A Florida man was sentenced Wednesday to eight years in prison in a computer theft case involving more than 1 billion records that Acxiom Corp., a data-management company, collected in its work for large corporations. Scott Levine, 46, of Boca Raton, Fla., was sentenced for the theft of 4,789 computer files. The government claims the stolen data was worth about $58 million; Levine's lawyer said it was worth about $50,000.
After spending more than $4,300 unsuccessfully defending a public records lawsuit, the city of Kokomo is ready to give Western High School student Ryan Nees what he wants. City Attorney Ken Ferries said Tuesday the city won�t appeal Howard Circuit Judge Lynn Murray�s Feb. 20 ruling on the Ryan Nees vs. Matt McKillip civil suit. Nees, 16, sued the city last year after his request for a city-compiled list of e-mail addresses was denied.
Alberto J. Mora, the former eneral counsel of the United States Navy wrote a document three years ago. The document, which is marked "secret" but is not classified, is a twenty-two-page memo written by Mora. It shows that three years ago Mora tried to halt what he saw as a disastrous and unlawful policy of authorizing cruelty toward terror suspects. The memo is a chronological account, submitted on July 7, 2004, to Vice Admiral Albert Church, who led a Pentagon investigation into abuses at the U.S. detention facility at Guant�namo Bay, Cuba.
Two uniformed men strolled into the main room of the Little Falls library in Bethesda one day last week and demanded the attention of all patrons using the computers. Then they made their announcement: The viewing of Internet pornography was forbidden. The men looked stern and wore baseball caps emblazoned with the words "Homeland Security." The bizarre scene unfolded Feb. 9, leaving some residents confused and forcing county officials to explain how employees assigned to protect county buildings against terrorists came to see it as their job to police the viewing of pornography.
Senate Republicans blocked a proposed investigation of President Bush's domestic spying operation Thursday as the chairman of the Intelligence Committee said he had reached an agreement with the White House to pursue legislation establishing clearer rules for the controversial program. But Senate aides described the discussions with the White House as very preliminary. And angry Democrats expressed skepticism over the negotiations, with some describing them as a ploy to protect the Bush administration and the highly classified surveillance operation from congressional scrutiny.
Leaders of the House Intelligence Committee said Thursday that they had agreed to open a Congressional inquiry prompted by the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. But a dispute immediately broke out among committee Republicans over the scope of the inquiry. The agreement to conduct an inquiry came as the Senate Intelligence Committee put off a vote on conducting its own investigation after the White House, reversing course, agreed to open discussions about changing federal surveillance law. Senate Democrats accused Republicans of bowing to White House pressure.
A federal judge dealt a setback to the Bush administration on its warrantless surveillance program, ordering the Justice Department on Thursday to release documents about the highly classified effort within 20 days or compile a list of what it is withholding. The Justice Department failed to meet the time restraints under FOIA and failed to make a case that it was impractical to deal quickly with the request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
The National Counterterrorism Center maintains a central repository of 325,000 names of international terrorism suspects or people who allegedly aid them, a number that has more than quadrupled since the fall of 2003, according to counterterrorism officials. The list kept by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) -- created in 2004 to be the primary U.S. terrorism intelligence agency -- contains a far greater number of international terrorism suspects and associated names in a single government database than has previously been disclosed. U.S. citizens make up "only a very, very small fraction" of that number, said an administration official.
Congress appeared ready to launch an investigation into the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program last week, but an all-out White House lobbying campaign has dramatically slowed the effort and may kill it, key Republican and Democratic sources said yesterday. The Senate intelligence committee is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a motion to start an inquiry into the recently revealed program. Two committee Democrats said the panel -- made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats -- was clearly leaning in favor of the motion last week but now is closely divided and possibly inclined against it.
The UK government has staved off a backbench rebellion to reverse changes imposed on the controversial ID Cards Bill by peers. Only 20 Labour MPs voted against the government, and the bill - opposed by the Tories and the Liberal Democrats - was passed by a majority of 31. ID card plans will now go back before the House of Lords.
Privacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and security vendor Kaspersky Lab have lashed out against Google's latest version of its desktop search application. The EFF has advised users to avoid the application because a feature known as Search Across Computers "greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy."
