COMMENTARY. No one can deny that Internet privacy legislation is THE hot issue this year on Capitol Hill. But now that a number of bills have been and will be introduced on the topic, Internet users are going to have a hard time trying to separate "pretty good" privacy protections from ones actually worth having.

You can safely determine that federal legislators who truly have their hearts set on increasing the safekeeping of online users' personal data will have less luck than their rivals.

Part of this problem is that no one is talking about Internet privacy bills that keep user data available to businesses that want to use it themselves. Those bills tend to be classified as "Internet privacy" bills by the legislators who introduce them, as well as by many news media members, leading the unsuspecting Internet user to conclude that they must be "pro-Internet privacy bills."

Slashdot | Book Reviews: The Hacker Ethic.

USA TODAY - Copyright fight might narrow TV, music options .

A shift in balance toward the entertainment industry is exemplified, consumer advocates say, in 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Movie studios, record labels and other copyright holders lobbied for the DMCA's passage to protect U.S. movies and music from international piracy.

DMCA provisions that make it illegal to circumvent technological protections allow the entertainment industry to control the specifics of playback devices.

"You can't buy a DVD player that isn't licensed by the movie industry," Templeton says. "The record industry is trying to make it so you can't buy a music player that isn't licensed by them, and now the studios want you to not be able to buy a TV set not licensed by them."

Such control runs counter to the idealistic notion of the free flow of information that has driven much of the digital revolution. What it comes down to, EFF attorney Robin Gross says, is that music and movie industries are "using the Napster situation as another reason to look at various ways technology can be used to reduce commonly held fair uses of consumers with audio and video."

FEED | Digital Culture - Steven Levy: The FEED Dialog. Crypto author Steven Levy discusses his latest book, the ongoing privacy wars, and the 'code rebels' doing battle against government spooks and bureaucrats.

As Levy writes in the book's introduction:

"What if governments were not the only potential beneficiaries of cryptography? What if the people themselves needed it, to protect their communications and personal data from any and all intruders, including the government itself? Isn't everybody entitled to privacy?... This book tells the story of the people who asked those questions and created a revolution in the field that is destined to change all our lives. It is also the story of those who did their best to make the questions go away. The former were nobodies: computer hackers, academics, and policy wonks. The latter were the most powerful people in the world: spies, and generals, and presidents. Guess who won."

ZDNet - News: Carnivore, cybercrime take prime time.

Carnivore, cryptography and cybercrime are just a few of the topics on tap this week at a high-profile conference concerning recent developments in Internet policy and civil liberties.

The Computers Freedom and Privacy Conference 2001 kicks off in Cambridge, Mass., on Tuesday and will feature a forum for privacy watchdogs, free-speech activists and human-rights specialists to discuss how the Internet is changing society.

The Register (UK) - Email snooping code of practice delayed.

The Data Protection Registrar's code of practice for surveillance in the workplace has been delayed due to the large number of responses from a public consultation.

The code of practice is vital for clarifying what employees and employers are entitled to do in the workplace following several pieces of new legislation.

The controversial and flawed RIP Act opens up the possibility of widespread email and phone surveillance. But this has also to tie in with the Human Rights Act, which enshrines the right to reasonable privacy, and the Data Protection Act, which insists that data is recovered "in a fair and proportionate manner".

Political News from Wired News - Europe Slaving Over Cybercrime. The Council of Europe has been working on it for four years and has gone through 25 drafts. And its proposed international treaty on cybercrime is still running against all those thorny privacy issues.

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But Fred Eisner, a consultant for the Dutch government and private companies, said the draft made unfair demands on Internet service providers by asking them to track Web users' online movements.

"This draft convention lacks balance," Eisner told the assembly. "The convention explicitly gives much more power to law enforcement agencies and it has no system of checks and balances."

Bruce McConnell, president of McConnell International, a Washington-based consulting firm, said the treaty should be more forceful in protecting the privacy of Web users who are already worried about being spied on.

"There is concern that the powers of surveillance ... are not balanced by comparable protections for individuals' privacy," he said.

The Register (UK) - CIA patching ECHELON shortcomings.

A core objection to paranoid rants regarding the US National Security Agency (NSA) electronic eavesdropping apparatus called ECHELON is the simple observation that spooks trying to use it are literally buried in an avalanche of white noise from which it's quite difficult to extract anything pertinent.

But now the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), no doubt with some assistance and guidance from NSA, is making strides towards cracking that little inconvenience.

The CIA's Office of Advanced Information Technology is developing a number of data-mining enhancements to make life easy for those who would eavesdrop on electronic communications, Reuters reports.

