civil rights
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Big Brother Would Like To Warn You About Big Brother, Inc.
...The new report, titled "Big Data: Seizing opportunities, preserving values," tries to flesh out what those private-sector ramifications might be...The report is the White House "hoping to move the national debate over privacy beyond the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities to the practices of companies like Google and Facebook," as the paper puts it...
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Carmen Ortiz And Stephen Heymann: Accountability For Prosecutorial Abuse
Imposing real consequences on these federal prosecutors in the Aaron Swartz case is vital for both justice and reform Read More »
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EFF Sues FBI For Access To Facial-Recognition Records
As the FBI is rushing to build a "bigger, faster and better" biometrics database, it's also dragging its feet in releasing information related to the program's impact on the American public. Read More »
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Ending Campus Sexual Assault—For Good
Five years ago, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) published a series of groundbreaking reports on how U.S. colleges handle sexual violence. The investigation found that survivors faced a “depressing litany of barriers” to reporting assaults and that assailants rarely receive serious punishments...
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Fighting For Rights In A Time Of Big Data
More than a dozen civil rights groups are working to establish fairness guidelines for use by big data wielding law enforcement, hiring and commerce entities. They rightly point out the potential use of big data in discriminating against seniors and other groups. Below is the set of principles they think should be adopted across the board to prevent discrimination. [...] Read More »
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Let's Do Public Health Better
Eric Reinhart, who describes himself as “a political anthropologist, psychoanalyst, and physician,” has had a busy month. He started with an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) about “reconstructive justice,” then an op-ed in The New York Times on how our health care system is demoralizing the physicians who work in it, and then the two that caught my attention: companion pieces in The Nation and Stat News about reforming our public health “system” from a physician-driven one to a true community health one. He's preaching to my choir. I wrote almost five years ago: “We need to stop viewing public health as a boring, not glamorous, small part of our healthcare system, but, rather, as the bedrock of it, and of our health.” Dr. Reinhart pulls no punches about our public health system(s), or the people who lead them...
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Open Source Day at Grace Hopper 2015
The 2015 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) started out like any other, with a giant room filled with thousands of women with a passion for technology and computing. This year's welcome keynote opened with green lights strobing over a dark room. What a way to highlight the rows and rows of women ready to learn, connect, and join new communities. Telle Whitney, founder of GHC, was first to the podium and offered a heartfelt and sincere welcome message that brought a tear to my eye. She spoke of the women who built GHC from their vision of a better future, where women and men take equal part in technology, and of her diagnosis of an auto immune disease. But she's doing well she says, and thanked everyone for their thoughts and concern...
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Q&A with Andy Oram: How Can We Tell Whether Predictive Analytics Are Biased?
The fear of reproducing society's prejudices through computer algorithms is being hotly discussed in both academic publications and the popular press. Just a few of the publications warning about bias in predictive analytics include the New York Times, the Guardian, the Harvard Business Review, and particularly a famous and hotly contested article by Propublica on predictions of recidivism among criminal defendants...
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US Hospitals Send Hundreds Of Immigrant Patients Back To Home Countries To Curb Cost Of Care
Days after they were badly hurt in a car accident, Jacinto Cruz and Jose Rodriguez-Saldana lay unconscious in an Iowa hospital while the American health care system weighed what to do with the two immigrants from Mexico. Read More »
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Why Civil Rights Groups Are Warning Against ‘Big Data’
The backlash against the government's use of bulk phone records for intelligence purposes has been led mostly by technologists used to speaking the language of privacy. But a new push by civil rights organizations to challenge "big data" — both in the public and private sectors — is highlighting how the abuse of data can uniquely affect disadvantaged minorities. Read More »
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