Archive for the ‘Privacy’ Category
Make the call
A broad coalition of organizations jointly signed a letter urging the congress and Senate to reject the proposed FISA legislation amendments. The proposed legislation will risk civil liberties and will hand more unchecked power to the executive branch. It is time to pick up the phone and call your representative and tell them to vote against this act.The U.S. Capitol Switchboard is (202)224-3121 - don’t hesitate and make the call.
As organizations that are deeply committed to both civil liberties and effective intelligence-gathering, we strongly urge you to oppose legislation recently outlined by Senator Bond to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This bill unreasonably and unnecessarily authorizes broad surveillance of Americans’ international communications without meaningful Fourth Amendment protections: no individualized warrant issued by a court, no determination of probable cause of wrongdoing, and no specification of the location or means of the surveillance.
Touted as a compromise to end an impasse between House and Senate versions of FISA legislation, the bill proposed by Senator Bond is far from a compromise. Its chief provisions are not significantly different from those contained in the bill passed by the Senate in February of this year (S. 2248). Like that measure, the “compromise” would threaten Americans’ privacy by severely curtailing judicial review and failing to include other reasonable civil liberties protections that appear in the House-passed version of the legislation (H.R. 3773). Neither Sen. Bond nor the administration has made a persuasive case that these sweeping new powers are needed or that existing authorities are inadequate to ensure the effectiveness of U.S. intelligence-gathering activities.
Worth quoting
In a response to a question about his political views, on one of the comments for one of his earlier posts, John Scalzi provided the following answer:
Well, I don’t want my political proclivities to be in doubt, so let me be absolutely crystal clear where I stand:
I support the right of same-sex married couples to carry concealed weapons.
I hope this explains everything.
The bigest threat
As annoying and disturbing the idea of banning the use of certain words is, I doubt the ability of practically implement it. It is the idea, that the government should be busy telling people how to behave, that anger me. However the focus should be not at the stupid idea of banning words, nor at the danger of the city enforcing breastfeeding, but on the dangerous plan to build a web of surveillance cameras that will cover big parts of manhattan.
Surely the Mayor, and his administration, talking about the benefits from such networks and promising restricted use of it. However the danger in the temptation of using such power shouldn’t be tested, after all - we already know how much the Mayor like to tell us how to live our life.
The Panopticon, as envisaged by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), was a society (initially proposed as a prison) in which surreptitious surveillance of the citizenry was always possible and ever-known. Control was exercised not by being surveilled continuously but by each person knowing they might be under surveillance at any time, or all the time.
Bentham was a man ahead of his time. His pet project was never fully carried out because the technology available at the time, relying as it did on direct, physical surveillance (electricity as a harnessable force, with which Benjamin Franklin was just then beginning to experiment, was still more than a century away) made creation of a workable Panopticon infeasible. Were Bentham alive today, he probably would be the most sought-after consultant on the planet.
The key to the surveillance society foreseen by Bentham more than two centuries ago was control. Crime was rampant in late 18th-century and early 19th-century London. Controlling the populace by modifying behavior became the central problem for Bentham and other social scientists of the day.
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Of course, Messrs. Bloomberg and Blair have one benefit available to them that was largely denied Bentham — money. Lots of money. "Homeland security" money taken from the wallets of taxpayers, but treated by government appropriators as theirs by right, is eagerly ladled out for cameras to surveill all. Add the magic words "for fighting terrorism" to your request for federal money and the chances of securing those dollars are made many times greater.
Not only is money readily available for government agencies to install, monitor and expand surveillance systems, but the cameras themselves are magnificent generators of money. Already in London, vehicle owners are billed for using their cars and trucks in certain areas and at certain times, through use of surveillance cameras that photograph, record and track vehicle license plates. The multimillion-dollar system being set up by Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly will almost certainly be similarly employed down the road.
The road to hell
This is bad on so many levels:
Spy-in-the-sky cameras are being used to identify householders who are wasting the most energy and to shame them into turning the central heating down.
Thermal images of homes have been taken by a light aircraft fitted with military spy technology to record the heat escaping from people’s houses.
[...]
Officials from the authority shrugged off suggestions of a Big Brother-style invasion of privacy by prying on people’s properties and then publishing the information.
They said that they hoped to use the maps to pinpoint the homes where grants should be offered and to identify empty properties that could be used to lessen the housing shortage.
We are so far from government only role is to protect human rights. So far that it seems OK for government official to abuse one’s right for privacy even when no law was broken…
They are not life lovers
Reading this post confirmed what I suspected for long time. While the issue of abortion in general, and late term abortion in particular, is a complicated moral issue - the motives of many participants in the debate aren’t.
A fair debate can be about who can make the priority decision, in what terms would we prefer one choice over the other and many similar questions.However the position quoted by Stephan clearly confirmed that many of those so called "Pro Life" simply hate women. At some point a decision being made whose life getting priority - the women or the fetus. Denying the women rights for abortion regardless the situation isn’t about preserving life - it just about scarifying the life of the women.
Does MySQL compromise your e-mail address?
