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NZ Herald
4 days ago
- NZ Herald
Police tout first-responder drone tech as lifesaving for officers and community members
'When you have a camera in the sky that can see things that police officers can't normally see, that offers a huge potential for privacy invasion,' said Beryl Lipton, a senior researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. DFRs serve as an eye in the sky, police say, streaming footage to officers before they enter a potentially dangerous situation. One of the hardest aspects of policing is that in calls for service, 'we don't have crystal balls, we don't know what we're going into', said Roxana Kennedy, chief of the police department in Chula Vista, California. There is no public list of law enforcement agencies that have adopted the programmes, and grey areas around what constitutes a DFR versus a different kind of drone programme makes creating a definitive count difficult. Around 50 agencies launched DFR programmes between 2018 and 2024, said Charles Werner, a retired Charlottesville fire chief who founded DroneResponders, an advocacy group that promotes responsible drone use. The technology is gaining ground fast: 'A handful of departments per week' are adopting it, said Divy Shrivastava, chief executive of Paladin Drones, a DFR manufacturer. The FAA has approved waivers for at least 300 agencies to adopt drone first responder programmes so far this year, according to Werner, who said he meets regularly with representatives of the federal regulatory agency. 'The FAA made the review process faster by removing duplicate steps and giving first responders updated guidance on how to submit waiver requests,' an FAA spokesperson said in an unsigned statement to the Washington Post. Captain John English, who leads the DFR programme for the Chula Vista Police Department, called the drones the 'single greatest integrated piece of technology' for policing. His agency became the nation's first adopter of the programme in 2018. DFRs are different from the tactical drones long used in policing, drone experts said. Unlike some earlier drones, DFRs can be launched from docks positioned around a city and controlled from inside police stations. They don't need to be within an officer's line of sight, which is why they require a special waiver from the FAA as part of a regulatory process meant to prevent collisions and other hazards. The drones can arrive on the scene of emergencies far faster than squad cars, police chiefs told the Washington Post. Kennedy's department, Chula Vista, said its drones' average response time is under two minutes, consistently outpacing patrol units. In Redmond, Washington, drones arrive to the scene before an officer about 75% of the time they are deployed, according to municipal data. In Elk Grove, California, that rate is 70%. The incident that 'changed everything' for Kennedy, she said, was when a drone responded in 2019 to a call about a man who appeared to be erratically waving a gun. Before officers arrived, the drone footage showed the object was not a gun, but a cigarette lighter. 'It could have ended up in a shooting,' Kennedy said. Police officials whose departments have adopted DFRs said the programmes are invaluable. In May, a drone in Redmond helped locate a missing diabetic elderly man. Officers on foot had searched the area where he was ultimately found but couldn't see or hear him, said Darrell Lowe, the city's police chief. Lieutenant Romy Mutuc, who heads the new DFR programme in Laredo, Texas, said his department has equipped its drones with Narcan - a nasal spray that can treat narcotic overdoses. In an overdose scenario, Mutuc said, an officer could drop a dose onto the scene and talk a bystander through the process of applying it through the drone's loudspeaker. DFRs are also widely deployed for low-priority calls, like about a suspicious person walking near private property. Sometimes the drones help police realise it's unnecessary to send an officer to the scene in-person. In nearly 20% of incidents where the Chula Vista department has deployed a DFR, the agency has cancelled officer response after the drone's arrival, according to English. But there are concerns among critics, who say drone first responders can encourage police intrusion in places they couldn't normally view. 'Drones and aerial cameras could be used to surveil political protests, and it could even be deployed for other purposes to see who is seeking healthcare in California from another state or used to track who's coming and going at an immigration courthouse,' said Jacob Snow, a technology and civil liberties lawyer at the ACLU of Northern California. 'So the idea that we should all be assured that law enforcement is just saying, 'Don't worry, it's only for a narrow purpose' flies in the face of what's happened historically.' In Chula Vista, a lawsuit filed by a local newspaper publisher seeks to force the police department to release the drone video footage collected in one month of 2021. The publisher, Art Castanares, is concerned that police could be infringing on people's privacy, said Cory Briggs, his lawyer. Privacy advocates say police departments may promise to use the DFRs only to respond to calls for service or certain kinds of emergencies, but once the technology is out of the bottle, it will be hard to put it back in. Drone industry representatives and cities that have adopted DFR programmes have offered assurances that they have implemented guardrails to address privacy concerns. Some departments said they keep the cameras pointed towards the horizon while en route to an incident. Some don't turn on the camera's recording function until the drone arrives at its destination, said Werner. And agencies said they aim to be transparent about the technology's use, including through public dashboards that log flight maps. Skydio, a DFR manufacturer, works with agencies to help develop policies surrounding drone use, 'and more importantly, how they do not intend on using drones', said Noreen Charlton, the senior manager of public safety marketing at the firm. In Redmond, the city's policy 'prohibits the department from using drones for general surveillance, harassing or discriminating against individuals or groups, or conducting personal business'. Those concerned about excessive surveillance remain sceptical. Lipton, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she hopes there are 'consequences for when there is abuse or misuse' of DFRs. Part of that, she said, could involve 'annual reviews by the city council and public meetings to discuss what reasons the surveillance tools were used for and whether there were any violations'. In the same vein, independent oversight bodies and local government could help assuage some of the concerns by imposing strict limits on the programmes, said Jay Stanley, a privacy and technology policy analyst at the ACLU. 'This is really a brand-new technologyand the jury is still out on it.'
