by Eli Siems
–Liferaft, a cloud-based open-source intelligence program, will allow lawyers and corporate professionals, among other potential clientele, to utilize a combination of data mining and geolocation to find social media posts relevant to “issues that might affect staff or assets.”
–Alexa the Amazon robot has evidence relevant to a murder. Amazon has filed a brief seeking to throw out a search warrant for Alexa’s records, saying it violates 1st Amendment rights– Alexa’s 1st Amendment rights! Amazon argues that both user commands and Alexa’s replies are constitutionally protected speech, the latter representing a novel legal argument.
-On that note, readers interested in potential A.I. 1st Amendment rights should check out this article: “Siri-ously? Free Speech Rights and Artificial Intelligence.”
-Promptly after signing a major deal with Disney, CloudPets Toys discovered that its vast data troves of children’s voice command recordings had been hacked, exposing over 800,000 user accounts and 2.2 million recordings. As of the end of February, CloudPets had not yet alerted exposed users to the breach.
-Parts of FISA are up for reauthorization this year, including Section 702 of PRISM infamy. The White House has expressed full support for the reauthorization without reform of those provisions.
-The Center for Democracy and Technology has released a new report on data deletion and consumer trust.
–Spiegel reported on documents suggesting German intelligence agencies spied on a large number of foreign journalists including BBC, reuters, and New York Times employees.
-Finally, a French businessman is suing Uber after the app continued to send updates to his wife’s phone (from which he had ordered the service) even after he had logged off, revealing to his wife his extramarital tryst. “My client was the victim of a bug in the application,” his lawyer asserts.