Andrea Peterson reports: In September 2003, Attorney General John Ashcroft called out the librarians. The American Library Association and civil liberties groups, he said, were pushing “baseless hysteria” about the controversial Patriot Act. He suggested that they were worried that spy agencies wanted to know “how far you have gotten on the latest Tom Clancy novel.”…
Category: Misc
Londoners give up eldest children in public Wi-Fi security horror show
Tom Fox-Brewster reports: A handful of Londoners in some of the capital’s busiest districts unwittingly agreed to give up their eldest child, during an experiment exploring the dangers of public Wi-Fi use. The experiment, which was backed by European law enforcement agency Europol, involved a group of security researchers setting up a Wi-Fi hotspot in…
Article: Sensitive Information – Ohm
Paul Ohm has an article, “Sensitive Information,” to be published in Southern California Law Review, Vol. 88, 2015. Here’s the Abstract: Almost every information privacy law provides special protection for certain categories of “sensitive information,” such as health, sex, or financial information. Even though this approach is widespread, the concept of sensitive information is woefully…
Law School’s Center for Internet and Society denies accusations that it accepts Google funds designated only for non-privacy research
Victor Xu reports: Barbara van Schewick, faculty director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS), denied accusations from a ProPublica article by Julia Angwin that Stanford accepts money from Google under the condition that it not be used for privacy research. “The ProPublica story is inaccurate and we have notified the reporters of this fact,”…