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Ministers are considering spending up to £12 billion on a database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain. GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, has already been given up to £1 billion to finance the first stage of the project. Hundreds of clandestine probes will be installed to monitor customers live on two of the country’s biggest internet and mobile phone providers - thought to be BT and Vodafone. BT has nearly 5m internet customers.

Justice Department officials released new guidelines Friday that empower FBI agents to use intrusive techniques to gather intelligence within the United States, alarming civil liberties groups and Democratic lawmakers who worry that they invite privacy violations and other abuses. The new road map allows investigators to recruit informants, employ physical surveillance and conduct interviews in which agents disguise their identities in an effort to assess national security threats. FBI agents could pursue each of those steps without any single fact indicating a person has ties to a terrorist organization.

"I repeat so as not to be misunderstood that this Court does have power, which it should exercise, to hold laws unconstitutional where they are forbidden by the Federal Constitution. My point is that there is no provision of the Constitution which either expressly or impliedly vests power in this Court to sit as a supervisory agency over acts of duly constituted legislative bodies and set aside their laws because of the Court's belief that the legislative policies adopted are unreasonable, unwise, arbitrary, capricious or irrational. The adoption of such a loose, flexible, uncontrolled standard for holding laws unconstitutional, if...

The Department of Homeland Security will proceed with the first phase of a controversial satellite-surveillance program, even though an independent review found the department hasn't yet ensured the program will comply with privacy laws. Congress provided partial funding for the program in a little-debated $634 billion spending measure that will fund the government until early March. For the past year, the Bush administration had been fighting Democratic lawmakers over the spy program, known as the National Applications Office. The program is designed to provide federal, state and local officials with extensive access to spy-satellite imagery -- but no eavesdropping --...

Cutting class just got harder but schools are safer thanks to computer chips that help track students, Japanese officials say. Some schools here this month began trial runs in which students carry chips that have tiny antennae and can be traced by radio, with some of the kids attaching the tags to their backpacks. The chips send signals to receivers at school gates. A computer in the system shows when a student enters or leaves. School officials say rising concerns about student safety prompted the idea.

A Florida man named Scott Weires has canceled the order for his long-awaited Nissan GT-R. Why? It's not that he was disappointed in the car's performance credentials, far from it. The problem is that the GT-R is equipped with a 'black box', similar in theory to the kind found on airplanes to help determine what went wrong in case of an accident or breakdown. By the end of 2012, car buyers won't have a choice as to whether their new car is equipped with a 'black box,' or Electronic Data Recorder -- they will be federally mandated to carry one....

Nearly one in 10 Hispanics in the U.S. reported that in the last year police or other authorities have stopped them and asked them about their immigration status, the Pew Hispanic Center said in a report released Thursday. The finding comes amid the biggest crackdown in decades against illegal immigration – one especially evident in Texas, the No. 2 destination for such migrants. Municipal police in several suburbs of Dallas, including Irving and Carrollton, have stepped up cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Nationally, deportations or removals of Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans from the interior of the United States have doubled...

Barackobama.com gives donors' personal contact information to "other organizations" Most people don't want their home addresses and phone numbers given to total strangers, but Barack Obama's "Neighbor to Neighbor" program seems to do exactly this. In addition, it has been alleged that the Obama campaign is giving out people's voter ID numbers as well as their home phone numbers. Barackobama.com says openly, meanwhile, that it gives donors' personal information to other organizations. Neighbor to Neighbor: Reach Out to Voters in your Community says openly that the Obama campaign gives out people's private information to total strangers--anyone who signs up can...

The Obama Campaign is giving out names, phone numbers, voter ID numbers, gender and age information to any yahoo who signs up at their web site. I got all the above information for 50 people in the 502 area code. Here is a quote from that portion of Obama's web page. In all states, you'll be able to immediately start calling potential supporters. Once you select a campaign on the right, you'll get a list of voters either in your state or in an important battleground state. You can pick up the phone and get calling immediately. Or if you'd...

Cloud computing puts your health data at risk By Stuart J. Johnston The advent of "in the cloud" medical records services, such as Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health, promises an explosion in the storage of personal health-care information online. But these services pose sticky privacy questions — unless you know how to protect your personal medical records. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Private health data goes public by mistake Part of consumers' reticence to sign up for electronic personal health-care records — with or without services "in the cloud" — has to do with a handful of recent high-profile...

