Hasta La Gadget!

Like it or not, drones are coming to America’s skies—lots of them. By 2025, the government expects tens of thousands of drones to take flight, and it’s scrambling to get the proper regulations in place. It’s not off to a great start.

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If you’re already overwhelmed by the sheer amount of activity surrounding the ongoing NSA fallout, we’re guessing that now would be an excellent time to go on vacation. Predictably, lawsuits are already being filed against the National Security Agency, the second of which is coming from the American Civil Liberties Union. Essentially, it’s challenging the constitutionality of the surveillance program in a New York federal court, deeming the initiative “one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government.”

The suit claims that the program infringes upon (at least) the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment of the United States constitution. As The Verge points out, the ACLU’s prior NSA lawsuit (in 2008) was dismissed in a 5-4 outcome “on the grounds that it did not have legal standing to sue, since there was no way to prove it had been targeted.” Given the leaked documents involved now, however, the outcome could be much different this go ’round. Of course, one has to wonder: if all of this leads to the public shutdown of the program, are we capable of trusting the same government that started it to not actually operate it in secret?

Filed under: Cellphones, Internet

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Via: Wired

Source: ACLU [PDF]

Yesterday, the Fourth of July, the American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU in New Jersey launched an interesting app on Google Play. The app is called the Police Tape app. Basically citizens in New Jersey can use this app to secretly record their interactions with police officers. But that’s not all. The app also provides civilians with legal information about their rights as citizens, which could prove to be useful especially when you are dealing with abusive police officers.

The app lets users record videos and record audio conversations, and the recorded data will be automatically uploaded to secure ACLU-NJ servers, making it impossible for police officers to delete them. But what’s so cool about the app is that it has the capability to disappear on your screen when used, thus, making police officers believe that you are completely mum about what is happening. The Police Tape app is developed by OpenWatch and it is downloadable for free via Google Play. The folks over at ACLU-NJ said that a similar app for the iPhone will be coming soon.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Apple’s App Store reportedly flooded with corrupt apps, Android botnet discovered,