X-ray cameras that would "undress" passers-by in a bid to thwart terrorists concealing weapons, could be coming to a street near you, according to reports. Aside from the obvious privacy issues, would such a plan work? Leaked documents said to have been drawn up by the Home Office and seen by the Sun newspaper say cameras which can see through clothes could be built into lamp posts to "trap terror suspects".
The Maine House and Senate registered nearly unanimous opposition Thursday to the federal Real ID Act, which requires states to change their drivers' licenses into national IDs linked to a central database. The resolution is not binding on Congress, but says the Legislature refuses to implement the Real ID Act. It asks Congress to repeal the law.
The Bloomberg administration is devoting more than $180 million toward state-of-the-art technology to keep track of when city employees come and go, with one agency requiring its workers to scan their hands each time they enter and leave the workplace. The scanning, which began in August at the Department of Design and Construction, has created an uproar at a generally quiet department that focuses on major city construction projects. At a City Council hearing yesterday, several unions vowed to resist the growing use of biometrics � the unique identifying qualities associated with faces, fingers, hands, eyes and other body parts. The unions called the use of biometrics degrading, intrusive and unnecessary and said experimenting with the technology could set the stage for wider use of biometrics to keep tabs on all elements of the workday.
There are at least 300,000 names on the U.S. government's watch lists. People who are under an unenviable category of false positives are wrongly detained because some of their personal information matches that of a terrorist or other suspect. The number of misidentifications is unknown, according to government auditors, but it has caused headaches for a cross-section of travelers, including nuns, infants and members of Congress. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, under the jurisdiction of the Homeland Security Department, said it was trying to remedy the problem with a system to prevent unwarranted detentions on international flights.
The federal government could add DNA from tens of thousands of immigration violators, captives in the war on terrorism and others accused but not convicted of federal offenses to the FBI's crime-fighting database under a plan being finalized by the Justice Department. Erik Ablin, a Justice Department spokesman, confirmed the plan, which hasn't been publicly disclosed, and said details are expected to be completed soon. Opponents, such as Caroline Fredrickson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington office, say such mass seizures of DNA violate privacy and do little to improve law enforcement.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales was lectured on Capitol Hill today by senators who were only partly mollified by the Bush administration�s concession to allow judicial oversight of its electronic-eavesdropping program. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who has just become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told Mr. Gonzales he welcomed the administration�s decision, announced on Wednesday, to seek approval for eavesdropping from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, �as many of us, many of us, have been saying should have been done years ago.�
The Bush administration, in what appears to be a concession to its critics, said today it will allow an independent court to monitor its warrantless electronic-eavesdropping program. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, created in 1978 to supervise anti-terrorism wiretapping within the United States, will supervise the eavesdropping operations.
Microsoft Corp. and the National Security Agency confirmed last week that the intelligence agency helped the company configure Windows Vista so it meets the Pentagon�s security requirements. NSA spokesman Ken White said the agency has provided guidance on securing Windows XP and Windows 2000 in the past. But this is the first time the NSA has worked with Microsoft or any vendor prior to an operating system�s release, White added. But privacy advocates said it would be tempting for the NSA to push for a way to gain access to data stored on Vista-based systems.
Deep into an updated Army manual, the deletion of 10 words has left some national security experts wondering whether government lawyers are again asserting the executive branch�s right to wiretap Americans without a court warrant. The manual, described by the Army as a �major revision� to intelligence-gathering guidelines, addresses policies and procedures for wiretapping Americans, among other issues.
The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering. The C.I.A. has also been issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies, though it has done so only rarely, intelligence officials say.
A pile of legislative proposals aimed at stiffening regulations on stewards of personal data died in Congress last year, but Sen. Dianne Feinstein has announced plans to try again. Feinstein (D-Calif.) reintroduced on Wednesday a pair of bills that would attempt to set national requirements for consumer notification in the event of data security breaches, and to restrict the sale, purchase and display of Social Security numbers.
The Department of Defense has agreed to change the database it uses for military recruitment efforts to better protect the privacy of millions of high school students nationwide, a civil liberties group announced Tuesday. In settling a lawsuit brought last year by the New York Civil Liberties Union on behalf of six students, the government agreed it will no longer disseminate student information to law enforcement, intelligence and other agencies and will stop collecting student Social Security numbers, the group said in a statement.
The Supreme Court on Monday rebuffed a challenge to the federal government's policy of requiring airline passengers to show identification before they board flights, spurning arguments that the well-known but unpublished policy would lead to more secret laws. John Gilmore, a founder of Sun Microsystems and an advocate of libertarian causes, sued the government because it has long refused to disclose the text of the regulation that forces air travelers to present an ID.
The U.S. Department of Justice is pushing the FBI and its other operating units to speed up and expand their efforts to share a wide array of crime information with outside law enforcement agencies via a centralized database called OneDOJ. The plan to expand the use of OneDOJ by other law enforcement authorities at the federal, state and local levels has raised the hackles of some privacy and civil rights advocates, who said last week that the DOJ will need to work hard to ensure that the increased information sharing doesn�t infringe on the rights of law-abiding Americans.
Police would have the power to seize DNA samples from anyone arrested for a crime -- from shoplifting to murder -- under legislation proposed by state lawmakers. The measure would provide South Carolina with the most aggressive DNA sampling program in the nation, allowing authorities to collect a person's genetic profile for even petty offenses before he or she is tried for the crime.
Germany's Data Protection Officer Peter Schaar has called for a revision in the plans for new regulations of telephone surveillance. As he put it in the German daily Berliner Zeitung, "there has to be a clearer distinction between the ban on collecting such data and using it. The law should stipulate when the police have to stop phone tapping and when information can be gathered but not used for investigations." Schaar complained that the current draft only prevents the collection of this data if the phone call only concerns a core area of privacy. "In practice, this means that phone tapping will always be allowed," he said. "This is going too far. I do not believe that these regulations comply with the stipulations that the Constitutional Court handed down."