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) has introduced a bill that would add accountability to the DHS searches conducted upon the laptops of those crossing the border. Specifically, it would require the issue of receipts to those who had their property confiscated so that it could later be returned, would limit how long the DHS can keep laptops, would require them to keep the laptop's information secure, and would create a way to complain about abuse. Finally, the DHS would be required to keep track of how many searches were done and report the details...

bl968 writes "The Newspaper is reporting that the leading private traffic enforcement camera vendors are seeking to establish a national vehicle tracking system in the United States using existing red-light and speed enforcement cameras. The system would utilize Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) to track vehicles passing surveillance cameras operated by these companies. If there are cameras positioned correctly the company will enable images and video to be taken of the driver and passengers. The nice thing in their view is that absolutely no warrants are needed. To gain public acceptance, the surveillance program is being initially sold as an...

Gawker, a site best known for its catty observations about important subjects like celebrity clothing faux pas and stalker celebrity sightings, claims to have obtained screen shots from one of Sarah Palin's private Yahoo e-mail accounts. Now, of course, Gawker isn't the New York Times, so it's only reasonable to be skeptical, but there are reasons to think this report is legitimate. According to Gawker, numerous anonymous individuals managed to hack their way into one of Palin's private accounts, gov.palin@yahoo.com. This is a different e-mail than gov.sarah@yahoo.com, which Palin allegedly used to send work-related messages, including e-mails about her involvement...

Microsoft Corp. today defended the Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) tool that suggests sites based on the URLs typed into its address bar, saying that the browser "phones home" only a limited amount of information to Microsoft and that the company discards all user IP addresses almost immediately. Company managers also contrasted IE8 Beta 2's "Suggested Sites" feature with the "Suggest" feature used by rival Google Inc. in its Chrome browser, saying that Microsoft's browser requires the user's explicit permission before it's used. They did, however, acknowledge a bug that prevents the request from reappearing when users reinstalled the browser. "We...

Declan McCullagh has a somewhat scary report about how the UN's International Telecommunication Union has been quietly working away on a proposal for new core internet technology that would allow a "traceback mechanism" to effectively get rid of anonymity, and allow those with access to identify who provided any particular piece of content. Not surprisingly, the proposal for such a technology was first suggested by a Chinese official, who has long tried to control the use of the internet in that country. The leaked documents related to this effort even indicate that one potential reason for such a mechanism would...

RIVIERA BEACH — A judge says Riviera Beach's "saggy pants" law is unconstitutional in the case of a 17-year-old who spent a night in jail for having his underwear showing. And a public defender said her office wants to get the law tossed altogether. Saggy pants File photo In Riviera Beach, a first offense carries a $150 fine or a requirement of community service. Julius Hart was charged Wednesday when an officer spotted him riding his bicycle in the 2800 block of Lakeshore Drive with 4 to 5 inches of blue and black boxer shorts sticking out of his black...

Prosecutors can’t use secret videotapes of a Watertown minister having sex with his comatose wife while she was in a nursing home, the 4th District Court of Appeals ruled Thursday. Advertisement The man faces eight felonies — four counts of second-degree sexual assault of an unconscious person and four counts of third-degree sexual assault — as well as a misdemeanor. The case raises a number of issues, including a nursing home’s obligation to protect the health and safety of a patient, an individual’s right to privacy and questions of marital sexual abuse. According to the appellate decision and other court...

MUMBAI, India: The new technology is, to its critics, Orwellian. Others view it as a silver bullet against terrorism that could render waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods obsolete. Some scientists predict the end of lying as we know it. Now, well before any consensus on the technology's readiness, India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from this controversial machine: a brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to reveal signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question. For years, scientists have...

This is the first of two stories adapted from "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency," to be published Tuesday by Penguin Press. EXCERPT: "The United States was at war with al-Qaeda, intelligence-gathering is inherent in war, and the Constitution appoints the president commander in chief. But they had not been asked to give their own written assessments of the legality of domestic espionage. They based their answer in part on the attorney general's certification of the "form and legality" of the president's orders. Yet neither man had been allowed to see the program's codeword-classified legal analyses [5], which were prepared by...

