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Content type: Long Read
In the UK, successive government ministers and members of parliament have made emotive proclamations about the malaise of "public sector fraud".
This year, former Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey said that the welfare system "is not a cash machine for callous criminals and it’s vital that the government ensures money is well spent...[and] fraud is an ever-present threat."
In 2013, the UK's minister for the disabled made numerous claims that there were "vast numbers of bogus disabled […
Content type: Examples
Ohio teenager Aaron Ogletree has won a lawsuit he filed against Cleveland State University after he was required to pan a webcam around his bedroom to eliminate possible cheating before taking a remote exam.
The court agreed that Ogletree's Fourth Amendment rights were violated by the scanning requirement, which briefly exposed tax documents and medications. The university has filed an appeal and in the meantime has told students that they will not be permitted to take remotely proctored…
Content type: Examples
US parents have reported receiving an explicit and deliberately shocking image after hackers attacked the primary school learning app Seesaw. Seesaw has 10 million users, who include teachers, students, and family members. The company said the hackers had not gained administrative access, but had accessed individual accounts via compromised email addresses and passwords that had been reused across services.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62914010
Writer: BBC
Publication: BBC
Content type: Examples
At least 37 US colleges and universities, as well as numerous school district, have repurposed Social Sentinel (recently renamed Navigate360 Detect) to help campus police surveil student protests. The software is marketed as a safety tool that can scan students' social media posts and university email accounts to identify those who are at risk of harming themselves or others; adoption in schools has been fuelled by shootings. For public colleges, this use of the software creates a conflict…
Content type: Examples
The 32-year-old Americans with Disabilities Act is failing to protect neurodivergent students from school monitoring and risk assessment software that treats any divergence from stereotypically "normal" behaviour as a harm to both the students themselves and others. Remote proctoring software penalises those who need psychological help, flag "suspicious" movements such as looking away from the screen during a test, and makes no provision for disabled students' special needs. These problems are…
Content type: Examples
In a 2010 case, the Lower Merion school district in suburban Philadelphia school district agreed to pay $610,000 to settle two lawsuits brought by students who had discovered that the webcams attached to their school-issued laptops had secretly taken hundreds of photographs of them in their homes along with hundreds of screen shots. In one of the cases, a teenaged boy was accused of popping pills; in fact, he was eating jelly beans.
https://www.wired.com/2010/10/webcam-spy-settlement/
Writer…
Content type: Examples
Even though schools are back in session in person, their teachers can still monitor the screens on their school-issued devices via software such as GoGuardian. In a new report from the Center for Democracy and Technology, 89% of teachers say their schools will continue to use student-monitoring software, up from 84% in 2021, raising worries about how the data will be used in a climate increasingly hostile towards abortion and LGBTQ+ issues.
CDT also reports that 44% of teachers say that at…
Content type: Examples
A new report from the education news site The 74 Million finds that in-school digital surveillance programs are flagging LGBTQ+ content as "pornographic". For example, Gaggle, comprehensive monitoring software implemented in the Minneapolis public school system, has led administrators to notify parents that their children's submissions have been flagged, without context, for mentioning suicide, gay, and lesbian. Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ed Markey (D-MA), and Richard…
Content type: Examples
Following the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision that paved the way for states to enact legislation criminalising abortion, health advocates warn that the surveillance software schools use to algorithmically monitor students' messages and search terms could be weaponised against teens looking for reproductive health care. These systems can automatically alert school administrators, parents, or police when they detect "dangerous behaviour", which may include anything from imminent suicide…
Content type: Examples
The Welsh Local Government Association is collaborating with the Centre for Digital Public Services on an 8-to-12-week discovery project to help local authorities to understand schools' requirements for information management systems and understand the market offerings in order to formulate a needs-based procurement specification. The project is intended to produce a shared set of core requirements and will look at user need for establishing one or more core datasets, individual schools'…
Content type: Examples
During a remotely proctored online exam, a number of students on the Bar Professional Training Course urinated in bottles and buckets and wore adult diapers rather than risk the possibility that their exam would be terminated if they left their screens long enough to go to the toilet. The Bar Standards Board responded to the story by saying that students are warned in advance that they will not be able to leave the room during an online exam and that they should take the exam in a test centre…
Content type: Examples
In September 2022, the UK Department for Education announced that under a £270,000 contract with Suffolk-based Wonde Ltd it would collect data on children's school attendance and potentially share it with other government departments and third parties as part of its drive to raise attendance. A visualisation tool will create an interactive national attendance dashboard to run alongside the publication of fortnightly attendance data that the DfE says will provide "ongoing transparency". LSE…
Content type: Examples
