Mitchell Freedman If you live in Riverhead and have a backyard pool that doesn’t have a permit, beware: The town is using a new tool to find you without ever setting foot on your property. In a move other Long Island towns may copy but privacy advocates say raises “Big Brother” concerns, Riverhead has used…
Category: U.S.
Researcher detained at U.S. border, questioned about Wikileaks
Elinor Mills has a story on cnet that suggests that once again, when it’s not convenient for our government, the Fourth Amendment becomes merely advisory: A security researcher involved with the Wikileaks Web site was detained by U.S. agents at the border for three hours and questioned about the controversial whistleblower project as he entered…
Breaking a Promise on Surveillance
From a New York Times editorial: It is just a technical matter, the Obama administration says: We just need to make a slight change in a law to make clear that we have the right to see the names of anyone’s e-mail correspondents and their Web browsing history without the messy complication of asking a…
Privacy Suit Targets Net Giants Over Zombie Cookies
Ryan Singel writes: A wide swath of the net’s top websites, including MTV, ESPN, MySpace, Hulu, ABC, NBC and Scribd, were sued in federal court Friday on the grounds they violated federal computer intrusion law by secretly using storage in Adobe’s Flash player to recreate cookies deleted by users. At issue is technology from Quantcast,…