An attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who's overseeing a high-profile deportation case in Louisiana says she was stripped of her electronics moments before a pivotal hearing, preventing her from accessing evidence and court records that remained available to the three US government attorneys in the room, each of whom were allowed use of a laptop by the court. Louisiana immigration judge Jamee Comans ruled late last month that Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was eligible for deportation. During that hearing, however, Khalil's attorney Nora Ahmed says she was barred from bringing her laptop into the courtroom, despite having filed the proper paperwork in advance and being a frequent visitor to the immigration facility. "There should not be an advantage, no matter how small or how large, provided to a particular party over the other," says Ahmed. "Because that starts to infect the proceedings themselves and the notion of fundamental fairness that we all uphold in courtroom proceedings." The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Police departments across Arizona plan to implement the use of drones as part of its first responders to emergency situations. Scottsdale's police department will be the first in the state to use a special fleet of drones that can be sent to potential crime scenes and emergencies by special detection cameras. The drone technology will come from a new drone startup called Aerodome and the public safety tech firm Flock Safety, which makes gunshot sensors, analytic software and cameras that can monitor neighborhoods and read license plates. Scottsdale PD's drones will respond to emergencies in real time to provide first responders with a bird's eye view of emergencies as first responders make their way to the area. The drones can be dispatched by police officers and emergency dispatchers as well as Flock cameras that detect unlawful activity such as stolen vehicles or cars that match descriptions from an AMBER alert.

The Detroit Police Department has to adopt new rules curbing its reliance on facial recognition technology after the city reached a settlement this week with Robert Williams, a Black man who was wrongfully arrested in 2020 due to a false face match. It's not an all-out ban on the technology, though, and the court's jurisdiction to enforce the agreement only extends four years. Under the new restrictions, which the ACLU is calling the strongest such policies for law enforcement in the country, police cannot make arrests based solely on facial recognition results or conduct a lineup based only on facial recognition leads. Williams was arrested after facial recognition technology flagged his expired driver's license photo as a possible match for the identity of an alleged shoplifter, which police then used to construct a photo lineup. He was arrested at his home, in front of his family, which he says "completely upended my life."

The use of police drones is "poised to explode" in the next year as law enforcement takes advantage of the technology's proliferation, leaving public regulation and transparency efforts in danger of being caught woefully behind, civil rights advocates warn. "A world where flying robotic police cameras constantly crisscross our skies is one we have never seen before," Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a report released Thursday. "Yet there are strong reasons to believe that such a world may be coming faster than most people realize." At least 1,400 police departments across the country are using drones in some fashion, but only 15 have obtained waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly their drones beyond the visual line of sight, or BVLOS, of operators. That means the vast majority of departments are still limited in the types of calls they can respond to with drones.

Clearview AI has promised to stop selling its controversial face-recognizing tech to most private US companies in a settlement proposed this week with the ACLU. The New-York-based startup made headlines in 2020 for scraping billions of images from people's public social media pages. These photographs were used to build a facial-recognition database system, allowing the biz to link future snaps of people to their past and current online profiles. Clearview's software can, for example, be shown a face from a CCTV still, and if it recognizes the person from its database, it can return not only the URLs to that person's social networking pages, from where they were first seen, but also copies that allow that person to be identified, traced, and contacted. That same year, the ACLU sued the biz, claiming it violated Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which requires organizations operating in the US state to obtain explicit consent from its residents to collect their biometric data, which includes their photographs.

Clearview AI has proposed to restrict sales of its faceprint database as part of a settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The controversial facial recognition firm caused a stir due to scraping billions of images of people across the web without their consent. As a result, the company has faced the ire of regulators around the world and numerous court cases. One court case filed against Clearview AI was by the ACLU in 2020, claiming that it violated the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). That act covers Illinois and requires companies operating in the state to obtain explicit consent from individuals to collect their biometric data.

Notorious facial recognition company Clearview AI has agreed to permanently halt sales of its massive biometric database to all private companies and individuals in the United States as part of a legal settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union, per court records. Monday's announcement marks the close of a two-year legal dispute brought by the ACLU and privacy advocate groups in May of 2020 against the company over allegations that it had violated BIPA, the 2008 Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. This act requires companies to obtain permission before harvesting a person's biometric information -- fingerprints, gait metrics, iris scans and faceprints for example -- and empowers users to sue the companies who do not. "Fourteen years ago, the ACLU of Illinois led the effort to enact BIPA – a groundbreaking statute to deal with the growing use of sensitive biometric information without any notice and without meaningful consent," Rebecca Glenberg, staff attorney for the ACLU of Illinois, said in a statement. "BIPA was intended to curb exactly the kind of broad-based surveillance that Clearview's app enables. Today's agreement begins to ensure that Clearview complies with the law. This should be a strong signal to other state legislatures to adopt similar statutes."

Flying into Dallas Fort Worth International Airport from Mexico in December, I queued in the immigration line for US citizens and was taken aback when – rather than request my passport – the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent simply instructed me to look at the camera and then pronounced my first name: "Maria?" Feeling an abrupt violation of my entire bodily autonomy, I nodded – and reckoned that it was perhaps easy to lose track of the rapid dystopian devolution of the world when one had spent the past two years hanging out on a beach in Oaxaca. A CBP poster promoting the transparent infringement on privacy was affixed to the airport wall, and featured a grey-haired man smiling suavely into the camera along with the text: "Our policies on privacy couldn't be more transparent. In my case, the process was not so fast, as I had to hand over my passport for physical scrutiny after I raised the agent's suspicions by being unable to answer in any remotely coherent fashion the ...

Massachusetts State Police (MSP) has been quietly testing ways to use the four-legged Boston Dynamics robot known as Spot, according to new documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. And while Spot isn't equipped with a weapon just yet, the documents provide a terrifying peek at our RoboCop future. This browser does not support the video element. The Spot robot, which was officially made available for lease to businesses last month, has been in use by MSP since at least April 2019 and has engaged in at least two police "incidents," though it's not clear what those incidents may have been. It's also not clear whether the robots were being operated by a human controller or how much autonomous action the robots are allowed.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a formal complaint against Detroit police over what it says is the first known example of a wrongful arrest caused by faulty facial recognition technology. Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, an African American man, was arrested after a facial recognition system falsely matched his photo with security footage of a shoplifter. The New York Times reports that the ACLU is calling for the dismissal of Williams' case and for his information to be removed from Detroit's criminal databases, and prosecutors have since agreed to delete his data. Facial recognition technology has been criticized for years, with researchers showing it to be biased against members of different races and ethnicities. But its use by law enforcement has grown even more controversial in recent weeks following nationwide protests against police brutality and racism.