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 law enforcement. ...

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 some 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, Landmark, has ...

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

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

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 ...