UK government’s Apple backdoor order is a massive target for criminals
Apropos the UK’s apparent order to Apple to enable surveillance of its end-to-end-encrypted iCloud data, Advanced Data Protection (ADP): someone
Continue reading
Category: Surveillance
32 European police forces attack encryption (again)
Over 30 European police forces have (yet again) attacked the increasing deployment of end-to-end encryption. This is how powerful policy stakeholders (like law enforcement and big business) often win arguments. They never, ever give up, repeating the same arguments ad nauseam — over decades if necessary — regardless of any evidence which emerges.
Continue reading
Police real-time remote biometric ID in the AI Act
This new analysis identifies at least five areas where the final text of the EU AI Act on law enforcement use of “real time” remote biometric identification (RBI) systems in publicly accessible spaces could be improved from a fundamental rights perspective.
Continue reading
UK tribunal fundamentally wrong on Clearview
On 17 October 2023, the UK First-Tier Tribunal held the use of the surveillance system offered by the US company Clearview by non-UK law enforcement and intelligence agencies constituted “an activity which, immediately before [Brexit] completion day, fell outside the scope of EU law”, and hence the GDPR. In this brief analysis, I look at why the Tribunal came to this conclusion, and show it is fundamentally flawed.
Continue reading
Should UK intelligence agencies get easier access to “low-sensitivity” datasets?
Our responses to chapter 3 of Lord Anderson’s review of the UK Investigatory Powers Act, on the use of bulk datasets with “low/no expectation of privacy” by the intelligence agencies.
Continue reading
Recurring themes in discussion of AI
Certain themes keep coming up in discussions of “AI”/machine learning I’ve written about before. To make it easier to refer to them, I’ve just published two new documents.
Continue reading
How can intelligence agencies get independent advice?
The UK’s “National Cyber [?] Force” has for the first time published detailed information about its work. But how can such a clandestine agency get genuinely independent advice?
Continue reading
The inadequacy of the US Executive Order on Enhancing Safeguards For US Signals Intelligence Activities
The new US Executive Order does not change the fact the US authorities insist on carrying out indiscriminate, untargeted mass surveillance, also of EU persons and EU governmental and non-governmental entities, by means of bulk collection of data, without independent substantive judicial oversight or effective redress.
Continue reading
The proposed new UK data protection regime & the continuing UK surveillance regime
If the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill is adopted as proposed, the UK data protection regime will be significantly less strict than – i.e., not “essentially equivalent” to – the EU GDPR regime, and undermine the EU regime.
Continue reading
Will the EU-US Privacy Framework succeed where the Privacy Shield and Safe Harbour failed?
The EU and US announced on 25 March they have “agreed in principle on a new Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework”. But there is little in the announcement of the “political”/“in principle” agreement suggesting the EU Court of Justice’s high standards will be met.
Continue reading
Recent Comments