THE ACLU AND YOU Here we go again. Ever on the alert to oppose any measures that would help insure America’s safety, the Anti Citizens’ Lives Union, aka, the American Civil License Union, aka, the ACLU is on the warpath again. Reuters reports that the FBI has drafted new regulations regarding suspicious individuals who may be plotting terrorist attacks within the United States. “Justice Department and FBI officials told a news briefing the changes would allow agents in some terrorism cases to use informants, do physical surveillance and conduct interviews without identifying themselves or their true purpose.” (http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1247176820080912?sp=true) Since this...

<p>Police who videotaped a man having sex with his comatose wife in her nursing home room violated his constitutional rights, an appeals court ruled Thursday.</p> <p>David W. Johnson, 59, had an expectation to privacy when he visited his wife, a stroke victim, at Divine Savior Nursing Home in Portage, the District 4 Court of Appeals ruled. Therefore, police violated his constitutional rights against unreasonable searches when they installed a hidden video camera in the room, the court said.</p>

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department made public on Friday a plan to expand the tools the Federal Bureau of Investigation can use to investigate suspicions of terrorism inside the United States, even without any direct evidence of wrongdoing.......

A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous. The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the "IP Traceback" drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public.

For much of the latter part of summer, police officers in Helena, Arkansas, shouldered military-style M-16 rifles equipped with laser sights and patrolled the streets of this little community of 15,000. White signs on large blue barrels were placed in a 10-block area, warning that it was under 24-hour curfew. "Everybody is subject to being stopped and questioned," said Mayor James Valley. "Our officers will ride in unmarked vehicles, pull surprises on people and check everybody out to see who they are." A crime spree prompted a similar lockdown in Hartford, Connecticut. After a chain of shootings that left one...

Government Must Get a Warrant Before Seizing Cell Phone Location Records San Francisco - In an unprecedented victory for cell phone privacy, a federal court has affirmed that cell phone location information stored by a mobile phone provider is protected by the Fourth Amendment and that the government must obtain a warrant based on probable cause before seizing such records.The Department of Justice (DOJ) had asked the federal court in the Western District of Pennsylvania to overturn a magistrate judge's decision requiring the government to obtain a warrant for stored location data, arguing that the government could obtain such information...

Park wardens have been ordered to stop and interrogate anyone who is not accompanied by children. The visitors who are quizzed have to explain their presence and risk being thrown out or reported to police if their answers are not satisfactory. The policy has been introduced at Telford Town Park in Shropshire. The council which manages the 420-acre area says it is a 'commonsense approach' aimed at safeguarding children. But park users accused it of 'authoritarian madness' and said the ruling risked panicking parents about the dangers faced from potential paedophiles. The policy came to light after two environmental campaigners...

The audience was overwhelmingly in favor of checkpoints, although protesters did fill the lawn outside the Library. The grant was accepted on a 6-1 vote, with Councilwoman Cristina Carrizosa opposed. Kudos to the mayor for rising to the occasion. Just when she's getting the hang of leadership, she's leaving. Carrizosa, for her part, said before the vote that she's fine with checkpoints but doesn't think Pomona's are being done appropriately. Carrizosa, who earlier this year compared Pomona officers to the Gestapo, also insisted she has always been a friend of the Police Department. At that comment, Chief Joe Romero, who...

Some of you may recall that a year ago I called attention to the absurdity and gender bias behind Virginia's anti-father Putative Father Registry. I wrote: Virginia’s controversial new Putative Father Registry law asks any man who has had heterosexual non-marital sex in Virginia to register with the State. Supporters say the law will help connect fathers with their children before the children are put up for adoption. Critics see it as another example of the erosion of citizens’ privacy. Both sides miss the real point of the Registry--to remove a father's right to prevent his child's mother from giving...

Councils are using anti-terrorism laws to spy on residents and tackle barking dogs and noisy children. An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph found that three quarters of local authorities have used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000 over the past year. The Act gives councils the right to place residents and businesses under surveillance, trace telephone and email accounts and even send staff on undercover missions. The findings alarmed civil liberties campaigners. Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said: "Councils do a grave disservice to professional policing by using serious surveillance against litterbugs instead of terrorists."

Councils are using anti-terrorism laws to spy on residents and tackle barking dogs and noisy children. -snip- The Act gives councils the right to place residents and businesses under surveillance, trace telephone and email accounts and even send staff on undercover missions. -snip- The RIPA was introduced to help fight terrorism and crime. But a series of extensions, first authorised by David Blunkett in 2003, mean that Britain's 474 councils can use the law to tackle minor misdemeanours. Councils are using the Act to tackle dog fouling, the unauthorised sale of pizzas and the abuse of the blue badge scheme...

