Canada's minister of industry said yesterday that the Canadian Parliament adopted amendments to the Telecommunications Act allowing for the establishment of a national do-not-call list. John Gustavson, president/CEO of the Canadian Marketing Association, said he doesn't expect the list to take effect until summer or fall 2007. The amendments give the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which will regulate the list, power to levy fines against telemarketers who don't follow the rules.
The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world. The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts -- including protecting military facilities from attack -- to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.
An Army plan to develop a database of sexual assaults is meeting resistance from lawmakers and members of an advocacy group, who say it could invade victims' privacy. In a letter to Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey, 15 members of Congress said the new system would deter victims of sexual assaults from reporting crimes and seeking treatment, and they asked him not to collect or store personal information or medical records in the database.
The Dutch Supreme Court on Friday ordered Internet company Lycos to reveal the identity of a client in a benchmark decision on privacy that was praised by copyright groups as a way to go after illegal swapping of music and movies
online. It is the first ruling of its kind in the Netherlands on Internet privacy and could have far reaching consequences for other Internet providers.
The Indiana Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a law that requires women seeking an abortion to get counseling about medical risks and alternatives, and to wait at least 18 hours after the session before going through with the procedure. The court ruled 4-1 that opponents of the law could not pursue their lawsuit, which argued that privacy is a core right under the state constitution that extends to women seeking to end their pregnancies.
Welcome to Sydney 2005 where, the New South Wales Privacy Office says, the rash of security video cameras across the city's suburbs has opened a whole new era for busybodies. "The office has received a number of complaints that video cameras, ostensibly installed for security purposes, have been used for spying on neighbours' houses," its report says. Disturbingly, pointing of CCTV cameras more often than not shows a "discernible streak of malice and more than a hint of retribution".
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a phone-book-thick proposed rule yesterday that would give the federal government new powers to track the comings and goings of individual travelers and expand the circumstances under which passengers exposed to a serious communicable disease could be isolated or quarantined. The new provisions -- the costs of which would fall mostly on the travel industry -- call for greater scrutiny of passengers for signs of illness and greater efforts by airlines and others to obtain personal contact information from travelers.
The Texas attorney general filed a civil lawsuit on Monday against Sony BMG Music Entertainment for allegedly including spyware on its media player designed to thwart music copying. According to the lawsuit filed in Travis County, several of the company's music compact discs require customers to download Sony's media players if they want to listen to the CDs on a computer.
Libraries around the country are borrowing techniques from Amazon, Netflix and other Internet companies that keep information about their customers' purchases and preferences so they can better cater to their needs or tastes. The hope is that these on-line programs, whose feasibility is still being tested at this point, will help libraries appeal to a generation that often prizes convenience over privacy. Yet for the libraries, privacy remains an important issue. The data such personalized programs store - information about what journals someone is reading, for example - could be sought by government agencies under laws like the USA Patriot Act.
Louisville city leaders hope the threat of being caught on video will help curb crime in some of the city's criminal hotspots. Police Chief Robert White and some members of the Metro Council have proposed spending about $300,000 next year to purchase and install 10 surveillance cameras around the city.
Five talking cameras - armed with motion detectors, a bright flash and a recorded warning - were approved by the city's Board of Estimates yesterday as part of an effort to curb quality-of-life crimes, especially illegal dumping. The cameras, which cost about $5,000 apiece, are the latest in surveillance technology that cities across the country are using to deter everything from red-light runners to drug dealers. They will add to an already expansive network of monitoring equipment in Baltimore.
The federal government wants to peer into your computer communications, forcing companies that provide high-speed access or Internet-based telephone service to design -- or redesign -- their networks to accommodate surveillance. On Monday, the Federal Communications Commission gave broadband Internet service and voice-over-Internet Protocol services, or VoIP, 18 months to ensure that their networks are wiretap-ready. This followed the FCC's formal release of the order in September.
While they're out chasing the news, employees at a local television station are wondering if anybody is tailing them. The news trucks at WABC-TV were recently equipped with global positioning systems, raising concerns among the station's union workers about privacy issues. It's a small but growing workplace topic as companies slowly embrace the GPS technology already in use to track everything from wayward teens to sex offenders.
Keylogger programs that record passwords and other typed-in text are increasing, according to data from iDefense. The programs are an increasingly popular tool among identity thieves, the security company said Tuesday. The biggest problem with keyloggers, which silently relay data to attackers, is that they often go undetected, easily slipping past firewalls and antivirus software, iDefense, a division of VeriSign, said.
