ABC News - Revisiting Suspects' Rights. Court May Decide Whether Police Still Must Read Miranda Warnings

Boston Globe Online / Nation | World - Police association seeks DNA testing of all suspects.

The International Association of Police Chiefs says it will urge Congress to require that DNA samples be taken from every person arrested in connection with a crime. Civil rights advocates say that could violate the privacy of innocent people.

Typically, DNA samples are taken only from felons convicted of violent crimes.

Its been a while since I went to school but isn't it supposed to "Innocent till proven guilty" ??

ZDNet Australia - Breaking down digital signatures. As e-mail integrates itself more tightly with how today's businesses operate, companies are becoming increasingly interested in the ability to make binding agreements over the Internet.

San Francisco Chronicle - Privacy Protections Lacking in Bank Reform. Under the measure, personal information could be divulged to any of a financial institution's divisions or affiliates as well as to unaffiliated companies that sign marketing agreements. Telemarketers could take a peek at customer's bank balances, for example.

CNET.com - News - The Net - Judge: Net content law allows for "severe standards". A government move to protect children from pornography on the Internet has come under fire from a U.S. judge who suggests that the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) could lead to censorship as restrictive as in "Iran or Iraq."

Technology News from Wired News - Med Sites Prescribe Ethics Credo.

An alliance of medical Web sites disclosed plans for an ethical code of conduct designed to guarantee the dissemination of "reliable, safe, and trustworthy" health information.

At a press conference in New York on Thursday, leaders of the partnership, called Health Internet Ethics, or Hi-Ethics, announced plans to create a set of industry standards focusing on site content, advertising and privacy issues.

XML.com - The W3C, P3P and the Intermind Patent. Last week, the W3C published an analysis from Pennie & Edmonds LLP on whether implementations of their Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) would infringe a patent held by Seattle-based Intermind Corporation.

New Scientist: Opinion interview: Confidentially yours.

New Scientist: New-wave spies.

Electronic eavesdropping is becoming mere child's play

Software that allows a computer to receive radio signals could make spying on other computers all too simple, according to two scientists at the University of Cambridge. Such are the dangers that they are patenting countermeasures that computer manufacturers can take to foil any electronic eavesdroppers.

New York Times - free registration required Internet Companies Set Policies to Help Protect Consumer Privacy.

To address online privacy concerns, a group of leading Internet advertising and data-profiling companies have agreed to adopt policies that allow consumers to find out what information is collected by marketers and to turn off data-gathering technology.

"This technology is something we haven't examined closely, yet it allows companies to collect great amounts of information without the slightest knowledge by consumers that it is being collected," said Robert Pitofsky, the F.T.C. chairman."It certainly strikes me as a troubling notion. And this surreptitious nature of the data collection makes this different from other privacy issues we've dealt with."

New York Times - free registration required Judges Raise Questions About Federal Anti-Pornography Law. A federal judge suggested that a law intended to shield children from online pornography could be fatally flawed, because it leaves open the question of which community's standards should apply when evaluating content.

MIT distribution site for PGP.

PGP Freeware v6.5.2 is now available for Windows 95/98/NT/2000 and MacOS 7.6.1+! This is for U.S. citizens in the United States, or to Canadian citizens in Canada

International users will have to settle for PGP 6.5.1i which can be found at The International PGP Home Page.

TECHNOCRAT.NET - Echelon, Silkworth, Moonpenny, Oh My!.

TECHNOCRAT.NET - UCITA revisited.

Update from CCH Banking Law Group - Financial Services Reform Means a New Way Of Doing Business for Banks and Consumers.

But one of the most highly charged privacy issues -- sharing of health information between an insurance company and an affiliated bank -- is not addressed at all in the legislation.

"The conferees took out all the medical privacy language from the bill, because the White House wants to deal with this issue separately," Pachkowski said. Critics believe that this omission could harm consumers. For instance, a bank upon discovering that a customer has a fatal disease may refuse to make a 30-year mortgage to that person.

Staff Editorial Michigan Daily U. Michigan - EDITORIAL: Protecting privacy. Patient's have every reason to worry about their medical records falling into the wrong hands. Clinton said in a speech last Friday that more than a third of all Fortune 500 companies check medical records before they hire or promote individuals.

Reuters - Clinton Proposes Rules To Protect Medical Privacy. President Clinton proposed federal rules Friday to protect the confidentiality of medical records, saying Americans should not have to live in an Orwellian world where their privacy is routinely violated.

U.S. Newswire - Institute for Health Freedom - IHF: Act Now to Protect Your Medical Privacy. "President Clinton is touting the new regulations, saying they would give the American public a new right' to medical privacy," states Blevins, president of the Institute for Health Freedom. "However, the Department of Health and Human Services acknowledges -- in its summary of the proposed rule -- that there is no statutory authority for a private right of action for individuals to enforce their privacy rights." In other words, the public is being told they have a new right to privacy when, in fact, they can't sue or bring a private course of action for damages caused by a breach of confidentiality, under the rule.

New York Times - free registration required Congress Passes Wide-Ranging Bill Easing Bank Laws.

Consumer groups and civil rights advocates criticized the legislation for being a sop to the nation's biggest financial institutions. They say that it fails to protect the privacy interests of consumers and community lending standards for the disadvantaged and that it will create more problems than it solves.

"I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010," said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. "I wasn't around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness."

Washington Post - Banking Battle May Shift to States.

At first, a provision in the banking bill that would let states overrule federal privacy law went virtually unnoticed.

The amendment was adopted almost as an afterthought, near the end of exhausting negotiations about legislation to overhaul the nation's financial services industry. Until the bill's approval yesterday by the Senate, it remained a largely unheralded handful of lines in a historic 400-page document.

But that late change, permitting states to override the bill's controversial privacy provisions, means the banking, insurance and securities industries - which spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying for the bill - now face the likelihood of new battles in states across the nation over a key element of their victory on Capitol Hill: The right to share customer information with few restrictions.

New York Times - free registration required Daisy Bates, 84, Civil Rights Leader. Daisy Bates, a civil rights leader who in 1957 led the fight to admit nine black students to Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., died at a hospital there Thursday. She was 84.

ZDNet: News - FTC commissioner: No privacy regs.

RealNetworks has put data privacy back in the news, but FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle backs self-regulation: 'The government cannot take care of everybody.' So lets not take care of anybody

Nobody asked them to take care of everybody just to try and take care of what they can. After all they can't stop every murder or robbery but they still try. At minimum they can make the companies admit what they do with the data they collect and give you the chance to opt-out. Of course it would be much better if it was a voluntary system that required you to opt-in.