Yahoo
26-07-2025
- Yahoo
U.K. starts enforcing online age check rules
A U.K. law requiring that pornography websites verify the age of their users took effect Friday. The BBC reports that around 6,000 porn sites have said they will start verifying users' ages to comply with the Online Safety Act, although at least one major site was not requiring age checks as of Friday morning. The law also requires that online platforms prevent children from being exposed to harmful content, which is why sites like Reddit, Bluesky, X, and Grindr have also begun asking users in the U.K. to verify their age through means including selfies or government-issued IDs. This is just one of a number of new child protection laws that could normalize online age checks globally, according to Wired. The approach has been criticized by groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a threat to online privacy and anonymity — indeed, it's worth noting that in a recent breach of the dating safety app Tea, many of the affected images were selfies and digital IDs uploaded for account verification. Some internet users may try to get around age checks by using fake IDs, selfies of video game characters, or VPNs.
TechCrunch
26-07-2025
- TechCrunch
U.K. starts enforcing online age check rules
In Brief A U.K. law requiring that pornography websites verify the age of their users took effect Friday. The BBC reports that around 6,000 porn sites have said they will start verifying users' ages to comply with the Online Safety Act, although at least one major site was not requiring age checks as of Friday morning. The law also requires that online platforms prevent children from being exposed to harmful content, which is why sites like Reddit, Bluesky, X, and Grindr have also begun asking users in the U.K. to verify their age through means including selfies or government-issued IDs. This is just one of a number of new child protection laws that could normalize online age checks globally, according to Wired. The approach has been criticized by groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a threat to online privacy and anonymity — indeed, it's worth noting that in a recent breach of the dating safety app Tea, many of the affected images were selfies and digital IDs uploaded for account verification. Some internet users may try to get around age checks by using fake IDs, selfies of video game characters, or VPNs.
