Companies face many snares, some of which are hidden, when protecting sensitive information and maintaining security, said lawyers addressing the Massachusetts Software and Internet Council Wednesday.

Security and privacy issues are mixed together, and companies must understand that their security and ability to maintain privacy are only as good as those of others who have access to their systems.

Government Computer News - McNealy: We've already lost privacy.

The Transportation Security Administration could guarantee air safety (ed. emphasis added) by collecting passenger information from public and private databases, industry executives said at a Washington forum sponsored this week by the Council for Excellence in Government.

That's a completely unrealistic statement. I'd be willing to debate the assumption that it might help but there is no way it can guarantee air safety.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Three Years Under the DMCA.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation just released a report (pdf) today detailing the last three years under the DMCA. It describes how the DMCA has been used to unfairly attempt to prosecute all of the various parties over the years, and gives yet another argument of why the DMCA needs to be struck down. It's worth a read.

Weekly Standard - Inside the District's Red Lights.

Red-light cameras are all over Washington--and coming to a city near you. The science behind them is bad and the police are using them to make money, not save lives. It's much worse than you thought. Part 1 in a series.

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Just to recap, consider: A private company is given police power to ticket citizens, has a monetary interest in generating as many tickets as possible, and, despite its low success rate, is often allowed to do so with minimal or no police supervision.

It would seem that a trip to Lockheed IMS's processing center was in order to watch its employees fulfill their constabulary duties. But when I ask D.C. police spokesman Kevin Morison for a tour, he must check with Lockheed, though the police are purportedly running the operation. A few days later, Morison regretfully informs me that Lockheed said no--"They had privacy concerns." Morison at least plays at being oblivious to the richness of a vendor's claiming to be concerned about your privacy after taking a picture of your car and in some instances whoever's in your car, tapping into your DMV records, levying a fine against you, then mailing the whole care package to your house (in Italy, a senator's marriage faltered when his wife spotted his mistress in a photo radar citation).

Washington Post - In Driver vs. Camera, Camera Usually Wins.

"If it's not, 'It wasn't me' or 'The light was not red,' they say, 'There must be something wrong with the machinery,' " she said.

Many motorists ask to see the camera's maintenance records, hoping to contest their tickets by proving that the equipment wasn't working properly. It's a request that is denied, she said, and when it is, "most people are upset."

The Washington Post made its own request to see the maintenance records after a police data sheet showed that red-light tickets were being issued at intersections during months when the cameras needed frequent repairs.

Washington Post - A Flash Point On D.C. Roads. Busy City Traffic Cameras Generate Cash, Questions

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D.C. police say the cameras have reduced red-light running by an average of more than 64 percent, a figure on a par with more than 60 other cities in the United States that have photo-enforcement programs, according to traffic safety advocates. Speed cameras, which monitor more than 500,000 vehicles a month, have cut violations 50 percent, police say.

The boast, however, rankles camera critics. Because of irregularities, about 45 percent of the camera-captured red-light violations and 41 percent of the photographed speed violations never result in tickets. Yet the reductions are calculated based on the number of violations photographed instead of the number of tickets mailed. Police said they could not determine how many tickets they issued each month.

"Even if we cannot issue a ticket, the driver is engaged in unlawful and dangerous behavior," said D.C. police spokesman Kevin Morison, defending the reduction claims.

But House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.), a strong opponent of the cameras, said that if the tickets are not good enough to mail, they should not be counted in calculating reduction figures.

"What we've seen is a consistent pattern of ponying up the data to justify the deployment of the cameras, and the data that we've seen so far in Washington is of questionable value," Armey said. The high number of tickets tossed, he added, is "an admission that this is not reliable technology."

On Thursday, the Arlington-based Insurance Institute for Highway Safety issued a report, based on a random survey of seven D.C. neighborhoods, that touted a 38 percent to 89 percent reduction in speeding after cameras were deployed. But the report did not disclose who helped conduct the survey: Affiliated Computer Services, the contractor for the city's program.

