Happy Thanksgiving to all of Pogo’s U.S. readers! I had planned to try to do a quick news update this morning, but woke up to discover that our entire community was without electricity. Needless to say, all of my cooking and preparations are wildly behind schedule and I’m racing around like a nut trying to…
Category: Misc
WikiLeaks releases 573.000 pager intercepts from 9/11 2001
From Wikileaks.org: From 3AM on Wednesday November 25, 2009, until 3AM the following day (US east coast time), WikiLeaks will release over half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. To foster a deeper understanding, the messages…
Keeping Personal Data Private (Editorial)
The following editorial urging Congress to pass a national data protection law is from today’s New York Times: In 2006, a Veterans Affairs Department analyst lost a laptop and external drive with Social Security numbers and other personal data from more than 26 million veterans and active duty troops. There was a national call for…
Database anonymity at risk, warns researcher
From Out-Law.com: Increasing amounts of personal information are collected by organisations and stored in massive databases. That information is sometimes used or released after being stripped of elements that could identify individuals in a process called ‘anonymisation’. University of Colorado Law School Associate Professor Paul Ohm, though, has said that the techniques used no longer…