The Summit County Sheriff's Office in Ohio expects to have a new identification system operational next month based on digital photographs of the composition of the iris, the colored portion of the eye, and is far more accurate and speedy than conventional fingerprint identification. Sheriff Drew Alexander and Akron police Chief Michael Matulavich said both agencies will use the system in conjunction with a nationwide program called the Children's Identification and Location Database, known as the CHILD Project.
By submitting a DNA sample to a commercial genetic database service designed to help people draw their family tree, a youth found a crucial clue that quickly enabled him to track down his long-sought parent. While welcomed by advocates of children trying to locate anonymous donors, the case -- apparently the first of its kind -- has raised alarm among sperm banks and some medical ethicists. They are concerned it might start a trend that could violate the privacy of thousands of sperm donors and discourage future ones.
Several state transportation agencies, including those in Maryland
and Virginia, are starting to test technology that allows them to
monitor traffic by tracking cellphone signals and mapping them
against road grids. The technology underlines how readily cellphones can become tracking devices for private companies, law enforcement and government agencies.
Americans are concerned about the privacy of their medical information and are mostly unaware of their privacy rights, a survey released today found. The survey from the California HealthCare Foundation found that 67 percent of adults age 18 and older were either very concerned or somewhat concerned about the privacy of their personal medical records.
Verizon Wireless filed a lawsuit in Florida against a private investigative agency that allegedly was trying to obtain confidential information about its subscribers. The suit, filed in Hillsborough County, Fla., names Global Information Group (GIG) as a defendant and claims it made "thousands of attempts" to secure confidential information about its customers without first obtaining authorization to do so. The carrier asserts the company tried to impersonate Verizon Wireless employees as well as customers.
Social Security numbers and other information about more than 3,000 consumers were stolen recently from TransUnion LLC, one of three U.S. companies that maintain credit histories on individuals, in the latest of many security breaches that have focused congressional attention on identity theft and fraud. On Oct. 21, the company sent 3,623 notices to consumers alerting them to the breach and offering free monitoring of their credit reports for a year.
On Sunday, Republicans and Democrats in Congress called for greater restrictions on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's ability to demand business and personal records in terrorism investigations without a judge's approval and to retain the records indefinitely. They were responding to an article published that day in The Washington Post about the government's increasing use of what are known as national security letters to demand records from businesses and institutions, without a judge's approval, to aid in terrorism and intelligence investigations.
It pays to mind your metadata. Technically, metadata is sort of the DNA of documents created with modern word-processing software. By default, it is automatically saved into the deep structure of a file, hidden from view, with information that can hint at authorship, times and dates of revisions (along with names of editors). Recently, the United Nations issued a long-awaited report on Syria's suspected involvement in the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. Recipients of one version of the report were able to track the editing changes, which included the deletion of names of officials allegedly involved in the plot, including the Syrian president's brother and brother-in-law.
A case in Connecticut affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act. "National security letters," created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies. The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources.
The Utah Supreme Court on Friday moved to protect the confidentiality of rape victims' mental health records. Defendants now must give their accusers notice when they attempt to subpoena such protected records, which cannot be disclosed without approval from a judge. "When a victim's confidential records are reviewed before she even knows they are subpoenaed, she cannot choose to protect them," wrote Justice Ronald E. Nehringa for the high court.
In the first U.S. prosecution of its kind, FBI agents arrested a 20-year-old Los Angeles man Thursday on charges that he cracked some 400,000 Windows machines and covertly installed pop-up-generating adware on them, in a scheme that allegedly brought in $60,000 in ill-gotten profits.
In Wales, Michelle Teran is leading a band of followers through the city streets. The Canadian artist drags along a screen embedded in a suitcase that is showing supposedly secret images captured from cameras inside surrounding buildings. Equipment that underpins in-store closed-circuit TV cameras, personal internet surveillance, even baby crib monitors and TV signal extenders, sends signals along the 2.4-GHz wave band, an unlicensed portion of radio spectrum that is firmly in the public domain. If the cameras are set up incorrectly, passersby with the proper equipment can easily grab images from them when they wander within range.
As a senior at Princeton University, Samuel A. Alito Jr., nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, chaired an undergraduate task force that recommended the decriminalization of sodomy, accused the CIA and the FBI of invading the privacy of citizens, and said discrimination against gays in hiring ''should be forbidden." The report, issued in 1971 by Alito and 16 other Princeton students, provides a glimpse of a more liberal Alito than the jurist is now perceived.