NOW might be a good time to buy some FedEx stock. International travelers are sure to be shipping a lot of laptops on overnight delivery to avoid losing them for hours or weeks - thanks to the Department of Homeland Security's new confiscation policy. Congress recently forced the department to admit it has assumed authority to take an air traveler's laptop computer (or any other electronic device) to an undisclosed location for an unspecified time to check for suspicious files - even "absent individualized suspicion" of wrongdoing. [Snip] Being "randomly" wanded and frisked at an airport-security checkpoint is bad enough,...

ST. LOUIS, Sept. 06, 2008 -- Boeing, through its commercial launch business, successfully launched the GeoEye-1 satellite today aboard a Delta II rocket procured from United Launch Alliance (ULA). Liftoff occurred at 11:50 a.m. Pacific time from launch pad SLC-2W at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The ULA Delta II rocket deployed the spacecraft approximately 58 minutes after liftoff. GeoEye-1 will have the highest resolution of any commercial imaging system, capable of collecting images with a ground resolution of 16 inches (.41 meters) in panchromatic (black-and-white) mode. Virginia-based GeoEye is the premier provider of geospatial information for the national...

If someone asks to borrow your cell phone, or you leave it unattended, beware! Unless you actually watch them use it, they may be secretly grabbing every piece of your information on the device, even deleted messages. If you leave your phone sitting on your desk, or in the center console of your car while the valet parks it, then you and everyone in your contacts list may be at risk, to say nothing of confidential e-mails, spread sheets, or other information. And of course, if you do not want your spouse to see who you are chatting with on...

When DNA from hundreds of people is pooled together, it has been impossible to identify any individuals. In what could be a boon for crime-fighters, however, a statistical technique now makes the task possible--allowing forensic detectives to determine whether a suspect handled a gun, for example. But the technique also creates a privacy concern about health data; the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, is now backpedaling on a policy mandating genetic sharing developed just 8 months ago for fear that the health information of people who participated in the studies could be identified. The authors of the...

China's Internet awash with state spies By Wu Zhong, China Editor HONG KONG - An innovative Internet-based "profession" of state-outsourced web commentators is flourishing under the guidance of the Chinese government, according to the latest edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER). As the article, titled "China's Guerrilla War for the Web", reports: They have been called the "Fifty Cent Party", the "Red Vests" and the "Red Vanguard". But China's growing armies of web commentators - instigated, trained and financed by Communist Party organizations - have just one mission: to safeguard the interests of the party by infiltrating and...

A type of DNA analysis that could vastly increase the power of genetic fingerprinting has been developed by US scientists. They have found a way of picking an individual’s DNA out of a mixed sample – even when that sample is contaminated by the DNA of up to 200 others. The method works even when the DNA of interest is only 0.1 per cent of the sample. At present, it is hard for forensic investigators to detect an individual’s DNA if it constitutes less than 10 per cent of a mixture, or if many other people’s DNA is present. This...

Mort Kondracke is every inch a lowlife

Credit card companies successfully nixed a Mythbusters segment exposing RFID's security flaws, according to Arbiter of Truth and Mythbusters co-host, Adam Savage. Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else... They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it's on Discovery's radar and they won't let us go near it.

Microsoft’s latest Internet browser includes a piece of software that allows Internet users to hide the audit trail of websites they have visited. The InPrivate feature on Internet Explorer 8, nicknamed “porn mode”, allows users to conceal the sites they have viewed at the click of a button. Once the setting is chosen, others using the same computer will not be able to see which sites have been accessed. Other browsers have similar functions, but this one is far more prominent. Although casual users cannot see the previous user’s search history, authorities such as the police will be able to...

A flagship database intended to protect every child in the country will be used by police to hunt for evidence of crime in a "shocking" extension of its original purpose, The Daily Telegraph has learned. ContactPoint will include the names, ages and addresses of all 11 million under-18s in England as well as information on their parents, GPs, schools and support services such as social workers. The £224 million computer system was announced in the wake of the death of Victoria Climbié, who was abused and then murdered after a string of missed opportunities to intervene by the authorities, as...

