Ellen Nakashima reports: For six years, Nicholas Merrill has lived in a surreal world of half-truths, where he could not tell even his fiancee, his closest friends or his mother that he is “John Doe” — the man who filed the first-ever court challenge to the FBI’s ability to obtain personal data on Americans without…
Category: Featured News
EFF Urges Supreme Court to Block NASA’s Invasive Background Checks
From EFF, an update on a long-running battle over employee background checks at NASA (links to some of the previous coverage on this case can be found in PogoWasRight.org’s archives, here): The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the United States Supreme Court Monday to uphold an appeals court decision that blocks invasive and unnecessary background…
Google Agonizes on Privacy as Ad World Vaults Ahead
Jessica E. Vascellaro reports: A confidential, seven-page Google Inc. “vision statement” shows the information-age giant in a deep round of soul-searching over a basic question: How far should it go in profiting from its crown jewels—the vast trove of data it possesses about people’s activities? Should it tap more of what it knows about Gmail…
Privacy commissioner seeks to block fingerprinting of med-school applicants
Glen McGregor reports that Canada’s privacy commissioner doesn’t want biometric data of Canadians accessible to U.S. authorities under the PATRIOT Act: Canada’s privacy watchdog has gone to court to stop the collection and storage of fingerprints from students who apply to medical schools. Privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart launched legal action in Federal Court last week,…