Irish Independent
21-07-2025
- Business
- Irish Independent
Lobby group weighs in against Ryanair in US legal battle
The lobby group has claimed that Ryanair is attempting to stymie competition by taking on Ryanair sued the website in 2020 in Delaware, alleging that it was screen-scraping the airline's fares without permission. Screen-scraping involves accessing an airline's ticket prices and flight data, and then selling tickets for those flights through a third-party website. After a four-day trial last July, a jury in Delaware convicted of having caused economic harm to Ryanair. The jury awarded the Irish airline just $5,000 (€4,293) – the minimum threshold required to state a claim under the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). However, the district court judge who heard the case then agreed with that Ryanair had not met the requirement of proving that at least $5,000 of loss was attributable to which is a prerequisite to any finding of civil liability under the CFAA. Accordingly, the judge overturned the ruling. Ryanair has now appealed against that decision, seeking to have the judge's decision reversed, or to have a new trial. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has weighed in behind The lobby group's founders were US author and lyricist John Barlow and entrepreneur Mitch Kapor. Its backers also included Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. It has argued that the continued reliance on the CFAA by companies to take legal actions could stymie competition. 'If unauthorised access can be predicated on a violation of a website owner's stated preferences, rather than hacking technological barriers, then companies will continue to use the CFAA to fend off competition,' the lobby group has claimed in its submission to the US Court of Appeals. 'For example, companies commonly use automated web browsing products to gather web data for a wide variety of uses.' Those practices include manufacturers tracking performance ranking of products in the search results of retailer websites, or monitoring posts on social media, it points out. Inhibiting competition is precisely what Ryanair sought to do here 'If the use of valid credentials in a way that has been disallowed as a matter of stated – or even unstated – policy were a CFAA violation, a company could create a password-protected 'gate', make the key freely available to all, and then send cease-and-desist letters to anyone they don't like,' Electronic Frontier Foundation said in its submission. 'This concern is not speculative. Inhibiting competition is precisely what Ryanair sought to do here, and in keeping with what companies have repeatedly tried to do in the past, with partial success.' Ryanair has already claimed that the travel firm has 'escaped liability' after the Delaware judge overturned the jury's verdict. 'The court impermissibly usurped the role of the jury as the ultimate finder of fact when it found that no reasonable jury could conclude that Ryanair's costs due to Booking's conduct from March 1, 2022, to February 28, 2023 would have exceeded $5,000,' it has claimed.
RNZ News
30-06-2025
- RNZ News
Can US Customs legally search your phone and what can you do about it?
Photo: RNZ Explainer - We carry our entire lives on our phones these days, but that also can make you particularly vulnerable when travelling to another country. When visiting America, US Customs have the right to search your devices - as do many other countries. After the return of Donald Trump to the presidency this year, there have been increased reports of travellers to the US denied entry and some detained in custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). New Zealand has recently updated its advice to those travelling to the US to highlight the risks and what travellers may face, including inspection of your laptops, phones and tablets. Is this legal, and is there anything you can do to protect your security? Here's what you need to know. They sure can. It is laid out clearly on the US Customs and Border Protection website . Sophia Cope is a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, a nonprofit organisation that defends civil liberties. She said Customs have a wide remit to conduct inspections. "Customs and Border Protection (CBP) asserts broad authority to search travellers' devices at ports of entry (like international airports), even devices of American citizens," she said. US Customs claims the searches help fight crime before it enters the country. The CBP defines "devices" to be: "Any device that may contain information in an electronic or digital form, such as computers, tablets, disks, drives, tapes, mobile phones and other communication devices, cameras, music and other media players." "These device searches are unconstitutional," the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes on its website, calling searches "exceptionally intrusive" . The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, but border agents have been found to have wide exceptions under legal doctrine. Non-US citizens do not necessarily have all of the same guaranteed constitutional rights that American citizens do. The US government claims that in 2024, less than 0.01 percent of arriving international travellers had their devices searched. However, there has been a strong surge in immigration crackdowns since Trump returned to the White House. Trump issued an executive order in January calling to "vet and screen to the maximum degree possible all aliens who intend to be admitted, enter, or are already inside the United States". Customs has the right to vet and screen visitors entering the US. Photo: AFP / Getty Images North America If you're a non-citizen trying to enter the US, refusal to comply with a device search may result in being denied entry, Cope said. "American citizens have the most leverage to refuse to comply because they must be let back into the country," Cope said. "However, they can be detained for several hours, subjected to additional questioning, and their devices can be confiscated for days, weeks, or months." US green card holders should also be let back in the country, but that has sometimes changed in recent months, she said. "We've seen the current administration display a willingness to challenge green card status, and so these travellers should take that into consideration." Donald Trump's administration has tightened border security. Photo: AFP "These searches have been used to identify and combat terrorist activity, child