[ ... ]

While the officials did not go into much historical detail, the restrictions that Mr. Ashcroft said he was lifting date back almost three decades. They were installed after revelations that under J. Edgar Hoover the bureau spied on people as disparate as anti-war demonstrators, members of the Ku Klux Klan and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The current guidelines have restricted the surveillance of religious and political organizations. They were adopted after disclosures of domestic F.B.I. spying under the old COINTELPRO program, and for 25 years they have been among the most fundamental limits on the bureau's conduct.

The revision will shift the power to initiate counterterrorism inquiries from headquarters to the special agents in charge of the 56 field offices, Mr. Ashcroft said.

[ ... ]

Officials at the American Civil Liberties Union criticized the new guidelines, saying they represent another step by the Bush administration to roll back civil-liberties protections in the name of improving counterterrorism measures.

"These new guidelines say to the American people that you no longer have to be doing something wrong in order to get that F.B.I. knock at your door," Laura W. Murphy, director of the national office of the A.C.L.U., said in advance of today's announcement. "The government is rewarding failure. It seems when the F.B.I. fails, the response by the Bush administration is to give the bureau new powers, as opposed to seriously look at why the intelligence and law enforcement failures occurred."

[ ... ]

Beyond the reports of the bureau's spying almost three decades ago, a political firestorm arose over what many critics regarded as the abuse of power. The surveillance guidelines have since then defined the operational conduct of the bureau in inquiries of domestic and overseas groups that operate in the United States.

Slashdot | Book Review - SSH, The Secure Shell.

If you administer remote systems, check your email from the road, or just have a sense of paranoia about your home network, you're probably somewhat familiar with SSH. If you need to know more, though, danny writes "SSH, The Secure Shell will be another 'must have' O'Reilly volume for many system

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - EU to Require Opt-In for Commercial Email.

D4C5CE writes --- "EuroCAUCE (Usenet message below) and Heise (in German) report that the European Parliament has voted to ban spam by adopting the "opt-in" system for unsolicited commercial email, finally freeing the way for the entry into force of a "European Parliament and Council directive concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector". The news of the parliamentary U-turn comes after a recommendation by the "Committee on Citizens' Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs" to permit "opt-out" marketing had received critical coverage, causing countless spam victims world-wide to alert the Members of the European Parliament to the big mistake they were about to make, and it is hoped to become the useful precedent of a workable approach for US lawmakers currently evaluating means to regulate spam as well." --- The Parliament's daily notebook has an overview. Individual EU countries still have to implement this with legislation before it is effective.

Gartner - Minnesota Law Points to Future of Customer Privacy.

Minnesota passed an Internet privacy law requiring consumers' consent before their personal data is shared with third parties. Enterprises should plan to comply with such regulations across the United States.

MS-NBC - EU Internet bill a threat to privacy? Parliamentarian warns large amounts of data may be stored

BRUSSELS, May 29 -- The European Union is on the verge of adopting an Internet bill that could give police forces greater power to keep records of personal communications such as phone calls or Web surfing, a key legislator said Wednesday.

Insurance News Net - Going overboard on privacy could hurt Web consumers.

In the Internet age, everyone is understandably more leery about their privacy. No one wants "the wrong people" to have access to their personal data, Or even "the right people" for "the wrong reasons," for that matter.

Still, there is an element of paranoia in the privacy rights campaign that, if left unchecked, could do more harm than good. Thus, our concern is focused on a bill introduced in the US. Senate by Commerce Committee Chairman Ernest F. Hollings, D-S.C.

They seem to ignore the reasons we are so nervous about all this data collection and sharing. Corporations don't exactly have a good record in being reasonable when it comes to data sharing. To many of them want to get every last penny they can from it, and share it with anyone who has a check book.

eCommerceBase - Hands Off! Personal Computer Privacy.

Computer files are just strings of numbers, 1s and 0s. When they're organised into patterns, they can be rendered by a computer as information -- words, pictures, equations, the whole shebang. When even a few number sets at the beginning of a file -- the "pointer" that tells the computer where and what it is -- are randomised, however, the whole file becomes becomes invisible.

Without the protection of its pointer element, the computer treats a deleted file as though it were blank space, and replaces sections of the deleted file with sections of other files until, gradually, all the numbers have been "overwritten". At that point, theoretically, the file is erased.

The process of overwriting deleted files occurs randomly, however, and some files may sit on a hard drive nearly complete for years, while others may vanish in weeks. Any part of a file not completely overwritten can be recovered -- and those fragments are your "invisible" hard drive.

New York Times - free registration required Europe Police Likely to Get Longer Access to Records.

The flash point in the law is a provision inserted in the draft last December by member governments. It requires phone and Internet service companies to retain "traffic data" -- information on their customers' phone calls, e-mail messages and Internet connections -- long after it would be discarded under current law, at the end of each billing cycle of one or two months. It would also loosen some restrictions on law enforcement access to the records.

The two biggest political blocs in the Parliament, the Socialist Party and the moderately conservative European People's Party, initially opposed changes in the law. But they agreed to a compromise this week that "goes a long way in granting the national governments what they want," said Tony Bunyan of Statewatch, which monitors civil liberties issues in Europe.

The compromise language adds a requirement that police surveillance of citizens' phone and Internet use be appropriate, proportionate and limited in length.