Across the political spectrum there is a race to bring DNA law into line with DNA technology. On the left, civil libertarians are cheering proposals to give convicts greater access to DNA testing to prove their innocence. On the right, prosecutors and police seek broader authority to take biological samples from individual suspects for DNA analysis.

Somewhere in the center, victims' rights groups and feminists have allied to urge speedy DNA testing of evidence taken from victims of rape. Evidence from up to 500,000 such cases nationwide has yet to be analyzed, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Representative Jerrold Nadler have introduced legislation to provide money for more timely tests of these so-called rape kits.

Each of these proposals would solve some problems while ignoring others. In the long run, America may well see the need for more DNA testing and much stricter privacy safeguards than anyone -- left, right or center -- is now suggesting.

The first step in the creation of a truly comprehensive database would be convincing the public of its value. With such a database, many cases could be cracked quickly. Because rapists typically leave behind semen, or blood and skin cells under victims' fingernails, police could solve and so further deter many types of rape. Genetic material is often found at the scenes of other crimes and could be used to solve them as well. If linked to birth certificates and drivers' licenses, the database could foil various kinds of identity fraud, benefiting both law enforcement and crime victims.

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Of course, such a database raises serious privacy concerns: our DNA code contains much information that could be used in sinister ways. Information about medical predispositions could threaten a person's health insurance, for example. Information about paternity could be used for purposes of embarrassment or blackmail.

To minimize these risks, a DNA statute should limit testing to so-called junk DNA -- parts of the DNA code that identify individuals without revealing other medical facts. The law should also allow the government to search the database only for important needs, as certified by a special DNA court, whose judges would develop expertise in the uses and abuses of DNA and keep abreast of new scientific developments.

BBC News | BUSINESS | Watchdog seeks snooping powers.

The UK's Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is seeking new snooping powers as it attempts to crack down on unfair business practices.

The competition watchdog has asked to be allowed to secretly follow suspect businessmen and track the e-mails and telephone calls they make.

The requested powers are in addition to the Enterprise Bill, which is currently passing through parliament.

The main body of the Bill would make price fixing a criminal offence, and unscrupulous chief executives could end up behind bars.

Also under the proposals, politicians would be removed from the merger approval process, giving trade watchdogs the ultimate say over such decisions.

New York Times - free registration required Freed Burmese Democracy Leader Proclaims 'New Dawn'.

Bangkok -- Radiating joy and confidence, the woman known throughout Myanmar as the Lady stood before a cheering crowd today for the first time in years and proclaimed, "It's a new dawn for the country."

Freed this morning after 19 months of house arrest in the capital, Yangon, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, 56, the leader of the pro-democracy movement, said it was time to move forward from a period of fence-mending to the beginnings of substantive change in the country, the former Burma.

After a year and a half of what were called confidence-building talks with the military leadership, Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi said, "The next step is discussions about policy." In remarks televised throughout much of Asia, she offered no specifics but said her task now was to do "everything I can to make sure that democracy comes to Burma."

Clearly that will mean slow and careful moves rather than the confrontations that have marked her relations with the country's junta since it nullified a parliamentary election in 1990 in which her party, the National League for Democracy, won 82 percent of the seats.

In a signal of an emerging new relationship, the government spokesman, Col. Hla Min, said there would be no restrictions on her movements and activities, "because we are confident that we can trust each other."

It appeared from the events reported and statements made today that Myanmar was moving into a tentative new phase of its history after the more than a decade of political and economic paralysis that followed the 1990 election.

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An early gauge of the new climate will be whether the government keeps its promise to free large numbers of political prisoners, which human rights groups estimate at up to 1,500. In particular, dozens of members of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi's party who were elected to Parliament remain in prison.

"I and my party have been disappointed by the slow rate of the release of political prisoners," she said at a news conference in Yangon. "Their release is not only important in humanitarian terms but also political terms."

Other major steps still remain to be taken. One of the most difficult, perhaps, would be opening the government-controlled press to opposing viewpoints. Another task on the agenda would be to hold a national convention to draw up a new constitution. The convention, the next formal step in creating a new government, has been stalled for a decade, since Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi's supporters withdrew in protest against its control by the military.

