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FACEBOOK can be a double-edged sword, a Canadian woman learned when an insurance company cut her health benefits, claiming she was healthy after seeing pictures of her smiling in bikini at the beach. Nathalie Blanchard, 29, took long-term sick leave from her job at IBM in Bromont, Quebec, more than a year ago for severe depression. She was receiving monthly benefits from her insurance company, Manulife. When Ms Blanchard called Manulife to ask why the payments dried up, the insurance company said that "I'm available to work, because of Facebook," she told CBC television. She said that Manulife cited several...

Good grief!

COLUMBUS — Ohio taxpayers are right in the middle of the civil rights lawsuit that Samuel Joseph — “Joe the Plumber” — Wurzelbacher has filed against three former state employees, charging that they illegally accessed his confidential information through state databases. Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray’s office is defending former state employees Helen Jones-Kelley, Douglas Thompson and Fred Williams. All have denied wrongdoing and asked that the case, filed last March in U.S. District Court in Columbus, be dismissed. Jones-Kelley was director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, Williams was the department’s assistant director and Thompson the...

All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer's personal communications, showing who they are contacting, when, where and which websites they are visiting. Despite widespread opposition over Britain's growing surveillance society, 653 public bodies will be given access to the confidential information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the Ambulance Service, fire authorities and even prison governors. They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to access the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a...

Syracuse, NY -- When Danielle Masursky cast her vote Tuesday at the Buckley Road Baptist Church in Clay, a trio of elections inspectors were standing close enough to read her ballot choices. That’s not counting the other voters who, as she carried the ballot from a table to a scanning machine, might have been able to see which boxes she had filled in. “I think it should be secret, and nobody should know how you’re voting,” Masursky said. “I think that is a key element of democracy.” Voters across New York state agreed, complaining to county elections boards that the...

Are Bank Safe Deposit Boxes Safe? No Commodities / Gold & Silver 2009 Nov 02, 2009 - 06:02 PM By: David_Vaughn Got a lot of email when I suggested that safe deposit boxes are not safe from bank or government intrusion. In most minds the “safe deposit box” is the “holy grail.” Our comfort will always be OK as long as our safe deposit box remains safe from others ill intent. Noticed the last few years how the Swiss Banks are no longer confidential places for one to store anything of value? The US government has applied pressure on Switzerland...

Today’s guest author is Deirdre Walker. She retired recently as the Assistant Chief of the Montgomery County, Maryland, Department of Police. She spent 24 years as a police officer. “Do I have the right to refuse this search?” This is a question I heard many times during my law enforcement career. Often my answer was no. But occasionally it would be “yes,” followed by an admonition to have a good day. For the last half of my career, I would have documented each interaction, whether or not it involved an arrest. I would have written down the nature and length...

POOLE, England — It has become commonplace to call Britain a “surveillance society,” a place where security cameras lurk at every corner, giant databases keep track of intimate personal details and the government has extraordinary powers to intrude into citizens’ lives. A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on a par with Singapore. But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of three, were startling just the same. Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the...

Recent problems with the financial system could be used as a reason for regulators to have authority policing social networking sites like Facebook and other types of electronic communication like text messaging. If Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) CEO Richard Ketchum has his way, that's exactly what will happen. Ketchum appeared on CNBC's Oct. 27 "Closing Bell" in an interview with the network's NYSE floor reporter Bob Pisani from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) annual meeting in New York City. Ketchum explained how the Internet and text messaging are unconventional means of communication that pose problems for...

You’re standing in your kitchen making coffee. You are naked, but no one else is home. It’s early in the morning and you are in the privacy of your own home. All right, so maybe you’re a little bit odd, and maybe not everyone makes coffee naked. But your house, your rules, right? That’s probably what Virginia resident Eric Williamson was thinking last Monday morning as he made himself coffee while dressed in nothing but his birthday suit. Unfortunately for Williamson, he wasn’t quite as alone as he thought. Walking through his yard were a woman and her seven-year-old son,...

