Op-ed by Jennifer Stoddart Privacy Commissioner of Canada January 2010 Many air passengers subjected to Canada’s latest airport security measure will find the experience of standing in a full-body scanner to be discomfiting, if not outright disturbing. But while any invasion of privacy is deplorable, the federal government has promised to respect the privacy and…
Category: Surveillance
U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google
Bruce Schneier writes: Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn’t that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated — we knew that…
The missing Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board
Alan Charles Raul, who served as vice chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board from 2006 to 2008, has a letter to the editor in today’s Washington Post that begins: The Jan. 19 front-page article “FBI broke law for years in phone record searches” missed a key part of the story. The lack…
Text Messages in China to Be Scanned for ‘Illegal Content’
Sharon Lafraniere reports: Expanding what the Chinese government calls a campaign against pornography, cellular companies in Beijing and Shanghai have been told to suspend text services to cellphone users who are found to have sent messages with “illegal or unhealthy content,” state-run media reported on Tuesday. China Mobile, one of the nation’s largest cellular providers,…