The White House invoked executive privilege yesterday in withholding subpoenaed documents on fired U.S. attorneys out of confidence that it can prevail in court and weather a political storm by blaming Congress for overreaching, administration officials said. White House counsel Fred F. Fielding said in a letter to the chairmen of the Senate and House judiciary committees that President Bush will not make available the requested documents or permit testimony by two former senior aides about White House and Justice Department calculations in the firing of nine federal prosecutors.
A new agreement between the Bush administration and the European Union will allow the United States government to continue a once secret program to obtain banking records from a Brussels-based consortium for use in counterterrorism investigations, American and European officials said Thursday. In the deal, announced by the European Union late Wednesday, the Bush administration has agreed to impose new privacy safeguards on the program, which gives the Treasury Department and the Central Intelligence Agency access to one of the global banking system�s most important conduits of international financial records. In one provision of the agreement, the United States has agreed that it will keep the banking data collected under the program for only five years, officials said.
Hundreds of pages of decades-old documents declassified and released by the CIA yesterday revealed a 1970s-era agency in the throes of unaccustomed self-examination, caught between its traditional secrecy and demands that it come clean on a history of unsavory activities. Partly disclosed yesterday, the documents chronicle activities including assassination plans, illegal wiretaps and hunts for spies at political conventions. One document spoke of a plan to poison an African leader. Another revealed that the CIA had offered a Mafia boss $150,000 to kill Cuba's Fidel Castro.
Video cameras scattered throughout downtown Pittsburgh and other neighborhoods would eventually be linked in a surveillance network, under a proposal by Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. The administration has set aside $3.4 million in port security money, including $2.6 million in federal funds and $862,000 in city money, for an initial phase. Federal, state and city funds could be tapped for later phases.
A decades-long battle to unseal Ontario adoption records will face yet another hurdle Monday when a small group of adoptees and birth parents mounts a constitutional challenge to the legislation. A minority of critics argues the Adoption Information Disclosure Act � which allows birth parents and adoptees to access information about one another � presents a serious breach of privacy under the Constitution. "We're saying that you can't retroactively undo the privacy that was promised to Canadians who gave children up for adoption or who adopted children," said Clayton Ruby, a Toronto-based civil liberties lawyer representing three adoptees and one birth parent who want their identities kept private.
In a showdown with the German government, Google, Inc. has threatened to shut down its popular e-mail service in Germany if a planned telecommunications law goes into effect unchanged -- a law Google's chief data-protection advisor has called a "heavy blow against the private sphere." The law is Germany's interpretation of EU data-retention rules. If passed later this year by German parliament -- by no means a sure bet -- it would require all telecommunications companies to collect and keep private information on their German customers starting in 2008. To help with criminal surveillance the government wants the connection data of any German citizen -- including Internet details, phone call information, and text messages -- saved for 6 months. Anonymous data would be unacceptable.
Privacy advocates warn that the shift to using handheld devices for email, telephone calls and Internet searches has created a global gold mine for snoops and spies. Le Monde newspaper has reported that government officials in France are advised against using BlackBerry devices because the US National Security Agency (NSA) might snatch information from e-mails. "It is good for a government to say that wireless information is less secure so be very cautious what you put out there," Electronic Privacy Information Center senior counsel Melissa Ngo told AFP.
Little-known documents now being made public detail illegal and scandalous activities by the CIA more than 30 years ago: wiretappings of journalists, kidnappings, warrantless searches and more. The documents provide a glimpse of nearly 700 pages of materials that the agency plans to declassify next week. A six-page summary memo that was declassified in 2000 and released by The at George Washington University on Thursday outlines 18 activities by the CIA that "presented legal questions" and were discussed with President Ford in 1975.
A hacker penetrated an unclassified Pentagon email system, prompting authorities to take as many 1,500 accounts offline, defense officials said Thursday. "Elements of the OSD unclassified e-mail system were taken offline yesterday afternoon due to a detected penetration," US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, using an acronym for the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Is your laptop a fancy piece of luggage or an extension of your mind? That's the central question facing a federal appeals court in a case that could sharply limit the government's ability to snoop into laptop computers carried across the border by American citizens. The question, before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, arose from the prosecution of Michael Timothy Arnold, an American citizen whose laptop was randomly searched in July 2005 at Los Angeles International Airport as he returned from a three-week trip to the Philippines.
President Bush has asserted that he is not necessarily bound by the bills he signs into law, and yesterday a congressional study found multiple examples in which the administration has not complied with the requirements of the new statutes. Bush has been criticized for his use of "signing statements," in which he invokes presidential authority to challenge provisions of legislation passed by Congress. The president has challenged a federal ban on torture, a request for data on the administration of the USA Patriot Act and numerous other assertions of congressional power. As recently as December, Bush asserted the authority to open U.S. mail without judicial warrants in a signing statement attached to a postal reform bill.