A MAN who established a sophisticated network of peepholes and cameras to spy on his flatmates has escaped a jail sentence after police were unable to crack an encryption code on his home computer. Rohan James Wyllie, 39, yesterday pleaded guilty in Southport District Court to charges of attempting to visually record one of his flatmates when she was in a private place without her consent. But police were unable to prove his elaborate surveillance system had actually been used. Wyllie's three flatmates, two women and a man, grew suspicious that he was up to something when they noticed lights...

First Amendment: Diversity czar Mark Lloyd's FCC votes Thursday on the issue of net neutrality. Advertised as providing access to all, it will do to the information superhighway what Lloyd proposed for talk radio. Not much was said when $7.2 billion was included in the stimulus bill "to accelerate broadband deployment in unserved and underserved areas and to strategic institutions that are likely to create jobs or provide significant public benefits." The administration has big plans for the Internet — like controlling it. Susan Crawford, the so-called Internet czar, told the Wall Street Journal in April that the broadband billions...

American spies are investing in technology designed to monitor websites including blogs, Twitter, YouTube and even reading habits on Amazon. They say social media websites offer a powerful opportunity for "open source" intelligence – publicly available data that can be mined for information. In an attempt to sift through the blizzard of information, the investment arm of the CIA, In-Q-Tel, has invested in a software firm that monitors social media. According to Wired magazine, In-Q-Tel has put money into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specialises in monitoring the internet. Visible Technologies examines more than half a million websites a...

SEATTLE — Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has temporarily blocked Washington state officials from releasing the names of people who signed a ballot measure on gay rights. Kennedy's ruling Monday temporarily blocks a federal appeals court ruling last week that ordered the release of the names. Kennedy said his order would remain in effect while he considers a request by a pro-marriage group that asked him to reverse the appeals court ruling. The case involves Referendum 71, a ballot initiative that asks Washington voters to approve or reject the state's so-called "everything but marriage" law, which grants registered domestic partners...

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- In its search for fugitives, the FBI has begun using facial-recognition technology on millions of motorists, comparing driver's license photos with pictures of convicts in a high-tech analysis of chin widths and nose sizes. The project in North Carolina has already helped nab at least one suspect. Agents are eager to look for more criminals and possibly to expand the effort nationwide. But privacy advocates worry that the method allows authorities to track people who have done nothing wrong. "Everybody's participating, essentially, in a virtual lineup by getting a driver's license," said Christopher Calabrese, an attorney...

Motorists should be forced to pay to drive on the busiest roads to slash greenhouse gas emissions, the Government's climate change watchdog says today. The Climate Change Committee, led by former CBI chief Lord Turner, wants ministers to introduce compulsory road pricing to prevent global warming. Under the controversial scheme, cars would be fitted with electronic tags and tracked either by satellite or roadside beacon. Charges would rise at times of peak congestion to around £1.50 a mile. In a report to MPs, the advisers called for a carbon revolution - with thousands of wind turbines, nuclear power stations...

The NYPD is amassing a database of cell phone users, instructing cops to log serial numbers from suspects' phones in hopes of connecting them to past or future crimes. In the era of disposable, anonymous cell phones, the file could be a treasure-trove for detectives investigating drug rings and other criminal enterprises, police sources say. "It's used to help build cases," one source said of the new initiative. "It doesn't replace the human element, like debriefing prisoners, but it's another tool to use that we didn't have in the past." A recent internal memo says that when cops make an...

Should doctors and hospitals be required by the federal government to maintain a national network of electronic health records for every individual in America that indicates, for example, whether that individual has had an abortion, a sexually transmitted disease, a mental illness or a drug problem? Such a system has already been mandated by the stimulus law enacted in February, and politicians in Washington, D.C., would now prefer not to answer straightforward questions about it. Americans should not let them get away with it. The stimulus law provided for “the development of a nationwide health information technology infrastructure” that would...

