Faiza Patel (@FaizaPatelBCJ) serves as co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. She has testified before Congress opposing the dragnet surveillance of Muslims, organized advocacy efforts against state laws designed to incite fear of Islam, and developed legislation creating an independent Inspector General for the NYPD.
Ms. Patel is the author of five reports: Rethinking Radicalization (2011); A Proposal for an NYPD Inspector General (2012); Foreign Law Bans (2013); What Went Wrong with the FISA Court (2015); and Overseas Surveillance in an Interconnected World (2016). She is a frequent commentator on national security and counterterrorism issues for media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Guardian, MSNBC, Al-Jazeera, NPR, the New York Daily News, and the National Law Journal and has published widely in academic outlets as well.
Before joining the Brennan Center, Ms. Patel worked as a senior policy officer at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, and clerked for Judge Sidhwa at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Born and raised in Pakistan, Ms. Patel is a graduate of Harvard College and the NYU School of Law.
In this episode, we discussed:
a comparison of candidate Donald Trump's proposals to surveil Muslims to President Trump's policies. a description of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) program and its prospects under the Trump administration. the Fourth Amendment implications of police surveillance issues on the local level that potentially impact innocent civilians within the United States.Resources:
Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama
NEWS ROUNDUP
The U.S. Senate passed a resolution last week by a vote of 50-48 to overturn the FCC's ISP privacy rules. The rules were designed to prevent ISPs from using sensitive data about their subscribers for the companies' own commercial purposes. Ali Breland and Harper Neidig have the story in The Hill.
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Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law who is also a senior advisor to the president, will lead a new White House Office of American Innovation which, the President says, is indented as a sort of SWAT team that will seek to apply solutions from the world of business to the world of government. The new office will focus in things like Trump's $1 trillion infrastructure plan, which includes a broadband buildout component, as well as modernizing the federal government's technology and improving government operations. Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker report in the Washington Post.
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The Trump administration issued a ban of electronic devices on flights coming from 8 countries including Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The UK followed up with a similar ban. Authorities suspect a plot to bring down a plane with explosives hidden in an iPad, according sources cited by Ewen Macaskill in The Guardian.
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Google has been battling over the past week to prevent ads from showing up adjacent to hateful and offensive content. The glitch led major advertisers to withdraw spots from YouTube. AT&T and Verizon were among the companies that pulled their advetising from the platform. Google responded by giving advertisers greater control over where their ads appear. Google's Chief Business Officer Phillipp Schindler also apologized. But reports of ads placed next to offensive content were still coming in as of Monday. Mark Scott reports in The New York Times.
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Apple has succeeded in persuading a Chinese Court that its iPhone 6 and 6 Plus don't infringe the patents of Shenzhen Baili Marketing Services, a now-defunct Chinese smartphone manufacturer. If the patent infringement decision against Apple had been upheld, it was seen as threatening to Apple which is under intense competition in China. But Baili is expected to appeal. Eva Dou and Yang Jie report in the Wall Street Journal.
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Mark Bergen and Eric Newcomer reported in Bloomberg that an accident in Tempe has prompted Uber to suspend its autonomous vehicle tests in Arizona. According to police, Uber was not at fault and no injuries resulted from the accident.
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A New York attorney named David Thompson has discovered via a Freedom of Information Act request that on over 400 occasions between 2011 and 2013, the New York City Police Department deployed officers to videotape or surveil activities of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter protesters. Importantly, the NYPD was unable to produce documentation showing the surveillance was authorized by a judge or higher ups within the NYPD. George Joseph has the story in the Verge.
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Aida Chavez of the Hill covered a House Oversight hearing last week in which lawmakers grilled witnesses from the FBI about how they use facial recognition technology. Lawmakers were highly concerned about the impact the FBI's facial recognition database would have on communities of color as well as the public in general
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The FCC voted unanimously Thursday to clamp down on robocalls. The National Do Not Call list has failed to prevent robocalls. Phone companies will now themselves be permitted to identify numbers associated with robocalls and block the calls from ever reaching their customers.