Google's pending purchase of online advertising giant DoubleClick will give it access to yet more information: the Web browsing histories collected by millions of DoubleClick cookies. Combine that data with what Google already knows through its homegrown services--Google Apps, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Desktop, and many others--and the company has the potential to know more about you than any one entity ever has. The question is, can you trust Google with all that information about you? And even if you trust Google, what about other groups that may try to access all that information--government agencies, hackers, and rival businesses, to name a few?
Six state legislatures are defying a federal law requiring new driver's licenses that aim to prevent identity theft, fraud and terrorism. The states have passed laws in the past two months, saying the federal law has a steep cost and invades privacy by requiring 240 million Americans to get highly secure licenses by 2013. The 9/11 Commission urged the first standards for licenses to stop fraud and terrorists such as the Sept. 11 hijackers, who lied on residency statements to get licenses and state IDs.
Which is better: a complex credential and identity management system with multiple technologies and standards, or a streamlined, one-size-fits-all approach? How about the trade-offs of speed versus security? Disputes over which technology standards should become the norm for identity management programs, or whether the existing menagerie of standards should be retained, have inflamed privacy disputes and spurred industry rivalries.
Nicole Wong is the point person for growing criticism of Google's privacy practices. When Wong, Google's deputy general counsel in charge of compliance, drafted her ideal job description for Google three and half years ago, calming fears about the search engine's data-collection policies was probably not the assignment she envisioned. Now it is. More than two dozen European privacy regulators have launched an inquiry into Google's data protection practices. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission is probing Google's pending $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, an online advertising company. Last week, Privacy International, a London group, ranked Google's practices the worst among 23 top Internet services, including Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL.
A 22-year-old intern was given the responsibility of safeguarding the personal information of thousands of state employees, a security procedure that ended up backfiring. The names and Social Security numbers of all 64,000 Ohio state employees were stolen last weekend from a state agency intern who left a backup data storage device in his car, Gov. Ted Strickland said.
U.S. military personnel have emerged as prime identity theft targets. The Department of Defense since the late '60s has used Social Security numbers for everything from dog tags to chow-line rosters. Now, data thieves and con artists have begun to increasingly target military personnel, data security experts say. "Thieves know this is the Achilles' heel of the system," says Todd Davis, CEO of identity theft detection firm Lifelock. Data thieves in the past year have grabbed computers containing sensitive data for nearly 30 million active and retired service members from four Veterans Affairs offices.
An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism. The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.
Cowed by confusing privacy laws, authorities sometimes fail to raise red flags about potentially dangerous students, and peers keep quiet out of a false sense of duty, a federal report (pdf) on the Virginia Tech shootings concluded Wednesday. Part of the problem is that educators, doctors and police aren't sure what they're permitted to reveal about someone's medical history, the report found.
The FBI wants to compile a massive computer database and analyze it for clues to unmask terrorist sleeper cells. Two congressmen are worried about whether the bureau will protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. Reps. Brad Miller, D-N.C., and James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., the chairman and ranking Republican on the House Science and Technology investigations subcommittee, asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the proposal. Their June 4 letter to GAO was released Tuesday.
Google is scaling back how long it keeps personally identifiable data accumulated from its Web users, seeking to mollify a European Union watchdog that has questioned its privacy policies. The world's top provider of Web search services said late Monday that it is ready to curtail the time it stores user data to a year-and-a-half, the low end of an 18- to 24-month period it had originally proposed to regulators in March.
Privacy groups are sounding alarms as the nation's largest insurance companies finalize plans to allow millions more customers to post their health records on the Internet. About 100 million insurance customers in the U.S. have access to Web-based tools, but companies don't have an estimate of how widely they are used. Insurers hope to at least double the technology's reach by the end of next year. Privacy advocates say there's no guarantee that the records will be safe from hackers. Some worry that patients may refuse to disclose some illnesses to their doctors to keep documents out of databases.
In a report released Saturday, Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade, finding the company's privacy practices are the worst among Internet service companies. Not one of the other 22 companies surveyed (including AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo) "comes close to achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy" as Google, said Privacy International. The group cited the privacy issues raised by the Google/DoubleClick merger, which have been highlighted by in an FTC complaint by EPIC, CDD and US PIRG. The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party has launched an investigation into Google's data retention policies.
Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators yesterday. The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey.
A coalition of privacy groups have taken another swing at Google Inc.'s proposed acquisition of online advertising firm DoubleClick, calling on federal regulators to prohibit the merged companies from compiling detailed dossiers about users' online behavior. The groups said in an amended complaint (pdf) with the Federal Trade Commission Wednesday that the government should allow Google to collect personal information about users only after getting their permission, and then give users the right to review that information and, if they choose, delete it.
ChoicePoint has promised to do a better job safeguarding sensitive consumer data as part of a settlement with attorneys general in 43 states and the District of Columbia stemming from a 2004 database breach at the Georgia-based company. The deal, announced Thursday, also calls for ChoicePoint to pay $500,000 to be used by the attorneys general. ChoicePoint admits no wrongdoing, company spokesman Matt Furman said. Even before the database breach, ChoicePoint had been criticized by consumer and privacy advocates. The Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., had filed complaints about ChoicePoint's data practices with the FTC.