"THIS data allows investigators to identify suspects, examine their contacts, establish relationships between conspirators and place them in a specific location at a certain time." So said the UK Home Office last week as it announced plans to give law-enforcement agencies, local councils and other public bodies access to the details of people's text messages, emails and internet activity. The move followed its announcement in May that it was considering creating a massive central database to store all this data, as a tool to help the security services tackle crime and terrorism. Meanwhile in the US the FISA Amendments Act,...

By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET's Technology Voters' Guide.... After taking over the Foreign Relations committee, Biden became a staunch ally of Hollywood and the recording industry in their efforts to expand copyright law. He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs.......

Kids With History of Skipping School To Wear Ankle Bracelets Equipped With Satellite Technology (AP) Court authorities here will be able to track students with a history of skipping school under a new program requiring them to wear ankle bracelets using satellite technology. But at least one group is worried the ankle bracelets, with Global Positioning System monitoring, will infringe on students' privacy. Linda Penn, a Bexar County justice of the peace, said she anticipates that about 50 students from four San Antonio-area school districts - likely to be mostly high schoolers - will wear the anklets during the six-month...

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Attorney General Michael Mukasey has agreed to allow Congressional hearings, but not to delay, the implementation of new FBI regulations that would allow them to spy on American citizens who are not suspected of any crime. As an editorial in the New York Times points out, this is a power that has a history of abuse. In times past, it was used to wiretap Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and to spy on other civil rights and anti-war protesters." As Dekortage points out, "Several senators have formally complained that citizens could be investigated...

Confidential information on almost 130,000 prisoners and dangerous criminals has been lost by the Home Office, sparking yet another Government data crisis. The loss of the details, which were stored on an unencypted computer memory stick, has raised fears that the taxpayer may now face a multi-million pound compensation bill from criminals whose safety may have been compromised and police informants who could be at risk of reprisals. The home addresses of some of Britain's most prolific and serious offenders - including those who have committed violent and sexual crimes - are understood to be among the missing data. A...

ASPEN, Colo.--Recording industry and motion picture lobbyists are renewing their push to convince broadband providers to monitor customers and detect copyright infringements, claiming the concept is working abroad and should be adopted in the United States. A representative of the recording industry said on Monday that her companies would prefer to enter into voluntary "partnerships" with Internet service providers, but pointedly noted that some governments are mandating such surveillance "if you don't work something out." "Despite our best efforts, we can't do this alone," said Shira Perlmutter, a vice president for global legal policy at the International Federation of the...

Senate Housing Bill Requires eBay, Amazon, Google, and All Credit Card Companies to Report Transactions to the Government Broad, invasive provision touches nearly every aspect of American commerce. Washington, D.C. - Update: Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Charles Grassley is pushing the bill. Hidden deep in Senator Christopher Dodd's 630-page Senate housing legislation is a sweeping provision that affects the privacy and operation of nearly all of America's small businesses. The provision, which was added by the bill's managers without debate this week, would require the nation's payment systems to track, aggregate, and report information on nearly every electronic transaction...

No, even more so.Remember that nifty "Foreclosure prevention and relief" law that was sponsored by Sen. Chistopher Dodd, written by Bank of America and Countrywide Credit, and signed into law by the president recently? Remember how it carried a mandatory -- yet rather tangential -- provision for federal government monitoring of all automatic payment transactions? You probably thought, "hmm." And maybe then you thought, "why'd they do that?" And then, "well, they must know what they're doin'." But some of us thought, "OK, what are the pickpockets (with the full force of the federal government) up to now?" And some...

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "In Vermont, US Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier has ruled that forcing someone to divulge the password to decrypt their hard drive violates the 5th Amendment. Border guards testify that they saw child pornography on the defendant's laptop when the PC was on, but they made the mistake of turning it off and were unable to access it again because the drive was protected by PGP. Although prosecutors offered many ways to get around the 5th Amendment protections, the Judge would have none of that and quashed the grand jury subpoena requesting the defendant's...

In our ever-growing surveillance society, the average Briton is being recorded 3,000 times a week. Richard Gray reports. In many cases information is kept by companies such as banks and shops, but in certain circumstances they can be asked to hand it over to a range of legal authorities With every telephone call, swipe of a card and click of a mouse, information is being recorded, compiled and stored about Britain's citizens. An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has now uncovered just how much personal data is being collected about individuals by the Government, law enforcement agencies and private companies...