Lee Fang reports: The debate over the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records has reached a critical point after a federal appeals court last week ruled the practice illegal, dramatically raising the stakes for pending Congressional legislation that would fully or partially reinstate the program. An army of pundits promptly took to television screens, with many of them…
Category: Govt
IN: No decision yet on intel agencies demand for blanket exemption from privacy bill
The Times of India reports: Responding to a query in Parliament, the government on Thursday said details of the Right to Privacy Bill are yet to be finalized. The government was quizzed on whether intelligence agencies had asked to be kept out of the bill’s purview. […] Intelligence agencies have reportedly sought a blanket exemption…
Twitter’s Fight with Feds Gets Public Hearing
From my Twitter timeline, yesterday’s hearing was a bit of an exercise in tortuous reasoning and side-stepping. I’ll try to find some more write-ups about what happened, but here are two media reports already available: Ross Todd reports: Justice Department lawyers urged a federal judge on Tuesday to short circuit Twitter Inc.’s legal campaign to…
How Private DNA Data Led Idaho Cops on a Wild Goose Chase and Linked an Innocent Man to a 20-year-old Murder Case
Jennifer Lynch writes: The New Orleans Advocate recently published a shocking story that details the very real threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by law enforcement access to private genetic databases and familial DNA searching. In 1996, a young woman named Angie Dodge was murdered in her apartment in a small town in Idaho. Although the police…