Revelations of a sustained bugging campaign targeting two government ministers, a newspaper editor, an England footballer and a string of celebrities prompted calls yesterday for tougher sentences for the buying and selling of confidential personal data. The government's information commissioner spoke out after Clive Goodman, the News of the World's royal editor, admitted at the Old Bailey yesterday to tapping into mobile phones belonging to aides of the Prince of Wales and his son, Prince William, over a 20 month period.
After months of pressure from Congressional Democrats, the Justice Department's inspector general said Monday that his office had opened a full review into the department's role in President Bush's domestic eavesdropping program and the legal requirements governing the program. Democrats said they saw the investigation as a welcome step that could answer questions about the operations and legal underpinnings of the program, which allows the National Security Agency to monitor, without obtaining court warrants, the international communications of Americans and others inside this country with suspected terrorist ties.
Relatives of suspects in criminal investigations are to face having DNA tests and their confidential medical records released to the authorities if they refuse to co-operate with the police. Internal government guidelines on the use of the DNA database seen by The Independent on Sunday instruct the police to ask for medical files belonging to the relatives of criminals so their blood and tissue samples can be tested for DNA.
As European privacy watchdogs step up their criticism of a U.S. counterterrorism program that monitors global bank-transfer data, U.S. and European Union officials are quietly exploring ways to preserve the program while allaying privacy concerns. An EU committee this week is expected to back recent findings by Belgium's privacy regulator that Swift, a global banking-telecommunications network, violated European privacy laws when it gave information on cross-border wire transfers by EU citizens to the Treasury Department and the Central Intelligence Agency in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Now, as more cellphones are equipped to use the Global Positioning System, the satellite-based navigation network, we are on the verge of enjoying services made possible only when information is matched automatically to location. Maps on our phones will always know where we are. Prospective benefits have seemed paltry when placed against privacy concerns. Who will have access to our location information � present and past? Can carriers assure us that their systems are impervious to threats from stalkers and other malicious intruders or neglectful employees � or from government snoops without search warrants?
Police Chief Anthony R. Scott said yesterday he will take advantage of the state's offer to tap into a computer system that can identify suspects through the Registry of Motor Vehicle's Facial Recognition System. In a recent letter to police chiefs throughout the state, RMV Registrar Anne L. Collins made the offer, which would allow local police to send digital images of suspects to the registry for identification. Collins' letter said the software can compare locally-generated digital photos with the 9.5 million license images stored in the registry's database.
Today, some three million RFID-enabled passports have been issued in the United Kingdom, and they don't look so secure. I am sitting with my scary computer man and we have just sucked out all the supposedly secure data and biometric information from three new passports and displayed it all on a laptop computer.
The Internal Revenue Service is the latest federal agency to acknowledge a security breach involving missing laptop computers. The breach once again puts Americans at risk of identity theft. According to documents obtained by WTOP through the Freedom of Information Act, between 2002 and 2006 year-to-date, the agency charged with collecting taxes and protecting taxpayers' personal information had 478 laptops either lost or stolen.
With all the privacy of a walk-up ATM, but little of the protocol, electronic voting machines on Tuesday left some people feeling exposed. Many voters said they found the touch-screen machines easy to read and easy to use. But they also complained of a lack of privacy and pined for the seclusion of the old-style voting booth. With the new machines lined up close together in crowded polling places -- and offering bright, readable screens -- some felt as if they were voting for an audience.
Will the people who received government hurricane aid after Florida�s 2004 devastating storm season have their privacy invaded if their names and addresses are released to the public? That�s what a three-judge federal appeals panel wanted to know as it grilled lawyers for three Gannett Inc. newspapers, the South Florida Sun Sentinel and the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday.
A pioneer of Britain's DNA database said on Wednesday it may have grown so far beyond its original purpose that it now risks undermining civil rights. Professor Alec Jeffreys told BBC radio that hundreds of thousands of innocent people's DNA was now held on the database, a disproportionate number of them young black men. The database, set up in 1995, has expanded to 3.6 million profiles, making it the largest in the world.
Technologies used by Microsoft and other online advertising outfits to analyze user behavior threaten privacy and must be curbed, a pair of advocacy groups said Wednesday. The Washington-based U.S. Public Interest Research Group and the Center for Digital Democracy have asked the Federal Trade Commission to review--and ideally restrict--what they describe as a growing online business model dependent on technologies that "aggressively track us wherever we go, creating data profiles to be used in ever-more sophisticated and personalized 'one-to-one' targeting schemes."
