Surveillance
What is ICE doing with this Israeli spyware firm?
The deployment of Paragon's Graphite spyware was a major scandal in Italy. Earlier this year, the messaging app WhatsApp revealed that 90 journalists and civil society figures had been targeted by the military-grade…
FBI spied on libertarian sci-fi author Vernor Vinge in ‘espionage’ case
Vernor Vinge had an active imagination. The computer scientist turned science fiction writer, who passed away in March 2024, won the Hugo Award several times for his groundbreaking novels on artificial intelligence and…
Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s spy industry connections
After his first arrest for sex crimes, Jeffrey Epstein tried to get into a new line of work: surveillance. In 2015, he partnered with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to invest in a security tech startup called…
Brickbat: Nosy Neighbour
A European Union proposal called "Chat Control" is gaining support from a majority of member states. The plan would require messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Signal to scan all user-generated content, even if it…
Brickbat: Social Media Monitors – Reason.com
The United Kingdom is establishing an elite National Internet Intelligence Investigations team to monitor social media for posts against migrants and early signs of civil unrest, operating from the National Police…
Warrantless use of license plate reader cameras is unconstitutional
Over the past two decades, Americans have been subject to one revelation after another of how little privacy we actually have, with both government and industry engaging in varying degrees of surveillance. This week, the…
Automated license plate readers are watching you
Last month, Charlie Wolf attended a meeting of the Greers Ferry, Arkansas, city council to complain about a license plate camera that he said was violating the Fourth Amendment by regularly taking pictures of his driveway and…
Hotel sex trafficking suit can proceed, inviting hotels to profile and harass guests
A hotel could be legally liable for sex trafficking because it failed to intervene against a guest who wore "sexually explicit clothing" and had condoms in her room, according to a recent ruling from Judge Matthew…
Israel used Microsoft to build a massive domestic eavesdropping system. Where will it deploy next?
Nowadays, it seems that the limit to government surveillance is neither the law nor technological capabilities; it's storage space. In the 1990s, the U.S. National Security Agency was "annually converting more than…
The libertarian case for postmodernism
What if one of the sharpest critics of centralized power, bureaucratic surveillance, and top-down social control wasn't a libertarian economist but a French postmodernist? And what if one of the economists most vilified…
