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University COVID App Mandates Are The Wrong Call

As students, parents, and schools prepare the new school year, universities are considering ways to make returning to campus safer. Some are considering and even mandating that students install COVID-related technology on their personal devices, but this is the wrong call. Exposure notification apps, quarantine enforcement programs, and similar new technologies are untested and unproven, and mandating them risks exacerbating existing inequalities in access to technology and education. Schools must remove any such mandates from student agreements or commitments, and further should pledge not to mandate installation of any technology.

Even worse, many schools—including Indiana University, UMass Amherst, and University of New Hampshire—are requiring students to make a general blanket commitment to installing an  unspecified tracking app of the university’s choosing in the future. This gives students no opportunity to assess or engage with the privacy practices or other characteristics of this technology. This is important because not all COVID exposure notification and contact tracing apps, for example, are the same. For instance, Utah’s Healthy Together app until recently collected not only Bluetooth proximity data but also GPS location data, an unnecessary privacy intrusion that was later rolled back. Google and Apple’s framework for exposure notification based on Bluetooth is more privacy-protective than a GPS-based solution, but the decision to install it or any other app must still be in the hands of the individuals affected.

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Police Confiscate Man’s Firearm After Anonymous “Antifa” Members Accuse Him of Being a “Racist”

A California man had his registered firearm seized by local police after “antifa” members on social media accused him of being racist on the internet — the first case of its kind.

On July 7th/8th, left-wing extremist twitter user @anonymouscommie doxed a Sacramento resident named Andrew Casarez. The anonymous account accused him of being a “neo-Nazi troll.”

On the very same day, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office opened up an investigation into him. During a background check, they found that Casarez was a registered gun owner. On July 13th, 2020, Sergeant Nate Grgich executed a search warrant for his home and car.

Nothing illegal or of a criminal nature was found during the search, but Sgt. Grgich was able to get a judge’s permission to seize Casarez’s handgun, a pair of pants and a “racist” t-shirt using a new law enforcement tool called a “gun restraining order,” which was signed by Judge Jaime R. Roman.

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office is bragging about being the first in the country to seize a firearm using primarily the owner’s political ideology as the excuse.

On the case, spokesperson Lacey Nelson was quoted as saying “This search warrant it’s the first of its kind at least in the country. As far as how we obtained it and were able to serve it […] He was posting enough racist rhetoric and propaganda on Facebook that it was concerning that his behaviors could become violent in retaliation.”

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