Via Talkleft, Records the Government Keeps On You:
The Forensic Scientist Blog has a list of the top six files the government keeps on you, how to obtain them, and why you should have them.
Cateories: The FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, Earnings Records, Criminal Records and Court Records. According to the blog, if your FBI record is under 50 pages, it's free.
How many years before the government has one mega-file, or an efficient and easy-to-collate distributed file, on each of us?
Chris Soghoian posts a bombshell or two at slight paranoia: 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight
Executive Summary
Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.
The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint's Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.
It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies' extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics — since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004.
(Spotted via Ed Felton, Soghoian: 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight).
As Chris Soghoian says, it is really staggering that law enforcement could make so many requests in a year or so and even more staggering that such a sea change in the government/privacy balance could happen with no public notice or debate.
Evan Brown at Internet Cases has a good writeup of Steinbach v. Village of Forest Park, No. 06-4215, 2009 WL 2605283 (N.D. Ill. Aug. 25, 2009) which holds that email snooping can be a tortious intrusion upon seclusion.
My e-home is my (cyber) castle.
Stewart Baker, ex-DHS guru, ex-NSA General Counsel, writes,
We're actually closer to 1984 than most people realize. Antidemocratic forces have the ability to turn on cameras in our homes and offices — to monitor our every action and every keystroke. That's the lesson of the ghostnet report.
The ghostnet report is about large-scale zombie computer networks. So there's the tiniest bit of hyperbole here, since the cameras being turned on in your home to which Baker refers are, so far, web cams. (The more interesting question to me is which cell phones can be turned on remotely, but the ghostnet report doesn't discuss that.)
Baker wants to sound like an optimist: he tells us he's confident that “the 1984ish powers aren't being exercised by the US government or NSA”. I actually share this confidence: Why zombie millions of computers, leave traces and create a host of fourth amendment issues, when the NSA can instead intercept all your packets at the switch?
Twitter announces an upcoming beta test of 'verified' accounts that will bear a “special seal”:
The experiment will begin with public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well known individuals at risk of impersonation. We hope to verify more accounts in the future but due to the resources required, verification will begin only with a small set.
While this announcement is motivated by the publicity given to the Tony La Russa case (see Twitter Defamation, Sec. 230 and the Dendrite Principles), Twitter also says,
Reports this week that Twitter has settled a law suit and officially agreed to pay legal fees for an impersonation complaint that was taken care of by our support staff in accordance with our Terms are erroneous. Twitter has not settled, nor do we plan to settle or pay.
I'm off to Berkeley to attend the Privacy Law Scholars Conference 2009. I'll be in transit much of today, starting too early, but touching down by lunch time — California time. Then BART and a little inter-modal, and if all goes well, I'll be there.
Should be fun — last year's conference at GW was tremendous. (I'm the discussant/moderator for a paper by the incandescent Paul Ohm.)
I'll be back late Sunday as I'm staying on Saturday to see some people I don't get to see often enough. In light of my plans for the rest of the summer that no longer seems as relaxing as I thought it would be when I bought the tickets lo these many months ago.
Jotwell Blenderlaw