California Governor Gavin Newsom in September signed the Body Camera Accountability Act, a law prohibiting the use of facial recognition and other biometric tracking software in police body cameras. Following similar measures in San Francisco and Oakland, the law is the first statewide ban of its kind in the country.
Red flag laws are a threat to everybody’s rights, giving government the ability to take away constitutional rights of people who haven’t violated the law.
The war on drugs makes it far too easy for corrupt police officers to plant evidence on people.
One hidden cost of inflation is that it makes an increasingly large share of cash holdings and transactions subject to government surveillance.
I’ve heard it said that “you never forget where you were when you heard that President Kennedy was shot.” I remember, but most American’s don’t because Kennedy’s assassination was 54 years ago and most Americans weren’t alive then. Like many Americans, I am convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald, the person who shot President Kennedy,...
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What happens if the TSA catches someone with a firearm at one of their checkpoints? It happens a lot. Last year the TSA found 3,391 guns in carry-ons at checkpoints. This happened to a friend of mine this week. Here’s what he told me. He and his wife were going through the TSA checkpoint...
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September 11, 2016, marks the fifteenth anniversary of a calamity that shook America to its core. I remember vividly to this day being riveted by the constant video replays of the two Boeing 767s plowing into the World Trade Center, people leaping from office windows to their deaths, the collapses of the twin towers,...
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Editor: Today is the publication date of the Independent Institute’s newest book, American Surveillance: Intelligence, Privacy, and the Fourth Amendment, by Anthony Gregory (Research Fellow, Independent Institute). Published for Independent by the University of Wisconsin Press, this widely acclaimed new book traces the history of government surveillance in the U.S. that transcends party divides,...
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My initial reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement, like many old white guys, was that All Lives Matter. But recent events have changed my thinking on this. My old thinking: Racial discrimination is a reality, but race is just one of many personal characteristics on which people discriminate. Good-looking people tend to be...
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The Washington Post recently ran an article titled, “Surprise! NSA data will soon routinely be used for domestic policing that has nothing to do with terrorism.” In the article, journalist Radley Balko explains that provisions in the Patriot Act have allowed the National Security Agency to share information with a variety of other agencies,...
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