Education Secretary Margaret Spellings called Tuesday for greater accountability by colleges and universities, including the creation of a national database to track how well students learn. She also called for an overhaul of the financial aid process and an increase in need-based aid. Known as a �unit record� system, it would track the progress of individual � but unidentified � students over time as a way to better assess and compare the educational performance of institutions.
Eva Charlene Steele, a recent transplant from Missouri, has no driver�s license or other form of state identification. So after voting all her adult life, Mrs. Steele will not be voting in November because of an Arizona law that requires proof of citizenship to register. Mrs. Steele is a player in a spreading partisan brawl over new and proposed voting requirements around the country. Republicans say the laws are needed to combat fraud, especially among illegal immigrants. Democrats say there is minimal fraud, if any, and accuse Republicans of suppressing the votes of those least likely to have the required documentation � minorities, the poor and the elderly � who tend to vote for Democrats.
Several states are cracking down on the online dating industry, proposing new laws that would, among other things, mandate criminal background checks on all those looking for love on the Internet. To date, New York is the only state that has a law regulating online dating sites, but six other states have introduced similar legislation mainly in the last year. They are California, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia and Texas.
The New York City public hospital system said it will suspend 39 employees without pay for peeking at the private medical records of a 7-year-old girl whose death from beatings and torture prompted an overhaul of New York's child welfare system. Suspensions will range from 30 to 60 days, and those facing suspension include nurses, doctors, technicians and some clerical staff.
The rocky launch of the Transportation Worker Identification Credential threatens to delay what Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff declared his highest priority after the Dubai port controversy in February: starting by year's end to screen the backgrounds of 750,000 U.S. workers at critical sea, air and land transportation facilities, and issuing them microchip-equipped ID cards. More broadly, the long-overdue ID program foreshadows concerns that hundreds of millions of Americans soon may encounter as the government starts issuing similarly equipped driver's licenses, passports, federal-worker badges and immigrant-guest-worker cards in coming years.
If you have a job, you have no privacy when it comes to using the office computer. From monitoring e-mails to capturing instant messages among friends, employers can do as they see fit with the information passing through a company network. They can read private conversations between a worker and a doctor, and they know who has spent too much time scrutinizing sports statistics. Any modern form of communication, including blogs, message boards, instant messages and even phones with global positioning systems can be monitored by employers.
Hewlett-Packard Co. said today that Patricia Dunn will step down as chairwoman of the computer and printer maker in January amid a widening scandal involving a possibly illegal probe into media leaks. She will be succeeded by CEO Mark Hurd. Hurd will retain his existing positions as chief executive and president and Dunn will remain as a director. Dunn apologized for the techniques used in the company's probe, which included "pretexting" in which private investigators impersonated board members and journalists to acquire their phone records.
In early September Jason Fortuny, a web designer and network administrator from Seattle, took an apparently real ad from one Craigslist site and posted it in the Seattle "casual encounters" section. The advert was from a woman looking for a man. Within a day he had 178 responses, many with photos. At which point he posted them all onto a public website, complete with the photos, e-mail and IM addresses and even mobile phone numbers. He has since asked people to help him identify those respondents who were more cautious about revealing themselves in their e-mails, presumably so he can humiliate them further online.
President Bush urged Congress Thursday to give him "additional authority" to continue his administration's warrantless eavesdropping program. The speech was his latest effort in several days to mark the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by framing the election-year national security debate to political and policy advantage. The president's appeal for congressional action to strengthen the legal underpinnings of the National Security Agency's surveillance program ran into roadblocks even as he spoke.
Stepping into a fight among some powerful Silicon Valley players, California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer on Wednesday said he had launched a criminal investigation into whether Hewlett-Packard Co. broke laws by spying on directors to determine who was leaking boardroom information to the media. Lockyer's announcement followed the company's disclosure earlier in the day that it had deceived telephone companies into releasing data on directors' personal phone calls.
The Homeland Security Department is using a dozen different data-mining systems to track terrorist and criminal activity, according to a study released yesterday by the agency's inspector general. The technology is also being used to screen airplane cargo, but not to pre-screen passengers -- an experiment that was abandoned after strong opposition from the public and members of Congress.
Facebook.com, a site used by more than 9 million students and some professionals, is an Internet lounge where people share photos, read one another's postings and make connections -- a kind of digital yearbook through which people find out about goings-on with their friends and on campus. But this week the site's immense popularity backfired after it started a feature that culls fresh information users post about themselves -- Tim is now single -- and delivers it in headline-news format to their network of buddies.
In the past, only banks and financial service companies routinely ran credit checks on potential employees. But employers in other sectors increasingly are including them in the screening process to assess applicants' honesty and integrity, traits not readily gleaned from a r�sum�. US employers' use of credit checks increased 55 percent over the last five years, according to Spherion , a recruitment and staffing firm with offices around the country, including Massachusetts.
Walt Disney World, which bills itself as one of the happiest and most magical places anywhere, also may be one of the most closely watched and secure. The nation's most popular tourist attraction is beginning to scan fingerprint information. By the end of the month, all of the geometry readers at Disney's four Orlando theme parks will be replaced with machines that scan fingerprint information, according to industry specialists familiar with the technology.
The Federal Education Department shared personal information on hundreds of student loan applicants with the Federal Bureau of Investigation across a five-year period that began after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the agencies said yesterday. Under the program, called Project Strikeback, the Education Department received names from the F.B.I. and checked them against its student aid database, forwarding information. Each year, the Education Department collects information from 14 million applications for federal student aid.