pornography, drug smuggling, human smuggling, bulk cash smuggling, human trafficking, export control violations, intellectual property rights violations and visa fraud, among other violations," the CBP website states . CBP also says searches can be used to see what a visitor's "intentions" are in coming to the US: "Furthermore, border searches of electronic devices are often integral to determining an individual's intentions upon entry to the United States and thus provide additional information relevant to admissibility of foreign nationals under US immigration laws." The CBP says it can retain copies of information obtained from a border search if it contains evidence of violation of law, or more broadly, "if the information relates to immigration, customs, or other enforcement matters." Data that is retained is kept in the CBP's systems, which it says have "robust access controls limiting user access to only those with a need to know". CBP should not access data stored in cloud services, Cope said. "CBP's 2018 policy expressly prohibits officers from looking at live cloud content on devices seized at the border/airports/other ports of entry. Border agents must put a device in airplane mode or otherwise disconnect it from the internet." The EFF has put together an extensive digital privacy guide for travellers , she said. The Foreign Affairs Ministry updated its travel advice to New Zealanders in May, including warnings about possible detention at the border . The US is under guidance for travellers to "exercise increased caution" on the government's Safe Travel website . A spokesperson for MFAT said that as of late June, 16 New Zealanders had requested assistance with immigration difficulties in the US since January. "This is made up of issues at the border and also in the community. It doesn't mean these people were detained," MFAT said. MFAT's Safe Travel website warns that on arrival to the US, "your travel documents, reasons for travel, or belongings (including electronic devices) may be subject to scrutiny and inspection". There have been multiple reports of people visiting the US having trouble at the border over political speech. Australian Alistair Kitchen was detained and questioned about views on Israel and Palestine before being deported from LA to Melbourne. He told RNZ's Jesse Mulligan that his name was called over a loudspeaker before he was even through the Customs queue. "I was pulled into the back room and my phone was demanded and my passcode was demanded and I realised at that moment that this wasn't random or ad hoc but they had been waiting for me, and they told me as much. Australian writer Alistair Kitchen. Photo: Supplied "They said, the reason you're here is because of these posts you wrote online about the protests at Colombia (University) ... and I had taken those posts down days before I got on the plane." The Department of Homeland Security has denied Kitchen was deported over his political views. "The individual in question was denied entry because he gave false information on his ESTA application regarding drug use," it said in a statement, although Kitchen maintains he was first singled out for screening over his political posts. Social media can leave plenty of traces even if they are not on your phone. "Social media apps can contain cached or copied content that is on the device's hard drive, even though the original content is principally stored on the social media company's servers," Cope said. "Thus, when a device is in airplane mode, some of that content may be viewable on the device, even if it's otherwise private. As such, people can delete those apps for the purpose of travel and reinstall them later to avoid border agents accessing cached private social media content." A New Zealand telecommunications expert who asked not to be named told RNZ that "I suspect if you've been online telling everyone what you think about Donald, it's too late" even if you delete information from your phone. The expert said that the information is out there and seen by companies such as Peter Thiel-founded mass surveillance technology company Palantir. "If apps are deleted on a phone but an officer knows ahead of time about a traveller's social media, the lack of the apps on the phone might lead to more scrutiny and questioning," Cope said. "I had prepared," Kitchen said. "You go through the passport control and you do make sure that your social media has been cleaned up, that your phone is missing messages that might have been critical of Donald Trump, for example. ...In my case, it was not sufficient exactly because they had already done this background search on me." US Immigration Customs and Enforcement teams - ICE - have been cracking down on illegal immigration. Photo: US ICE Many other countries can also search your phone at Customs. In New Zealand, Customs has had the power since 1996 to examine all goods crossing the border, including devices. However, Customs said "officers must have 'reasonable suspicion' of criminal offending before searching an electronic device and must have "reasonable cause to believe" that an electronic device has offending material on it before detaining it". If you refuse access, courts can impose a penalty of up to NZ$5000 - but this is only possible if Customs decides to prosecute the traveller. Customs claims on its website that most passengers entering New Zealand do not have their devices searched. The advice from some tech experts is to make a plan before travelling if you're concerned about data on your phone - but it might not be a good idea to buy a pristine cheap "burner" phone for a trip. "We've heard anecdotally that travelling with a temporary device or an otherwise "clean" device devoid of any personal information can itself raise suspicions with border officers," Cope said. "At the same time, travellers may have very sensitive information on their devices, especially if you're someone with ethical or legal obligations for confidentiality such as a journalist, attorney, or doctor. "But even average people may have personal photos or texts or emails that reveal sensitive or intimate things about themselves or their families that they wouldn't want a US federal agent to see. "People should therefore think about what privacy interests they have and mitigate their risks - both of a privacy invasion and of being denied entry or escalating an interaction with a CBP officer - to the extent they feel comfortable." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