Today, we sent the below letter to Gov. Quinn urging him to disclose documents releated to his office giving names and contact information of home healthcare providers to the unions. Illinois currently provides state funding to approximately 3,000 residents to assist family members with developmental disabilities through the Illinois’ Home-based Support Services Program. The personal information of people enrolled in the Support Services Program was distributed to two unions in accordance with Executive Order 09-15 which states, “the Department of Human Services shall provide to an organization interested in representing individual providers access to the names and addresses of current...

New guidance for Britain’s 150,000 practising doctors could remove the right to confidentiality from patients with inherited diseases. When a patient is found to have a gentic disease, such as certain forms of cancer, doctors will be obliged to inform relatives about potential risks to their health, the General Medical Council (GMC) says. Updated guidance on confidentiality, seen by The Times before publication on Monday, suggests that most patients will readily share information about their health with their children and close relatives. However, in circumstances where family relationships have broken down, where children have been adopted — or patients refuse...

The reason why I am asking is because I post on Conservatives4Palin.com, and these two trolls who post there constantly are just evil, deranged individuals. I'd like to find out who they are(or most likely they are the same person) unfortunately the site has not been able to IP block them, but if there is a way for me to find out their IP address to scare them off once and for all that would be great. They post the most hateful(Huffington Post kind of crap)

You go on vacation to San Diego and take more than 100 photos of your three daughters, ages 5, 4 and 18 months. You also take seven or eight shots of your girls playing together at bathtime. Then you return home to Peoria, Ariz., bring your memory stick into Walmart for processing, and lose custody of your children because an employee finds the photos, decides they are pornographic, and alerts the police. That is what happened to Lisa and Anthony Demaree last year. Accused of sexual abuse, they were not allow to see their girls for several days, and did...

The White House is collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site users, a failure that appears to run counter to President Obama's promise of a transparent government and his pledge to protect privacy on the Internet. Defenders of the White House actions said the Presidential Records Act requires that the administration gather the information and that it was justified in taking the additional step of asking a private contractor to "crawl and archive" all such material. Nicholas Shapiro, a White House...

Reporting from Broughton, England - The good folk of Broughton don't take kindly to being photographed without permission. Just ask Google. When the search-engine giant sent one of its specially equipped cars to take pictures of the village for its Street View feature, residents swung into action. They stopped the car in its tracks, called the police and quizzed the bewildered driver for nearly two hours before letting him go. "I don't think this guy anticipated how angry people would get," said Edward Butler-Ellis, 28. "We didn't stand there with pitchforks or anything and block the road with bales of...

To the sons and daughters of our Founding Fathers, "Health care" under Obama's drastic plot is neither healthy nor caring, as these actual pages of the bill below will demonstrate. Ever since our founding fathers broke free from tyranny of a foreign power, enemies of America have always sought to destroy her special place in history. German "National Socialists" in the 1940s and Liberals from the 2000s, their goal is the same: the annihilation of freedom and the American way of life. America has a special place in history. Marxists wish to destroy it. Ever there was a time to...

NLPC has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites.The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.”In the course of investigating procurement by the White House New Media office, NLPC discovered a 51-page solicitation of bids that was filed on Friday, August 21, 2009. Filed as Solicitation # WHO-S-09-0003,...

Here are the news stories, editorials, and videos that conservatives dugg Wednesday, September 2, 2009. Please take a moment to digg these articles at Digg.com, then get back over here! What is Digg? And why should I care?

Security: A Senate bill lets the president "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "nongovernmental" computer networks and do what's needed to respond to the threat. Didn't they just collect our e-mail addresses?We wish this was just a piece of the fictional "Dr. Strangelove" that fell to the cutting-room floor, but it's not. It is a real piece of disturbingly vague legislation sponsored by Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. Senate Bill 773 would grant the administration emergency powers (where have we heard that before?) in the event of a cyberemergency that the president would have...