A year later after a scandal where it sold personal information on 145,000 people nationwide to an identity theft ring, Alpharetta-based ChoicePoint is quietly trying to put the episode in the past and keep growing its business of collecting and selling data for background checks and other verification purposes. Its sales pushed past $1 billion in 2005, although profit fell on costs related to the episode.
When Representative Heather A. Wilson broke ranks with President Bush on Tuesday to declare her "serious concerns" about domestic eavesdropping, she gave voice to what some fellow Republicans were thinking, if not saying. Now they are speaking up - and growing louder. In interviews over several days, Congressional Republicans have expressed growing doubts about the National Security Agency program to intercept international communications inside the United States without court warrants.
A federal judge said Friday he was considering setting a deadline for the Justice Department to produce records on the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program or to explain in court why it was refusing to do so. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Security Archive asked for the material shortly after The New York Times revealed the eavesdropping on Dec. 16.
An ambitious program to check every domestic airline passenger's name against government terrorist watch lists may not be immune from hackers, a congressional investigator said Thursday. And because of security concerns, the government is going back to the drawing board with the program called Secure Flight after spending nearly four years and $150 million on it, the Senate Commerce Committee was told.
The National Security Agency has secured the cooperation of large telecommunications companies, including AT&T, MCI and Sprint, in its efforts to eavesdrop without warrants on international calls by suspected terrorists, according to seven telecommunications executives. A majority of international calls are handled by long-distance carriers AT&T, MCI and Sprint. All of the carriers own �gateway� switches capable of routing calls to points around the globe.
Millions of motorists across the nation are carrying around driver licenses displaying their Social Security numbers - a potential jackpot for identity thieves. Privacy experts strongly warn against the practice. And a recent federal law ordered states to stop issuing licenses displaying Social Security numbers. Yet some states continue to do so, a review by The Associated Press has found.
Who is sending threatening e-mail to a teenager? Who is saying disparaging things about a company on an Internet message board? These questions, and many more like them, are asked every day of the companies that provide Internet service and run Web sites. And even though these companies promise to protect the privacy of their users, they routinely hand over the most intimate information in response to legal demands from criminal investigators and lawyers fighting civil cases.
In November 2001, Acxiom Corp. proposed to the U.S. Department of Justice that it conduct an Internetwide surveillance of Web sites touching on topics such as "abortion, racial superiority, politics, religion, immigration, and foreign affairs," using technology designed to extract business contact information from dot-com sites. Information about the proposed surveillance was included in documents released Thursday by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
About 30 people around the world have independently inserted radio frequency identification chips, known as RFID tags, into their bodies, according to Web-based forums devoted to what participants call getting tagged. The tiny silicone chips, which for years have been safely implanted in pets and livestock to identify their owners, come with an encoded string of numbers. (Some chips have a small amount of memory that can be updated.) They are read by a scanner two to four inches away, much like a bar code except the chips don't need to be visible to be read.
Advances in technology will ensure the safety of players and fans at Super Bowl XL in Detroit this Sunday. Hundreds of high-resolution surveillance cameras have been set up around the city to hunt for any evidence of a terrorist plot, with the layers of security becoming tighter the closer you get to the stadium. Images from satellites monitoring city streets will be beamed to the Super Bowl security command center.
The cellphone's emergence as a primary communications device has spawned a cottage industry of con artists seeking to trick mobile phone companies into giving away the phone numbers and calling records of unwitting subscribers. That is the premise of a Congressional hearing, scheduled today, into the extent of the problem, whether carriers are doing enough to protect subscriber data, and the possibility of enacting tighter regulations to thwart thieves.
Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. was quietly sworn in Tuesday as the 110th justice of the Supreme Court, taking the oath of office less than two hours after a sharply divided Senate voted roughly along party lines to confirm him. His confirmation, by a vote of 58 to 42, is expected to tilt the balance of the court to the right on matters like abortion, affirmative action and the death penalty, and partisans on each side said the outcome would echo through American politics for decades.
A federal judge in Wichita began hearing testimony this morning in a case that pits teenagers' sexual privacy against the state's ability to investigate abuse. A coalition of health care workers is suing to challenge an opinion by the Kansas attorney general that they are required to report all adolescent sexual activity to state child protection services.
