The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against the Department of Justice today, demanding the public release of the surveillance guidelines that govern investigations of Americans by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI’s Domestic Investigative Operational Guidelines went into effect in December of 2008 and detail the Bureau’s procedures and standards for implementing…
TSA responds to Privacy Coalition’s concerns about Whole Body Imaging
EPIC.org reports that the Transportation Security Administration has replied to the Privacy Coalition statement on whole body imaging systems. The letter, signed by Acting Administrator for TSA, Gale Rossides, identifies all of the protections that WBI has in place. But it really doesn’t address the biggest concerns about the potential for the misuse and the…
How much information can the government demand from us?
When I was in law school, I went to a luncheon at which famed legal scholar Arthur Miller spoke. His topic, still a fresh one back in the mid-1980s, was the amount of private information floating around in computers. His target was American corporations. He felt that American corporations were collecting too much consumer data,…
China’s Green Dam, technology and human rights
China recently announced a policy that every computer sold must be packaged with specific software that bars it from being used to visit certain Internet sites. This so-called “Green Dam” software ostensibly is aimed at blocking child pornography and other vile sites. In Chinese, “green” and “clean” are interchangeable — here, the idea being that…