A fellow blogger alerted me (or actually reminded me) of the upcoming census, brought to you by ACORN. This time, it will be a 20-page form loaded with questions that have nothing to do with the census, but everything to do with learning ways to tax you: How many televisions do you own? How many computers do you own? How many cars do you own? Do you attend your local library? How many times a week do you eat fast food? What's your annual income?...and so on. Here's how to deal with it all: give non-answers to all but questions...

A second Obama Zero dollar is out. Focused on the intrusion Obamacare (or HR 3200 if you believe it's not Obama's plan) will be into our private lives and information. Please download it, print out both sides if you like it, and pass it out at opportune moments to like-minded folks, or leave it in places that anyone can find. Get them out there exposing the lies of Obamacare. Keep fighting it any way you can. Front of it is first, then the back image. For the whole series of Zero dollar bills, go here: "Flickr Archive of Zero Bills"

In a ruling with broad implications for computer privacy, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that federal investigators went too far when they seized the digital records of a drug testing company and kept the results of confidential drug tests performed on all Major League baseball players during the 2002 season. According to published reports, 104 players tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. The names of four of them — Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, and (now retired) Sammy Sosa — were leaked to the press by an anonymous source or sources. The court...

RUSH: President Obama has arrived at Marxist Vineyard, has told the press no coverage, just leave us alone, we don't want any coverage here, just leave us alone. I feel like waiting for the next headline on Drudge to be: "People to President: Leave Us Alone! Keep your hands off our health care; keep your hands off our Social Security; keep your hands off everything, just stay up there in Marxist Vineyard with your buddy skip Gates and go play a couple rounds of golf." In fact, I have a very good friend -- I wonder if I should say...

SAVOR the silence of America's self-serving champions of privacy. For once, the American Civil Liberties Union has nothing bad to say about the latest case of secret domestic surveillance -- because it is the ACLU that committed the spying. Last week, The Washington Post reported on a Justice Department inquiry into photographs of undercover CIA officials and other intelligence personnel taken by ACLU-sponsored researchers assisting the defense team of Guantanamo detainees. According to the report, the pictures of covert CIA officers -- "in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes" -- were shown to jihadi suspects tied to the 9/11...

<p>EDGARTOWN - The Obama White House, like administrations before it, has gone to great lengths to accommodate the press corps traveling with the president on his first official vacation in office. Staffers arranged for a filing center at a local school, assembled “pools’’ of reporters to tail the president if he goes out, and promised to brief the press daily.</p>

An interesting video by ACLU (yes, the ACLU does some good things) on how government having all our data will control our lifes. It is really quite scary how data can be used to manipulate our lifes. This is the kind of thing the ACLU should really focus on.

We are berated, ad nauseam, with imprecations that America is the only advanced nation that fails to have universal health care. This statement is often followed by the rueful remark that the debate over government controlled health care has been going on without progress for 60 years and, ipso facto, it is time to settle it. All right, let's do that. Let's look a little deeper. Why is there no settlement of the issue, and why is America unique in its obstinate reluctance to follow the example of our older cultural brothers in Europe? When a debate continues for decades...

Gotta give credit where it is due, and this time the ACLU got it right. While too many of their positions are clearly in the Left Camp, when it comes to privacy we all agree. Check out the future of ordering a pizza.

Buried in the 1,017 pages of the House Democrats’ health-care bill is a little-noticed provision that for the first time could give the government access to the checking or credit-card information of every American. Under section 163, which is entitled “Administrative Simplification,” the bill sets new “standards” for electronic transactions between individuals and their health-care providers. According to section 163, the standards will “enable the real-time (or near real-time) determination of an individual’s financial responsibility at the point of service . . . ” In addition, they will “enable electronic funds transfers, in order to allow automated reconciliation with related...

WASHINGTON – Vice President Joe Biden plans to announce Thursday nearly $1.2 billion in grants to help hospitals transition to electronic medical records.

Internet denizens and urban dwellers alike need to recognize that an era of anonymity is ending. The population of the world stands at about 7 billion. So it takes only 10 digits to label each human being on the planet uniquely. This simple arithmetic observation offers powerful insight into the limits of privacy. It dictates something we might call the 10-Digit Rule: just 10 digits or so of distinctive personal information are enough to identify you uniquely. They're enough to strip away your anonymity on the Internet or call out your name as you walk down the street. The 10-Digit...

