them. Much to the chagrin of the courts, that secrecy extended even unto them. “It is time for Stingray to come out of the shadows so that its use can be subject to the same kind of scrutiny as other mechanisms.” Chief Judge Wood wrote those words in his 2016 dissent in United States v. Patrick, 842 F. 3d 540 (7th Cir. 2016) (Wood, J., dissenting), when the issue of cell-site simulators came before the Seventh Circuit. Nevertheless, little more is known about them seven years later, and various court references to their capabilities seem to conflict with each other. Fortunately, thanks to critical courts, the work of groups like the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (“EFF”), and the American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”), as well the emergence of competitors to the maker of Stingray who advertise their product capabilities, more information is being revealed about them.

The super-secret system in question is at least conceptually tied to a humble device. Years ago, corporations ...

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 ...