CNET NEWS.COM - Hotmail users unwittingly opting for spam? Microsoft's free e-mail service is divulging people's e-mail addresses, cities and states to an Internet directory that combines the information with telephone numbers and home addresses.

CNET NEWS.COM - Hack at Amazon-owned service exposes thousands. Bibliofind.com, a book service owned by the e-tail giant, restarts its Web site in the wake of a hacker attack that compromised about 98,000 personal customer records.

Waltham, Mass.-based Bibliofind, which links buyers and sellers of hard-to-find and out-of-print books, discovered last week that a hacker had broken into its Web servers sometime in October and had continued to access the company's site since then, Bibliofind spokesman Jim Courtovich said. The hacker downloaded customer records from the site, including customers' names, addresses and credit card numbers, Courtovich said.

Manila Bulletin - Asians sense big brother at work.

SINGAPORE - Big Brother is alive and active, according to a new Asia-Pacific survey, with workers having more confidence in the security of employe records than they have in the privacy of office e-mails and phone calls.

Only 20 percent of respondents polled by credit card giant MasterCard felt their office e-mail offered enough privacy.

The positive sentiment was strongest among Australians at 29 percent, ahead of South Koreans at 28 percent followed by Japanese and Hong Kong consumers at 27 percent each.

New Zealanders were the most wary of office emails with 18 percent claiming they had "absolutely no privacy," according to the survey released Monday under the headline: "Is Big Brother Watching You at Work."

Business2.com - WebMD Privacy Fight. State privacy laws may conflict with business partners' plans.

Adding an interesting twist to the privacy debate, online healthcare site WebMD is seeking a federal court's help in its battle to stop providing healthcare data to a strategic partner, Quintiles Transnational .

With the healthcare industry up in arms over new federal regulations geared to protect patient privacy--especially in the Internet age--the conflict between WebMD and Quintiles could be a sign of debates yet to come.

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Under a data-sharing agreement struck in May 2000, WebMD has been providing electronic health claims data to Quintiles--the world's largest pharmaceutical services company--which repackages the information and then provides it to drug companies and other clients.

However, on February 24, WebMD stopped sending Quintiles the data, saying that doing so would violate certain state privacy laws. In prompt response, on February 25, Quintiles obtained a temporary restraining order forcing WebMD to resume providing data. And finally, last Thursday, WebMD asked a federal court to dissolve the restraining order. At press time, the court had not ruled on that decision.

MS-NBC - Microsoft Xbox gets family-friendly. The software giant plans to voluntarily insert a V-chip-like control in its new video game console

Amid the considerable buzz over Microsoft's highly anticipated Xbox, few have taken notice of the unglamorous announcement that Microsoft will solder a V-chip-style control inside the video game console, which is slated for introduction this fall. Details about the device won't be unveiled until the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the annual gaming industry powwow in May, but it will probably allow parents to prevent their kids from playing games rated for violent or sexual content.

Slashdot | Xbox To Include Censorchip?

Political News from Wired News - Napster Fallout: Privacy Loses?. Even if Napster completely went away, trading of music files would still exist. How responsible would ISPs be in curtailing the flow of such swapping? The mere thought of it sends chills down the spines of privacy advocates.

If Napster is ultimately ruled to be liable for copyright infringement, the frontlines of the intellectual property battle could shift to ISPs and end users. Experts say that could be bad news for online privacy.

"The next big battle is the liability that is lying on the ISP level," said Tim Smith, president of Copyright.net, a firm that defends copyrights on file-trading networks like Napster on behalf of copyright holders.

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Some say the Napster decision could be an ominous first step toward increased monitoring of the Internet in general. Dierdre Mulligan, a privacy expert at the University of California at Berkeley's Boalt Law School, warned that law enforcement should always be balanced with a sensitivity toward privacy concerns. "Copyright protection efforts need to make sure we don't end up with a fully monitored world, and there is a threat of that."

CNET NEWS.COM - Privacy forum to focus on crime, free speech.

Carnivore, cryptography and cybercrime are just a few of the topics on tap this week at a high-profile conference concerning recent developments in Internet policy and civil liberties.

The Computers Freedom and Privacy Conference 2001 kicks off in Cambridge, Mass., on Tuesday and will feature a forum for privacy watchdogs, free-speech activists and human-rights specialists to discuss how the Internet is changing society.

The conference will include speakers such as Privacy Foundation Chief Privacy Officer Richard Smith, cryptographer and Zero-Knowledge Systems Chief Scientist Ian Goldberg, and Peter Swire, the former chief counselor for privacy for the U.S. government.