05/24/18 Overnight Links

The Telegraph: Amazon defends marketing facial recognition tool to police amid privacy concerns

Ars Technica: Police use of Amazon’s face-recognition service draws privacy warnings: “Cloud-based service can index millions of faces and recognize 100 people in an image.”

Wired: Few rules govern police use of facial-recognition technology

NBC: Your DNA is the next big privacy battleground

National Review: Report: FBI greatly overestimated threat posed by encrypted cell phones

Techdirt: The attorney general thinks police having to follow the Constitution leads to violent crime increases

The Atlantic: The undemocratic spread of Big Brother: “Year by year, for the foreseeable future, surveillance hardware and software will keep improving, extracting ever more information. Threats to privacy will proliferate. Communities will theoretically be able to choose whether or not their police officers make use of a given piece of new technology. But in practice, if the status quo persists, even the most intrusive innovations that portend the most radical changes in society will be quietly adopted without public notice or debate or votes that force elected officials to be accountable. The cops will just press ahead without asking permission.”

The Intercept: With Medal of Honor, Seal Team 6 rewards a culture of war crimes

The American Conservative: The Saudi lobby’s scheme to destroy the Iran deal

Also The Intercept: One teen and three FBI operatives: Was the government behind a 17-year old’s terror plot in Texas?

FEE: How media outlets misinform the public about teacher pay

Reason: Firefighter earned $300,000 in overtime by working more hours than actually exist

Ars Technica: NASA’s EM Drive fails actual testing

LiveScience: Archaeologists find shipwreck with stash worth up to $17 billion

BoingBoing: Depression: the psychedelic cure

Author: S. Smith