The stolen laptop computer and hard drive containing sensitive data for up to 26.5 million veterans, their spouses, and active-duty military personnel have been found, according to Veterans Affairs. This news comes as the Associated Press discovered documents showing that Veterans Affairs had given permission in 2002 for the analyst, from whom the equipment was stolen, to work from home with data that included millions of Social Security numbers, disability ratings and other personal information.
Canada's privacy commissioner is investigating whether U.S. officials and the CIA were improperly given access to the banking records of Canadians. While declining to comment further on the American program specifically, a spokeswoman for the privacy commissioner's office said that, in general, "anytime personal information of Canadians is obtained by a foreign government in circumstances that may not provide the same privacy protections that exist in Canada, we have concerns."
A human rights group in London said today that it had lodged formal complaints in 32 countries against the Brussels-based banking consortium known as Swift, contending that it violated European and Asian data protection rules by providing the United States with confidential information about international money transfers. Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, said the organization filed the complaints in the hope of halting what it called "illegal transfers" of private information by Swift, whose full name is the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications.
President Bush on Monday condemned as "disgraceful" the disclosure last week by The New York Times and other newspapers of a secret program to investigate and track terrorists that relies on a vast international database that includes Americans' banking transactions. The executive editor of The Times, Bill Keller, said in an e-mail statement on Monday evening that the decision to publish had been "a hard call." But Mr. Keller noted that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has "embarked on a number of broad, secret programs aimed at combating terrorism, often without seeking new legal authority or submitting to the usual oversight."
Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records. That access to large amounts of confidential data was highly unusual, several officials said, and stirred concerns inside the administration about legal and privacy issues.
New Jersey police investigating a case asked Library Director Michele Reutty for data about who checked out a certain book. Reutty said she refused to give the information to police without a subpoena -- in accordance with New Jersey state statutes governing access of private information from libraries, she said.
Numerous federal and local law enforcement agencies have bypassed subpoenas and warrants designed to protect civil liberties and gathered Americans' personal telephone records from private-sector data brokers. These brokers, many of whom advertise aggressively on the Internet, have gotten into customer accounts online, tricked phone companies into revealing information and even acknowledged that their practices violate laws, according to documents gathered by congressional investigators and provided to The Associated Press.
Virginia's public and private colleges and universities soon will be required to submit the names and Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of students they accept each year to state police for cross-checking against sexual offender registries. Passed this year as part of a crackdown on sex crimes and signed by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D), the law also requires Department of Motor Vehicles officials to turn over personal information to police any time a Virginian applies for a license or change of address. It goes into effect July 1.
A laptop containing the Social Security numbers and other personal data of 13,000 District of Columbia employees and retirees has been stolen, officials said. The computer was stolen Monday from the Washington home of an employee of ING U.S. Financial Services, said officials with the company, which administers the district's retirement plan.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, drawing on her experiences as a young Watergate lawyer who decades later was investigated as first lady, urged creation of a "privacy bill of rights" Friday to protect people's personal data. "Modern life makes many things easier and many things easier to know, and yet privacy is somehow caught in the crosshairs of these changes," Clinton said in a speech at the American Constitution Society's annual convention.
The federal government sued the New Jersey attorney general and other state officials Wednesday to stop them from seeking information about telephone companies' cooperation with the National Security Agency. The unusual filing in U.S. District Court in Trenton, N.J., is the latest effort by federal authorities to halt legal proceedings aimed at revealing whether and how often AT&T, Verizon and other phone companies have provided customer records to the NSA without a court order.
The Pentagon pays a private company to compile data on teenagers it can recruit to the military. The Homeland Security Department buys consumer information to help screen people at borders and detect immigration fraud. As federal agencies delve into the vast commercial market for consumer information, such as buying habits and financial records, they are tapping into data that would be difficult for the government to accumulate but that has become a booming business for private companies. Privacy advocates say the practice exposes ordinary people to ever more scrutiny by authorities while skirting legal protections designed to limit the government's collection and use of personal data.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that police armed with a warrant can barge into homes and seize evidence even if they don't knock, a huge government victory that was decided by President Bush's new justices. The case tested previous court rulings that police armed with warrants generally must knock and announce themselves or they run afoul of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches.
Trey Sunderland, a world-renowned Alzheimer's disease researcher at the National Institutes of Health, took advantage of the agency's lax oversight by improperly forwarding valuable tissue specimens to a pharmaceutical company and then accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees from it, according to congressional investigators.
Sensitive information on millions of U.S. military personnel and veterans remains at grave risk because of weak security controls that have not yet been fixed, government investigators said Wednesday. In testimony to Congress, the Government Accountability Office and Veterans Affairs inspector general detailed ignored warnings, weak management and lax rules in their review of VA information security following the theft of 26.5 million military personnel's private data last month.
The National Security Agency's controversial domestic surveillance program faces its first major court test today before a veteran federal judge in Detroit. In January, groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations as well as several individuals, who said they feared the government was spying on them, filed a 60-page lawsuit seeking to have the warrantless wiretapping program declared unconstitutional. The suit asserts that the NSA's eavesdropping program has violated free-speech and privacy rights and has had a chilling effect on the communications of potential surveillance targets.
A hacker stole a file containing the names and Social Security numbers of 1,500 people working for the Energy Department's nuclear weapons agency. The cyber break-in happened last September, but the employees were never told and the Secretary of Energy didn't learn about the theft until this week. The data theft occurred in a computer system at a service center belonging to the National Nuclear Security Administration in Albuquerque, N.M.
A last-minute deal Tuesday with Vice President Cheney averted a possible confrontation between the Senate Judiciary Committee and U.S. telephone companies about the National Security Agency's database of customer calling records. The deal was announced by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the committee chairman, and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. They said Cheney, who plays a key role supervising NSA counterterrorism efforts, promised that the Bush administration would consider legislation proposed by Specter that would place a domestic surveillance program under scrutiny of a special federal court. In return, Specter agreed to postpone indefinitely asking executives from the nation's telecommunication companies to testify about another program in which the NSA collects records of domestic calls.
In the three years since Americans gained federal protection for their private medical information, the Bush administration has received thousands of complaints alleging violations but has not imposed a single civil fine and has prosecuted just two criminal cases. Of the 19,420 grievances lodged so far, the most common allegations have been that personal medical details were wrongly revealed, information was poorly protected, more details were disclosed than necessary, proper authorization was not obtained or patients were frustrated getting their own records.
Brimming with the genetic patterns of more than 3 million Americans, the nation's databank of DNA "fingerprints" is growing by more than 80,000 people every month, giving police an unprecedented crime-fighting tool but prompting warnings that the expansion threatens constitutional privacy protections. With little public debate, state and federal rules for cataloging DNA have broadened in recent years to include not only violent felons, as was originally the case, but also perpetrators of minor crimes and even people who have been arrested but not convicted.
