Elinor Mills reports: The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team warned BlackBerry users on Tuesday about a new program called PhoneSnoop that allows someone to remotely eavesdrop on phone conversations. The PhoneSnoop application must be installed on the phone by someone who has physical access to it or by tricking the user into downloading it, the…
Category: Surveillance
India’s new IT law increases surveillance powers
John Ribeiro reports: A new IT law has come into force in India that frees Internet portals from liability for third-party content and activity, but also gives the government powers to monitor communications on the Internet, and block web sites that are found to be offensive. The Information Technology (Amendment) Act 2008 was passed by…
UK police forces challenged over files held on law-abiding protesters
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…
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…