Flash cookies placed by many of the most popular Web sites are being used to track site visitors, even going so far as to re-create http tracking cookies after they're deleted by privacy-conscious surfers. A new study released by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and other universites found that the Flash cookies, or local shared objects, are used on 54 of the top 100 Web sites, as ranked by Quantcast. The Flash cookies are stored in a different location than regular http cookies, and are not removed if you delete cookies from within your browser. Per the report,...

Over the next decade, systems which create and store digital records of people's movements through public space will be woven inextricably into the fabric of everyday life. We are already starting to see such systems now, and there will be many more in the near future. Here are some examples you might already have used or read about: Monthly transit swipe-cards Electronic tolling devices (FastTrak, EZpass, congestion pricing) Cellphones Services telling you when your friends are nearby Searches on your PDA for services and businesses near your current location Free Wi-Fi with ads for businesses near the network access point...

WASHINGTON – The Barack Obama administration has announced plans to lift a government ban on tracking visitors to government websites, and potentially, collect their personal data through the use of "cookies" – an effort some suspect may already be in place on White House sites. A ban on such tracking by the federal government on Internet users has been in place since 2000, however, the White House Office of Management and Budget now wants to lift the ban citing a "compelling need." In fact, according to the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, federal agencies have already negotiated agreements and contracts...

I know it's from the ACLU.....but really between the IRS and Obamacare what privacy will we have left? Still funny. http://aclu.org/pizza/images/screen.swf

The Department of Health and Human Services is almost certain to take on responsibility for creating the criteria used to decide what health records technologies qualify for billions of dollars in reimbursements to medical offices under a new stimulus program, officials said Friday. The decision represents a significant restriction of the role played by a private certification group, begun several years ago by the technology industry, which until recently had served as the government's gatekeeper for endorsing systems designed to improve the sharing of medical records. The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology, or CCHIT, came under sharp criticism in...

I was involved in a very minor fender bender on 94 West in Milwaukee on Friday. The responding officer took down my driver's license information (even though I was a passenger) and statement (the other car drove off and I gave a partial plate) Today I get 7 mailings from 6 different law firms about my accident, my friend who was the driver received 8 mailings. As the Milwaukee Sheriff's Department is the only entity that knows about it, they must have sold my information to the law firms in the area. Can they do this? I also gave my...

Despite the advances in technologies and solutions, the concern that remains central to the objective of providing security to the nation is the question of “who is who?” The federal homeland security laws directed toward enhancing the security of the United States — and the federal government’s confidence in the adequacy of such efforts — is, at the most basic level, grounded in the process of identity determination and the use of powerful databases to accurately determine individual identity to best evaluate threat and risk. Much of government’s effort to protect the borders, minimize the risk to infrastructure and ensure...

MORE than 10 years after she tried without success to have a baby, Marcy Campbell Krinsk is still receiving painful reminders in her mail. The ads and promotions started after she bought fertility drugs at a pharmacy in San Diego. Marketers got hold of her name, and she found coupons and samples in her mail that shadowed the growth of an imaginary child — at first, for Pampers and baby formula, then for discounts on family photos, and all the way through the years to gifts suitable for an elementary school graduate. “I had three different in vitro procedures,” said...

This is funny...but could become very true under the Obama Czaristic Administration

Transit agency plans to make photography policy publicIt took a teenager and a scrappy online newspaper to get Muni to state what ought to be obvious: People can take photos in public places. A 16-year-old Galileo High School student was shooting video on the K-Ingleside Muni line when fare inspectors 57 and 61 confronted him and told him he was not allowed to shoot on the Muni, according to our friends at SF Appeal, a local website. In the era of smartphones, YouTube and Flickr, it's hard to go anywhere without seeing someone taking a picture -- and to imagine...