Camera detractors long questioned the revenue-sharing alliance between the District and ACS that gave the contractor a cut of each paid ticket. In September, a San Diego judge threw out nearly 300 camera-generated tickets after raising concerns about the city's pay-per-citation arrangement with a contractor.

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Police have flagged their own concerns about the camera programs.

In summer 2000, a red-light camera at H and North Capitol streets NE was taken down after police decided it had been unfairly placed about 100 feet from the intersection. But by then, about 13,000 cited motorists had paid the fine, and no refunds were offered. Also, police have photographed hundreds of D.C. government vehicles going through red lights -- but about half the tickets were tossed because police could not determine which employees were driving.

In about 330 cases, motorists received speeding tickets -- mostly in the 100 block of Malcolm X Boulevard SE -- because the camera was calibrated incorrectly and the radar computer did not have the correct speed limit for the street, Burke said.

[ ... ]

But the cameras don't always get it right. "Fairly often," the examiner said, motorists bring in separate speeding tickets showing their vehicles were cited at two different places in the city -- at the same time.

"Those ones we don't even delve into," she said. "We just dismiss."

Red-light cameras have been adopted by 15 states, but many communities are having second thoughts. Several cities in California and Oregon have halted their programs.

In Denver, city officials suspended the speed-camera program and dismissed tickets after a judge ruled that a private contractor had been given police powers illegally. Armey's office said Alaska, Nebraska, New Jersey, Wisconsin and Utah have banned the radar cameras. And Hawaii scrapped its speed cameras after drivers in Oahu tried to sabotage them by calling radio stations to report where the van-mounted cameras were located.

Slashdot | Traffic Cameras in D.C..

San Francisco Gate - Court orders SonicBlue to give networks and studios viewer data.

"This forces us to spy on our customers," said Ken Potashner, chairman and chief executive of SonicBlue. "We have to give them individual files they could align with identities, which is a blatant violation of privacy."

The court order requires SonicBlue to gather information on each viewer and log that data under a unique identification number.

Laurence Pulgram, SonicBlue's lawyer, called the order "utterly unprecedented."

San Francisco Gate - Sonicblue chafes at ruling / Maker of ReplayTV told to gather data.

Eick, ruling on a pretrial discovery motion, gave Sonicblue 60 days to start gathering information "about what works are copied, stored, viewed with commercials omitted or distributed to third parties (and) when each of those events took place."

Owners will be identified not by name but by "unique identification numbers, " the order said.

Wolfe said Sonicblue now has to write software to gather that data.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation of San Francisco and San Jose's TiVo Inc. , Sonicblue's main competitor in the digital video recorder market, rushed to Sonicblue's defense, saying the order could prove a setback to consumer rights and could have a chilling effect on new technology.

"This whole thing just smacks of Big Brotherism. It's just insane," said Jeff Joseph, vice president of the Consumer Electronics Association, a trade group representing more than 1,000 companies.

Joe Krause, a co-founder of a new Silicon Valley group, "DigitalConsumer. org", said the media companies are "trying to make the argument that consumers have signed a contract to watch the television commercials."

"If we ban that (ReplayTV commercials skipping) feature, then we should be asking ourselves what the next step is: to ban the fast-forward button on the VCR?" Krause said.

Slashdot | Studios Forcing ReplayTV to Collect Viewing Info.

CNN.com - 'People meter' promises better ratings. Device picks up codes embedded in broadcasts

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It logs programming seen or heard anytime, anywhere by whomever is wearing it.

The gadget requires nothing of participants other than to wear it during the day and place it in a home docking station each night so data can be collected and transmitted to Arbitron.

The device uses sensitive microphones to pick up codes embedded in television, radio and even streaming Internet broadcasts -- and it includes a motion detector to verify someone is actually wearing it.

"With the portable people meter, we know that you carried it and what it was exposed to," said Thom Mocarsky, a spokesman for Arbitron, which compiles radio ratings.

Slashdot | TV People Meter: Monitoring What You Watch.