Privacy
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A Senate committee passed an act recently called the Protect IP Act but then, just as quickly, a Senator from Oregon, Ron Wyden, put the bill on hold because as he said, it would “muzzle speech and stifle innovation and economic growth.” The latest piece of internet blacklist legislation, known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives, was introduced by the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) who claims it is for the purpose of shutting down foreign sites that post intellectual property created by U.S. firms, goes even further than the Protect IP Act. The act would allow the US Justice Department powers to punish and shut down websites, both in the U.S. and anywhere in the world and go after companies that provide support for them, either technically or through payment systems
The U.S. joins China in censoring the Internet: Voice of Russia
from the well-that-could-make-things-interesting dept In an amazingly short and to the point ruling (embedded below), a judge in a district court in Southern Texas, Lynn Hughes, ruled that letting the government get mobile phone data without a warrant was unconstitutional : When the government requests records from cellular services, data disclosing the location of the telephone at the time of particular calls may be acquired only by a warrant issued on probable cause . U.S.
Court Says Warrantless Mobile Phone Tracking Is Unconstitutional | Techdirt
Daily Kos: Fmr. Fox News Executive: Americans' Phones Were Hacked
After helping chairman Roger Ailes create the Fox News channel in 1996, Cooper was fired for doing an anonymous interview with New York Magazine : ”I'm frightened right now,” said a former Fox employee, noting the vast array of powerful connections Ailes maintains throughout the political and media worlds. “I've been told that if Ailes figures out I talked to you, he'll hunt me down and kill me.” Negotiating the ground rules for an off-the-record meeting, Ailes came on like an Edward G. Robinson character in a B movie.
Microsoft Patents 'Legal Intercept' Technology, Will Skype Have A Backdoor? — TheTelecomBlog.com
Microsoft and Skype may represent a match made in mobile heaven but they’ve been in the news for all the wrong reasons of late. Skype outages have become a norm rather than an exception. Skype protocol has been cracked through reverse engineering and published as an open source project. And now a newly patented Microsoft technology called ‘ Legal Intercept ‘ that would allow the company to secretly intercept, monitor and record Skype calls is stoking privacy concerns. The technology would allow Microsoft to silently record communications on VoIP networks such as Skype.Every right-thinking person abhors child pornography. To combat it, legislators have brought through committee a poorly conceived, over-broad Congressional bill, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. It is arguably the biggest threat to civil liberties now under consideration in the United States.
The Legislation That Could Kill Internet Privacy for Good - Conor Friedersdorf - Politics - The Atlantic
Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers' activities for one year--in case police want to review them in the future--under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today. The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall's elections, and the Justice Department officials who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements, a development first reported by CNET . A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.
House panel approves broadened ISP snooping bill | Privacy Inc. - CNET News
Aurora critics can remain anonymous, judge rules
In a decision with broader implications for online privacy, a judge has ruled not to force the identification of anonymous bloggers who wrote critical web posts about former Aurora mayor Phyllis Morris. The Ontario Superior Court ruling, which Ms. Morris intends to appeal, is a major blow to her $6-million defamation action, which targets three individuals who authored anonymous posts on the Aurora Citizen website, along with the site's moderators.
What did you do for AT&T? How long did you work there? I worked at AT&T for 22 and a half years. My job was basically to keep the systems going. They were computer systems, network communication systems, Internet equipment, Voice over Internet [Protocol (VoIP)] equipment. I tested circuits long distance across the country.
Interviews - Mark Klein | Spying On The Home Front | FRONTLINE | PBS
This open-source application maps the information that your iPhone is recording about your movements. It doesn't record anything itself, it only displays files that are already hidden on your computer. The file exists on PCs too, but we haven't written a version of the application that runs on Windows ourselves. If you do a web search, you'll now find versions that other people have created, but while we have no reason to believe they contain any malicious code, we haven't inspected and verified any of them ourselves. Since we can't vouch for them we don't feel capable of recommending one in particular.
petewarden/iPhoneTracker @ GitHub
Yes, that's the FBI saying that it shouldn't be forced to say who's violating their rights, because people might get upset that their rights are being violated and sue. And that's bad for business. This is a justification for secretly spying on people without a warrant? That people would get upset and sue?
FBI: Customers Might Sue If They Knew Companies Were Helping With Wiretaps | Techdirt
Breaking News on EFF Victory: Appeals Court Holds that Email Privacy Protected by Fourth Amendment | Electronic Frontier Foundation
In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak , the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Closely tracking arguments made by EFF in its amicus brief , the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail. EFF filed a similar amicus brief with the 6th Circuit in 2006 in a civil suit brought by criminal defendant Warshak against the government for its warrantless seizure of his emails.ACLU of Northern California : Don't Hide Your Gun in Your iPhone(?!)
By Chris Conley (Jan 5, 2011 at 11:30 am) In a case with chilling privacy implications, the California Supreme Court recently held that police officers can search the entire contents of a cell phone whenever they arrest someone , no matter how small the suspected crime or how relevant the cell phone contents might be. Why? Because it's just like a backpack, according to the Court, and previous cases have stated that backpacks can be searched "incident to arrest" without a warrant. The problem, of course, is that cell phones and backpacks are very different.One Hundred Naked Citizens: One Hundred Leaked Body Scans
At the heart of the controversy over "body scanners" is a promise: The images of our naked bodies will never be public. U.S. Marshals in a Florida Federal courthouse saved 35,000 images on their scanner.TSA Groping Out Of Control
TSA abuse in airports is completely out of control with more and more cases of security workers groping women, fondling children, abusing naked body scanners, and interrogating passengers emerging every week, and yet the government’s answer to the epidemic of oppression is to hand TSA thugs more power with which to harass American citizens. The story of Infowars employee Michelle , who along with her child was sexually assaulted by TSA staff after refusing to go through a naked body scanner, has gone viral on the Internet after it was picked up by the Drudge Report , a website leading the charge in the backlash against airport oppression at the hands of the TSA that has now led to the world’s largest pilot’s association boycotting the use of naked body scanners. Michelle’s traumatic experience represents just the tip of the iceberg."When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?' "And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.