Environmental campaigners wrote to Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon asking her to intervene to ensure the right to protest was upheld during COP26, when as many as 10,000 police officers from all over the UK were deployed per day on the streets of Glasgow. The letter said the police were reportedly filming campaigners, eavesdropping on conversations, unlawfully demanding personal details, and in one case followed a group to where they were staying even though no protest was in progress.…
Content type: Examples
Emails obtained by EFF show that the Los Angeles Police Department contacted Amazon Ring owners specifically asking for footage of protests against racist police violence that took place across the US in the summer of 2020. LAPD signed a formal partnership with Ring and its associated "Neighbors" app in May 2019. Requests for Ring footage typically include the name of the detective, a description of the incident under investigation, and a time period. If enough people in a neighbourhood…
Content type: Examples
Since the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, Minnesota law enforcement agencies have carried out a secretive, long-running surveillance programme targeting journalists and civil rights activists known as Operation Safety Net, a complex surveillance engine that has expanded to include collecting detailed facial images, scouring social media, and tracking mobile phones. Documents obtained via public records requests show that the police continued using the powers granted under OSN to monitor…
Content type: Examples
After the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, the Department of Homeland Security expanded its monitoring of online activity and set up a new intelligence branch to counter domestic terrorism, including tracking platforms that have been linked to threats and “narratives known to provoke violence”. The agency warned law enforcement partners when appropriate when it saw upticks in activity on platforms linked to white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The Brennan Center for Justice warns in a new…
Content type: Examples
According to internal documents obtained by the Brennan Center, the Polish “strategic communications” specialist Edge NPD, whose business is helping companies with market research, provided the Los Angeles Police Department with a free 40-day trial in which it collected nearly 2 million tweets, including thousands relating to six topics, including Black Lives Matter and “defund the police”. LAPD did not ultimately enter into a contract with the company; the documents do not say what the agency…
Content type: Examples
According to internal documents, the San Francisco Police Department illegally spied on thousands of Bay Area residents protesting in 2020 against the murder of George Floyd and racist police violence. To conduct its surveillance, the SFPD used a network of more than 300 video cameras in downtown’s Union Square even though the city had passed an ordinance in 2019 that banned SFPD and other city agencies from using facial recognition and requiring them to get approval before using other…
Content type: Examples
Internal documents show that local police coordinated with Enbridge, the oil company building the Line 3 pipeline through northern Minnesota, to track and crack down on indigenous opposition to the development in an initiative known as Opposition Driven Operational Threats (ODOT). Enbridge designed ODOT to spot emerging outside threats to its business, defining “threat!” as anything from reputational harm to property damage. In 2021, ODOT tracked more than a dozen “threat actors”, including…
Content type: Examples
At his 2021 trial, prosecutors used previously-unseen infrared footage from FBI airplane surveillance at 9,000 feet to attempt to show that 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse chased one of the two people he later claimed to have shot in self-defence. Rittenhouse travelled from his home in Illinois to Wisconsin to join a protest following the 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake. Aerial surveillance of people in public places is legal in the US, but illegal if directed at a single person for an…
Content type: News & Analysis
Last night, PI, Migrants Organise and Bail For Immigration Detainees joined forces to shine a light on the enduring plight of migrants in the UK who are subject to hardline and dehumanising Home Office policies.
Our joint light projection marked the 10 year anniversary of former Home Secretary Theresa’s May’s infamous 'hostile environment', a policy purposefully cruel that includes indefinite detention of migrants and refugees.
The past decade has also seen the steady creep of data sharing…
Content type: Report
Privacy International’s submissions for the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration inspection of the Home Office Satellite Tracking Service Programme
The Home Office have introduced 24/7 electronic monitoring and collection of the location data of migrants via GPS ankle tags. This seismic change cannot be overstated. The use of GPS tags and intention to use location data, kept for six years after the tag is removed, in immigration decision-making goes far beyond the mere…
Content type: News & Analysis
The UK government has acknowledged that section 8(4) of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (“RIPA”) (which has since been repealed) violated Articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In relation to Article 10, it specifically acknowledged that the way in which security agencies handled confidential journalistic material violated fundamental rights protected by Article 10.
As part of a friendly settlement with two applicants, the UK government acknowledged…
Content type: Press release
Today, the High Court ruled that the Home Secretary acted unlawfully and breached human rights and data protection laws by operating a secret, blanket policy of seizing, retaining and extracting data from the mobile phones of asylum seekers arriving by small boat.
This claim for judicial review was brought by three asylum seeking claimants: HM represented by Gold Jennings, and KA and MH represented by Deighton Pierce Glynn. The Claimants, like thousands of others arriving by small boat, all…