BW Online | May 13, 2002 | Lawrence Lessig: The "Dinosaurs" Are Taking Over. If the media giants have their way, the Net freedom fighter says, content will be rigidly controlled and innovation stifled

Who should control the Internet? If Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig is right, the Internet will soon belong to Hollywood studios, record labels, and cable operators -- corporate giants that he says are trying to cordon off chunks of the once-open data network. Lessig's mission is to stop them. At age 40, he's already the Net's most famous freedom fighter. Since 1995, he has been a seminal thinker on many of the Digital Age's most important battles -- the AOL-Time Warner merger, Napster, and the Microsoft antitrust case.

In his latest book, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, Lessig argues that imminent changes to Internet architecture plus court decisions that restrict the use of intellectual property will co-opt the Net on behalf of Establishment players -- and stifle innovation. On Apr. 29, Lessig spoke with BusinessWeek Online Technology reporter Jane Black about what he sees as some disturbing trends. Here are edited excerpts of that conversation:

Political News from Wired News - Shanghai Cracks Down on Net Cafes.

SHANGHAI, China -- Shanghai police have shut down almost 200 Internet bars that operated without licenses requiring them to block websites deemed subversive or pornographic, a city official said Monday.

Police in China's largest city confiscated 965 computers in a sweep that began April 26, said the official in the Shanghai Industrial and Commercial Administration Bureau, which ordered the crackdown.

Privacy News from Wired News - Survey: Opt-Out Is a Cop-Out.

Comments gathered by the U.S. "Treasury" indicate that Americans have plenty of complaints about a recently enacted law that requires customers to opt-out if they want to keep financial institutions from sharing their data.

Top items on the grievance list: opt-out notices hidden in thick junk mailings, confusing legal language and the potential for invasive sales tactics.

A coalition of 37 state attorneys general went so far as to assert that "current law does not adequately protect consumers' privacy."

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EPIC was quick to point out examples of data exchanges gone awry, including one case of a bank that sold its database, including credit card numbers, to a convicted felon. The felon, in turn, fraudulently charged the credit cards for access to Internet pornography sites.

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Last year, the attorneys general said, an American Bankers Association survey found that 41 percent of people never even recalled getting an opt-out notice.

Slashdot | Another DMCA Attack Looms.

Wired News - Another DMCA Attack Looms. Plus other tasty tidbits.

Rep. Rick Boucher is finally ready to try and dismantle a key part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, said last July that he wanted to amend the DMCA to permit certain "fair uses" of digital content, such as backing up an audio CD by bypassing copy protection technology.

In an interview on Thursday, Boucher said he now has sufficient support -- from the tech industry, librarians, and Internet activists -- to feel comfortable introducing his bill "in the next month."

"If I had introduced it six months ago, you wouldn't have seen this kind of support," said Boucher.

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But, according to the Justice Department's annual report released this week, the number of secret wiretaps and surveillance orders actually decreased from 2000 to 2001.

Those figures left Washingtonians scratching their heads. Common sense seemed to indicate that either the data is inaccurate, the FBI was napping during the biggest crisis in decades or the numbers don't tell the whole truth.

David Sobel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center speculated that the low number -- 934 orders -- was due to new anti-terrorism laws. Sobel said the USA Patriot Act lets the feds obtain "orders which allow one warrant to be served on multiple service providers."

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Ex-FBI director Louis Freeh is back.

This week, Freeh told Canada's CBC News that companies such as Microsoft must be legally obligated to hand over the keys needed to decipher encrypted messages.

According to CBC News, Freeh believes such a move "could prevent al-Qaida from maintaining encrypted communication over the Internet."

FBI director Freeh was the Clinton administration's most ardent foe of encryption, and told Congress as recently as 1999 that he has "not given up on encryption." A few years before, one House committee approved a bill to ban encryption products -- including SSH and Web browsers -- without backdoors for the feds.

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The Nevada Supreme Court says that cops may plant tracking devices on or underneath people's cars without a search warrant.

In a decision last week, the court said GPS-tracker transmitters could be used because the defendant "had neither a subjective nor an objective expectation of privacy in the bumper of his vehicle."

Nevada isn't the first court to decide it's perfectly OK to use such devices without a warrant.

In 1999, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said pretty much the same thing, ruling the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures does not apply.

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Even the U.S. Supreme Court doesn't have a problem with it. A 1983 case, U.S. v. Knotts, says that a beeper-transmitter could be used without a warrant: "The beeper surveillance amounted principally to following an automobile on public streets and highways. A person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements."