Rob Evans and Paul Lewis report: Chief constables will be forced to justify the legality of recording thousands of law-abiding protesters on secret nationwide databases, the government’s privacy watchdog announced today. Christopher Graham, the information commissioner, said he had “genuine concerns about the ever increasing amount” of personal data held by police. Graham’s move came…
Category: Surveillance
Privacy, free speech, and the PATRIOT Act: First and Fourth Amendment limits on national security letters
Patrick P. Garlinger has a Note in the October issue of the New York University Law Review. The abstract is: Congress’s passage of the Patriot Act after 9/11 expanded the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) information-gathering authority to issue national security letters (NSL). Without any judicial review, the FBI issues NSLs to telecommunications providers to…
Sex texting love rats on notice
It’s a technological breakthrough that will worry cheating partners – secret text messages can now be retrieved from mobilephones five years after they were deleted. Shaped like an ice hockey puck, the XRY forensic device mines old SIM cards for long-erased nuggets of personal information. Kim Khor is director of Khor Wills & Associates –…
Editorial: Privacy and the Patriot Act
In the aftermath of 9/11, legislators cut legal corners to protect the nation. Congress should amend that now by revising certain expiring provisions of the law. Along with the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and the Bush administration’s illegal eavesdropping on U.S. citizens, the USA Patriot Act came to symbolize the excesses of the post-9/11 war…