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

New America Foundation
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
4:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.

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.

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

To RSVP for the event:
http://www.newamerica.net/events/2014/the_cost_of_surveillance

For questions, contact Kirsten Holtz at New America at (202) 735-2806 or holtz@newamerica.org