EPIC Files FOIA Requests to Evaluate President Bush's First 100 Days on Privacy The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) today submitted a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to five executive agencies in an effort to determine the Bush Administration's commitment to privacy protection within its first 100 days. The requests focus both on Bush Administration transition team documents and the scheduling calendars of senior executive agency officials at the Department of the Treasury, Department of Commerce, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Privacy protection was an important element of President Bush's campaign. The President, in print and oral statements, articulated strong support for privacy protections. In an Associated Press interview, President Bush called privacy a "fundamental right," and vowed to place privacy protections in law for individuals' sensitive personal information. In other interviews, President Bush referred to himself as a "privacy guy," and said that every American should have "absolute control over his or her personal information."

EPIC - Bush Administration FOIA Request. This letter constitutes a request under the Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA"), 5 U.S.C. § 552, and is submitted on behalf of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

The Nando Times: Attorneys general: Law lagging behind technology.

One emerging technology would link wireless devices such as cell phones with satellites that can pinpoint a person's location. If companies have the technology to track a person's whereabouts, do they have the legal right to do so?

Or what of the potential for companies to tap the excess storage space on individual computers - the way Napster uses millions of hard drives to share and distribute music files. Who's responsible for protecting any financial, medical or other data stored there?

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said that by the time policymakers figure out whether to require Web sites to ask consumers before collecting information about them online, technology may change and "it may be irrelevant."

Spitzer advocates state privacy laws to pressure Congress to act. But for the most part, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, state action has been limited to studies or laws applying only to government agencies.

ZDNet: Interactive Week: Hardwiring Privacy.

A European Parliament committee is expected to take up legislation in coming weeks that would require companies to include privacy-protection technology in their products.

The controversial provision is included in proposed revisions to a 1997 European Union law outlining privacy protections in telecommunications. The parliament's citizens' freedoms and rights committee is expected to vote on it next month.

MS-NBC - Web piracy crackdown spawns stealth platforms. New ways to hide communication between Web users

A giant game of cat-and-mouse has emerged on the Internet between the entertainment industry and Internet-savvy users who keep finding new ways to foil efforts to crack down on piracy.

[ ... ]

Organizations developing platforms for anonymous activity include Havenco.com, Zero-Knowledge Systems and FreeNet, according to Sinnreich, who said the platforms "hide" online data collection and transfer by scrambling information.

"The worldwide developers' community is getting on the stick because there's so much concern about Internet service providers cracking down on users' behavior and government and private organizations spying on consumers' online activities," he said.

The goal, he said, is to make it impossible for Internet service providers (ISPs) to police the activities of their users, the very step that the entertainment industry is demanding.

Guardian Unlimited Observer | Business | The American crocodile that swallowed freedom .

The reason the crocodile is able to get away with this is because it has been endlessly appeased by legislatures worldwide. The US Congress has twice rolled over when faced with the lobbying muscle of the RIAA. Its first act of appeasement was the granting of a ludicrous extension of the period during which works enjoy copyright protection. But the coup de grace came when the RIAA persuaded the supine US legislature to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) - aka the Copyright Lawyers Lifetime Employment Act - which, among other things, makes it a crime even to speculate in public about technical measures to circumvent copy protection schemes.

Having screwed Congress, the RIAA turned its attention to the European Union and successfully lobbied its Parliament into promoting the European Copyright Directive. This will embed the key provisions of the DMCA in the law of every EU country within 18 months. This is no longer just an American problem.

Slashdot | John Naughton on the RIAA and SDMI.

The Register (UK) - Microsoft issues bounty for OS-less PC buyers. Microsoft may not have succeeded in persuading OEMs and system builders to "decline politely" all perverse requests for PCs lacking a pre-installed (preferably Microsoft) OS, but it's shifted to a new approach. It's now bribing system builders to turn in anyone who bids on naked boxes, ostensibly so it can harass these poor, twisted madmen directly from Beast Central.

aaxnet.com (Andrew Grygus) - M010425 - Microsoft: Prizes for Rat Finks. Turn your customers over to the Microsoft license police for fun and nifty prizes.

Microsoft has started a pilot program rewarding computer system builders for turning their customers over to Microsoft's license enforcement department. If the builder or reseller receives an RFQ (Request For Quote) that includes computers to be shipped without Windows installed, Microsoft wants a copy of the RFQ sent to them, and, if you are the first to submit that particular RFQ, you'll be awarded points toward winning prizes. Full text is included below.

Microsoft says this is to "help you help your customers be compliant".

Will system builders and resellers turn in RFQs and trust Microsoft to maintain the promised "privacy"? Well, they're obviously pitching to individuals, not companies, and I bet there's plenty of employees at many builders who would scramble for the opportunity.

Slashdot | MS Wants To Know Whose PC Is Windows-Free. Aaxnet details an e-mail sent from Microsoft to computer system builders in an effort to bribe them in to handing over the customers that bought OS-less pcs from them. The more users they turn over the better, too.

Boston Globe Online / Business / New Web privacy rules for state government. 150 agencies to post policy on cookies by June 8

New York Times - free registration required Compressed Data: A Pessimistic Assessment of Privacy.

A panel of researchers and policy makers gathered at Columbia University Tuesday to address this question: "Can encryption safeguard the Internet?" The conclusion was pessimistic.

"Clearly the answer is no," said Whitfield Diffie, the inventor of public key cryptography, a method of encoding communications sent on the Internet. "Cryptography is a long way from where the real security problem is."

Mr. Diffie and others on the panel said the broader security issue on the Internet involved privacy. And there was a consensus during the discussion that while technology had expanded the opportunities for privacy invasion -- through the combination of desktop computers, databases and the Internet -- technology alone would not bring about privacy protections.

"It really isn't an issue about encryption and having secure communications," said Michael Rabin, professor of computer science at Harvard. "The main issue is how is our personal data handled and how is it protected."

ZDNet: Interactive Week: Is Privacy Too Expensive?

Furthermore, he says, none of the studies being used by industry groups addresses the issue of bolstered consumer confidence - and increased online spending - that could result from federal privacy-protecting legislation. The omission, Catlett says, is glaring.

"The majority of Americans don't do any distance buying, and one of the major concerns is privacy," he says. "[Annual] growth in e-tailing has dropped down to 30 percent, from hundreds of percentage points, and the industry is overlooking the obvious reason [people are] not buying."

Meanwhile, Forrester's McCarthy calls the figures in the recent spate of industry-backed studies "inflammatory" and says all of the research Forrester conducts shows that consumers say privacy laws would fortify their confidence in the online world.

If nothing else, he says, a baseline privacy law could at least "force [companies] to articulate what the hell they are doing - to bolster their marketing departments and put discipline around what they do."