The New York Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan that alleges the U.S. Department of Defense violated the law by improperly collecting data on potential military recruits, according to wire service reports. The lawsuit filed on behalf of six teenagers charges that the Pentagon collected data on individuals as young as 16, and kept records on race, ethnicity, gender and social security numbers illegally. Such data included students' grades.
A revised law requiring Georgia voters to show government-issued photo ID at the polls cleared an important hurdle Friday, gaining the approval of the U.S. Department of Justice. But whether voters will have to present a photo ID at the polls for the July 18 primaries remains unknown because a federal lawsuit challenging the law is still pending. The law has also been challenged in state court.
The family of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson yesterday rejected a request by the FBI to turn over 50 years of files to agents who want to look for evidence in the prosecution of two pro-Israel lobbyists, as well as any classified documents Anderson had collected. Kevin P. Anderson, son of the storied Washington-based writer, said the family is outraged at what it calls government overreaching and "a dangerous departure" from First Amendment press protections, a stance joined by academic and legal experts.
The National Archives signed a secret agreement in 2001 with the Central Intelligence Agency permitting the spy agency to withdraw from public access records it considered to have been improperly declassified, the head of the archives, Allen Weinstein, disclosed on Monday. Mr. Weinstein, who began work as archivist of the United States last year, said he learned of the agreement with the C.I.A. on Thursday and was putting a stop to such secret reclassification arrangements, which he described as incompatible with the mission of the archives. Like a similar 2002 agreement with the Air Force that was made public last week, the C.I.A. arrangement required that archives employees not reveal to researchers why documents they requested were being withheld.
The Transportation Security Administration today announced that Peter Pietra has been named the agency's director of privacy policy and compliance. He now is TSA�s assistant chief counsel for information law. The Homeland Security Department agency said in a press release that Pietra�s appointment, along with expanded staffing of TSA�s privacy office, showed its commitment to privacy protection.
Along a gritty stretch of street in Brooklyn, police this month quietly launched an ambitious plan to combat street crime and terrorism. But instead of cops on the beat, wireless video cameras peer down from lamp posts about 30 feet above the sidewalk. They were the first installment of a program to place 500 cameras throughout the city at a cost of $9 million. Hundreds of additional cameras could follow if the city receives $81.5 million in federal grants it has requested to safeguard Lower Manhattan and parts of midtown with a surveillance "ring of steel" modeled after security measures in London's financial district.
Mark Klein was a veteran AT&T technician in 2002 when he began to see what he thought were suspicious connections between that telecommunications giant and the National Security Agency. But he kept quiet about it until news broke late last year that President Bush had approved an N.S.A. program to eavesdrop without court warrants on Americans suspected of ties to Al Qaeda. Now Mr. Klein and a few company documents he saved have emerged as key elements in a class-action lawsuit filed against AT&T on Jan. 31 by a civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The suit accuses the company of helping the security agency invade its customers' privacy.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced 18 months ago that he intended to provide free wireless access to all of the city's 760,000 residents. Last week, the city announced it had selected Google and EarthLink to build the wireless network, which it hopes will be in operation early next year. The two companies, along with Tropos Networks and Motorola, which will help build the infrastructure for the network, beat out five other bidding teams in a six-week review process. But even before the city announced the winning bidder, privacy advocates had begun to criticize the Google approach for what they say is its potential to violate consumer privacy. Early last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Council released a joint report calling the EarthLink and Google proposal "privacy-invasive," because it would involve "cookies" that track users from session to session to enable customized delivery of ads.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales left open the possibility yesterday that President Bush could order warrantless wiretaps on telephone calls occurring solely within the United States -- a move that would dramatically expand the reach of a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program.
Gonzales previously testified in the Senate that Bush had considered including purely domestic communications in the NSA spying program, but he said the idea was rejected in part because of fears of a public outcry. He also testified at the time that the Justice Department had not fully analyzed the legal issues of such a move.
When a privacy-rights group requested records to show how many times a secretive presidential oversight board had asked the Justice Department to investigate possible violations of intelligence-gathering laws since 2001, the answer that came back last month was as simple as it was startling. Zero. One possible reason: For more than half of President Bush's first term, the Intelligence Oversight Board had no members because Bush did not appoint anyone to it.
In Baltimore, cameras - called Mobile Plate Hunters - are replacing the laborious eyeball-and-keystroke method of checking for stolen cars, letting officers rely on an automated scan. Already in widespread use in London and Italy, automatic number plate recognition is a technology on the verge of exploding in the Baltimore-Washington area, fueled in places by funds from the federal Department of Homeland Security. Privacy advocates warn that the plate hunters mark another step toward a society in which police can track a person's every move.
