Dhruv Mehrotra
Truthout
New York, NY, United States
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Past articles by Dhruv:
Facebook Enables Anti-Abortion Clinics to Collect Highly Sensitive Info on Would-Be Patients
Personal data may someday be used as evidence against abortion seekers in states where the procedure is outlawed. → Read More
DC Police Tried to Fire 24 Current Officers for ‘Criminal Offenses.’ A Powerful Panel Blocked Nearly Every One, Documents Show.
Disciplinary files obtained by Reveal and WAMU/DCist show how a panel of high-ranking officers – including the current police chief – kept troubled officers on the force. → Read More
Crime Prediction Software Promised to Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them
Millions of crime predictions left on an unsecured server show PredPol mostly avoided Whiter neighborhoods, targeted Blacks and Latino neighborhoods. → Read More
How We Determined Predictive Policing Software Disproportionately Targeted Low-Income, Black, and Latino Neighborhoods
A trove of unsecured data allowed the first-ever independent analysis of actual crime predictions across the U.S. by the self-described software leader, PredPol → Read More
We're Archiving Yahoo Answers So You'll Always Know How Babby Is Formed
With the help of the Internet Archive—and a little bit of code—we set up a script to auto-archive as many of the roughly 84 million submitted questions that we were able to find using the “sitemap” file for the Yahoo Answers site. → Read More
The U.S. Is Sending Hundreds of Thousands of Empty Shipping Containers Across the Ocean
In our latest proof that global capitalism is extremely logical and efficient, hundreds of thousands of completely empty shipping containers are being transported overseas amid the pandemic, according to an analysis by Earther. → Read More
Leaked Parler Data Points to Users at Police Stations, U.S. Military Bases
Location data gleaned from thousands of videos posted on the social network Parler and extracted in the days before Amazon restricted access to app this week, reveal its users included police officers around the U.S. and service members stationed on bases. → Read More
Parler Users Breached Deep Inside U.S. Capitol Building, GPS Data Shows
At least several users of the far-right social network Parler appear to be among the hoard of rioters that managed to penetrate deep inside the U.S. Capitol building and into areas normally restricted to the public, according to GPS metadata. → Read More
The Big Oil Money Behind the Members of Congress Who Fueled the Capitol Attack
Fossil fuel companies helped those who wanted to overthrow the election results that led to violence on the Capitol on Wednesday. Earther pulled donation data from the past decade to see just how much money they gave. → Read More
U.S. Schools Are Buying Phone-Hacking Tech That the FBI Used to Investigate Terrorists
A Gizmodo investigation has found that schools in the U.S. are purchasing phone surveillance tools from Cellebrite and companies that offer similar tools just four years after the FBI used it to crack a terrorism suspect's iPhone. → Read More
A New 'Buy Black' Campaign Aims to Avert an Amazon Surveillance State
After a summer of nationwide protests against unchecked state violence brutalizing Black people in America, Amazon’s ever-escalating push to make itself indispensable to daily police work is drawing fresh scrutiny from a host of leading civil rights advocates. The tech giant’s efforts to support and enhance police surveillance capabilities, aimed unevenly at communities of color, has given rise… → Read More
American Cops Turn to Canadian Phone-Tracking Firm After Infamous 'Stingrays' Become 'Obsolete'
Police across the United States are scrambling to secure funding for new cellphone-tracking equipment after the maker of the controversial “Stingray” device quietly announced last year it would no longer sell equipment directly to local law enforcement. → Read More
Louisville Police Take Down Inmate Lookup Site Amid Mass Arrest of Protesters
An estimated 127 people have been arrested since protesters took to the streets of Louisville, Kentucky, on Wednesday after a grand jury chose not to charge three officers for Breonna Taylor’s death. With hundreds more expected to be detained in the coming weeks, the Information Systems Team at the Louisville Metro Department of Corrections has made the unusual decision to disable its inmate… → Read More
The Nvidia RTX 3080 eBay Debacle Exposed a Scalper Bot Civil War
Last week, RTX 3080 scalpers pissed off a lot of Nvidia GPU fans by buying up all the graphics cards and attempting to resell them for hundreds of dollars more than the actual MSRP. Unfortunately, this is a common scalper tactic: Buy up as many items of a single product as possible, create a false scarcity, and sell them at a higher price to make a huge profit. People did this at the beginning… → Read More
CBP Drones Conducted Flyovers Near Homes of Indigenous Pipeline Activists, Flight Records Show
Tom Goldtooth awoke on Feb. 21 expecting a pretty regular day ahead. And by all accounts, his day was normal. He was on the road by 11 a.m. to catch a flight. But unbeknownst to him, around the same time as he left, U.S. Customs and Border Protection was watching his home in Beltrami County, Minnesota, from 20,000 feet in the air. A CBP Reaper drone operated silently for more than an hour,… → Read More
Prison Phone App Exposes Millions of Inmate Messages and Personal Data
As many incarcerated individuals are having their visiting privileges restricted due to the global pandemic, Telmate’s Getting Out app has become one of the only options that families separated by incarceration have to keep in touch. But according to research published today, hundreds of millions of intimate messages from many millions of inmates were sitting exposed on the web. → Read More
DHS Is Spying on Social Media to Track Threats to Statues
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence & Analysis has been authorized to conduct social media surveillance of protestors in order to protect statues and monuments, according to an unclassified three-page document obtained by Lawfare and the Washington Post. The undated document appears to offer legal guidance to analysts at I&A about how best to implement the “expanded… → Read More
We Mapped Where Customs and Border Protection Drones Are Flying in the U.S. and Beyond
In 2011, Rodney Brossart, a cattle rancher from Lakota, North Dakota was accused of stealing six cows. The cows, he said, simply wandered on to his 3,000-acre farm, and by his estimation, they, therefore, belonged to him. When the cops came, he and his family were prepared. Armed with high power rifles, they engaged in a 16-hour standoff with police. → Read More
Customs and Border Protection Flew a Predator Surveillance Drone Over Minneapolis Protests Today
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has flown a Predator drone above ongoing protests against police brutality in Minneapolis, according to flight logs. → Read More
The Mystery of 'Hacked' Houseparty Users May Have Been Solved
By the end of March, things were looking good for the group video chat app Houseparty as quarantined young people, perhaps put off by Zoom’s relentless security failures, were looking for a less corporate-seeming platform to keep in touch with friends and family. Vogue gushed that it was “the quarantine app you need to download immediately,” as daily downloads for the Epic Games-owned app… → Read More