Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports: Tragically, Aaron Swartz, hounded by an apparently over-zealous prosecutor, committed suicide in early 2013. His just-unveiled major open-source privacy project, DeadDrop, lives on in a citizen and press protection program, The New Yorker’s Strongbox. Strongbox is the first use of DeadDrop technology. The New Yorker magazine will use it so that its readers can “communicate with our…
Category: Misc
There are 12.5 unprotected versions of the average American’s personal information on the web
Christopher Mims writes: Safe Shepherd is a company that searches the web for all the public records available on Americans, and then presents them in a dashboard. Try it for yourself—it’s free—and the results are almost guaranteed to be unnerving. The information is mostly innocuous, and includes your address, phone number and email, but the fact…
Forget about drones: Are robots the next privacy threat?
Scott Bomboy writes: A United Nations report about “killer robots” is a new spin on the rising concern about drones—and the legal problems caused by self-guided machines could be closer than you think. The U.N. Human Rights Commission plans to address part of the issue later this month in Geneva. Christof Heyns, a South African…
Colorado’s Mark Udall, a privacy watchdog, stumps for domestic drones
Allison Sherry of the Denver Post reports: Sen. Mark Udall has worked to carve out a reputation on Capitol Hill as the Senate watchdog to the Obama administration on intelligence gathering and privacy issues. He successfully fought to prohibit the IRS from reading Americans’ e-mails without a warrant. He pushed last year to amend federal…