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The Ever-Falling Cost of Surveillance

476 views · Published 20 February 2014 · 1:43:51 · Indexed 5 October 2026

Channel: New America · 2014 · News & Politics

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The Ever-Falling Cost of Surveillance: 
How You Can Be Tracked for Just Pennies a Day, and What It Means for The Future of Privacy


​It used to be that if the government wanted to secretly track your movements, it would have to spend hundreds of dollars an hour on a team of agents to follow you. Now it can track a cellphone for just pennies a day. The cost of surveillance is sharply dropping, making previously unimaginable surveillance cheap and easy. How can privacy law keep up, and ensure that our rights are protected against tech-enabled spying that was impossible—or impossibly costly—just a few years ago?

That question is the subject of an article just published by the Yale Law Journal Online, "Tiny Constables and the Cost of Surveillance: Making Cents Out of United States v. Jones," co-authored by independent privacy researcher Ashkan Soltani, who has recently shared the byline on some of the Washington Post's most explosive front page exposés on the NSA's surveillance programs, and Kevin Bankston, the Policy Director of New America's Open Technology Institute. Combining legal analysis of US v. Jones, the Supreme Court's landmark case on GPS tracking and the Fourth Amendment, with analysis of the actual dollar costs of location tracking methods through the decades, the authors chart a new cost-based theory of privacy that might be applied to new technologies.

Come join the authors in discussion with a top tech reporter, a privacy law practitioner, a constitutional rights scholar, and a privacy technologist as they tease apart the law and technology of cheap surveillance, from cellphone tracking to the NSA's bulk surveillance programs, and consider how we might protect ourselves practically and legally when more and more invasive surveillance is possible for less and less money. 

Join the conversation online using #surveillancecosts and following @OTI.

If you are unable to join us in person, please tune in to our live webcast of the event. No signup is required to view the streaming video.  
Participants
Moderator
Jennifer Valentino-DeVries
Reporter, Wall Street Journal 
@jenvalentino 

Featured Speakers
Kevin Bankston
Policy Director, New America's Open Technology Insititute
@kevinbankston

Ashkan Soltani 
Independent researcher & consultant specializing in consumer privacy & security
@ashk4n

Commentators
Orin S. Kerr
Fred C. Stevenson Research Professor, George Washington University Law School

Christopher Soghoian
Principal Technologist of the Privacy & Technology Project of the American Civil Liberties Union
@csoghoian

Marc Zwillinger
Founder & Managing Partner, ZwillGen PLLC
@MJZwills

http://newamerica.net/events/2014/the_cost_of_surveillance

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