Recently I received an e-mail with very disturbing news:
Hello,
I wanted to let you know that I found your email address along with mine in an email that MySQL.com sent out! I ran all the email addresses into Excel and found over 9,000 email addresses! I was extremely upset about this as I am sure you are too. I wanted to let you know this because I am emailing MySQL.com and complaining about this and you might want to do the same. I get enough spam as it is. Thanks!
While I wasn’t able to validate the claim on e-mails I received from MySQL.com I verified that the sender is a real person. If this claim is correct, and I have no reasons to doubt it, the sender of the e-mail had my e-mail address, this is very disturbing.
Providing my e-mail done always under the promise that the company that received my e-mail address will keep it confidential. One can expect from company like MySQL to keep the e-mail addresses it receives confidential.
The Big Brother?
eWeek reports on companies that are screening workers’ e-mails. The magazine describes this phenomena:
“SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters)—Big Brother is not only watching but he is also reading your e-mail.
According to a new study, about a third of big companies in the United States and Britain hire employees to read and analyze outbound e-mail as they seek to guard against legal, financial or regulatory risk.”
Regular reader of this blog know that I’m constantly worried about privacy issues and the government’s infringements of privacy right. However this is completely different and unlike the noise that it start to make in the blogosphere – this activity is well within the companies right.
Using the company’s e-mail isn’t , and should not, considered as using private e-mail. Not only that the company itself can use it as its own property, which it is, its require to do it by many regulations.
I don’t understand, however, why one should use the company’s e-mail , and have it stored for whatever regulatory inspection, when there are so many other solutions around.
Wonders
On my laptop at home I’m using Zone Alarm firewall , which I like very much. Today I got from them advertisement e-mail attempting to sell this :
Anonymous Surfing protects you and your family from online identity theft by keeping your IP address (and your identity) private. It also protects you from visiting phishing, pharming, or spyware sites by displaying a warning notification of the hidden dangers ahead. Anonymous Surfing offers peace of mind and is an excellent companion to antivirus, anti-spyware and firewall protection.
I only wonder if it will give me any protection from this ?
Call records, and then what?
During the weekend I was reading very well drafted opinions about how the government, and the telecom companies, did not do anything wrong obtaining the call record of the entire population.
Chris argued that not only the actions discussed were completely legal but they did not violate any right. His assay is, by the way, very well written and argued, and although I disagree with his moral argument I recommend reading.
Jeff Jarvis argued that our call record aggregate data belong to the public, and therefore:
If the people own it, then one could argue that the government, acting as the people, may seek and use that data unless we, the people, forbid it through law. There is, of course, a proper debate about whether the law does allow it. There is also a proper debate over whether this is a necessary and prudent weapon in finding terrorists (and whether that is being done effectively). Indeed, a Washington Post poll says that 63 percent of Americans consider this an “acceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism.” And didn’t we protest that our government did not do a good enough job analyzing data and intelligence to prevent 9/11? If someone had been analyzing patterns of enrollment in flight schools — hmm, why are an abnormally high number of Saudis suddenly learning how to fly passenger jets? — then could we have stopped them? A further question is whether we have a right to know that all this is going on or whether that public knowledge cripples this investigation and our safety. Finally, it is not clear that releasing aggregate data necessarily violates individuals’ privacy. My point is that this isn’t as simple as raising the tattered-from-overuse privacy flag. Neither is this as simple as raising the also tattered war-on-terrorism flag.
But my fears of the government’s, yet another, invasion into another method of obtaining information about its citizens weren’t calmed by these arguments. Today’s news about the government tracking reporters’ calls to identify their sources confirmed my worries.
I don’t know if the call records served to track the reporters’ calls obtained from the NSA database, however it represent the same disregard for the same liberties it pretend to protect.
And Josh Marshal’s sums it very well:
I think part of the issue for many people on the administration’s various forms of surveillance is not just that some of activities seem to be illegal or unconstitutional on their face. I think many people are probably willing to be open-minded, for better or worse, on pushing the constitutional envelope. But given the people in charge of the executive branch today, you just can’t have any confidence that these tools will be restricted to targeting terrorists. Start grabbing up phone records to data-mine for terrorists and then the tools are just too tempting for your leak investigations. Once you do that, why not just keep an eye on your critics too? After all, they’re the ones most likely to get the leaks, right? So, same difference. The folks around the president don’t recognize any real distinctions among those they consider enemies. So we’d be foolish to think they wouldn’t bring these tools to bear on all of them. Once you set aside the law as your guide for action and view the president’s will as a source of legitimacy in itself, then everything becomes possible and justifiable.
When Compliment is Due (II)
Dealing with Qwest wasn’t my best business experience. As a business to business I found dealing with them almost the worst from the RBOC’s . However today I’m only praising Qwest and its management. While all the other Telecom companies granted the NSA request to our private information Qwest alone declined this request .
Mr. Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request. When he learned that no such authority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process, including the Special Court which had been established to handle such matters, Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommications Act. Accordingly, Mr. Nacchio issued instructions to refuse to comply with these requests. These requests continued throughout Mr. Nacchio’s tenure and until his departure in June of 2002.
This behavior is a bright contrast for those of the other RBOC’s :
The paper’s report said AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. complied with the request, which resulted in the creation of a massive database of virtually every call.
When compliment are due, I am glad to pay them in public