Media freedom groups have criticised China for blocking access to the popular search engine Google.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) both called on Beijing to lift the ban.

Chinese internet surfers have been unable to access the Google site since the weekend.

Google has said it is working with Chinese authorities in an attempt to remove the block.

[ ... ]

"The authorities were already in the habit of using surveillance, censorship or the outright elimination of overly critical websites," said RSF Secretary-General Robert Menard in a letter to the Chinese authorities.

"But the blocking of a search engine sets a surprising and very worrying precedent.

"This move against Google strikes at the very ability to find information on the internet," said Mr Menard.

CNET NEWS.COM - An open letter to the U.S. privacy officer.

Over the summer, the Bush Administration revealed plans to appoint the first-ever U.S. chief privacy officer as part of the proposed Department of Homeland Security. This is significant because our government has generally resisted appointing a privacy officer.

I am happy you're going to be on the job. The appointment of a national chief privacy officer makes public sense. But we need a system of checks and balances to ensure that issues of confidentiality, data collection and the secure handling of personal information always weigh heavily in the office's decision-making. Several elements will need to go into the creation of any effective policy.

[ ... ]

Third, prevent the inappropriate use and unnecessary merging of data. Personal information collected for national security must be used for that purpose, and that purpose alone. That means the Department of Homeland Security should not share personal files for the purposes of, say approving candidates for small-business loans. Don't forget, most state motor vehicle departments only recently ceased selling license information to mailing houses.

New York Times - free registration required Dirty Laundry, Online for All to See.

Four years ago, Mr. Cissell decided that it was time to move the county's court records onto the Web. The documents were already public. They were already electronic. Where else to put public electronic documents but on the Internet?

"It was the natural progression of technology," said Mr. Cissell, the clerk of courts for Hamilton County, whose seat is Cincinnati.

Mr. Cissell's three-person technology staff put together the Web site at www.courtclerk.org. State tax liens, arrest warrants, bond postings -- all became searchable and accessible on the Internet.

"Everything we get is scanned and available," said Mr. Cissell, a former United States attorney. "It was very easy to open the door to the public."

Visitors have flowed to the site. So have the complaints.

Divorce lawyers say clients are furious that neighbors are combing through the details of their cases (and are even brazen enough to discuss them with them). A teenager was confronted by his father about a speeding ticket. A man complained to Mr. Cissell's office because his friends discovered his history of domestic violence.

"We didn't realize we were walking into a privacy hornet's nest until after we were under way," said Mr. Cissell, who has received e-mail from people threatening to vote against him in the next election. The legal systems capture the grimier aspects of American life, ones that many people prefer to keep hidden.

As a result, Cincinnati finds itself at an uncomfortable frontier: the city is being asked to redraw the line between private and public.

CNET NEWS.COM Interview By Declan McCullagh - Setting the rules for spam and Net privacy.

ASPEN, Colo.--Orson Swindle is an unusual breed of Washingtonian: a politician who doesn't trust other politicians much at all.

Swindle, 65, is one of five commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC's responsibilities involve policing the Internet for fraud and privacy violations; the agency recently compelled Microsoft to make changes to its Passport authentication system.

Swindle believes the private sector typically is better at resolving online problems than are government bureaucrats. It's not a new argument: When the FTC voted 3-2 in May 2000 to ask Congress for more power to regulate Web sites, Swindle was one of the two dissenters.

Appointed to the FTC by then-President Clinton in December 1997, Swindle previously worked as an assistant secretary in the Commerce Department under President Reagan. He was a Marine aviator in Vietnam, and his plane was shot down in 1966. Swindle, who spent the next six years in a prisoner of war camp, won two Purple Hearts during his combat service. CNET News.com recently caught up with Swindle to get his views on Microsoft, Internet privacy and spam, among other subjects on his radar.

CNET NEWS.COM - University to challenge copyright laws - Tech....

Duke University's law school has received an anonymous $1 million gift to fund advocacy and research aimed at curtailing the recent expansion of copyright law.

The school, which plans to announce the gift at a conference in Washington on Thursday, is using the money to fund a center focused on finding "the correct balance" between intellectual property rights and material that should be in the public domain.

James Boyle, a Duke law professor and co-director of the school's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, says that the center is likely to look skeptically at recent laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and a measure that extended copyright's duration by another 20 years.

The Christian Science Monitor - As stalkers go online, new state laws try to catch up. One of the first trials for 'cyberstalking' in the US opens in Illinois this week.

[ ... ]

Despite the prevalence of such incidents, arrests are rare. This week, however, one of the first cases of cyberstalking in the US will be played out in a suburban Chicago courtroom. The trial offers a window into how difficult such cases are to prosecute, but also signals that authorities are beginning to take the crime seriously.

All but six states have cyberstalking statutes on the books, but the Illinois case is "one of very few arrests I've heard of," says Jayne Hitchcock, president of Working to Halt Online Abuse (WHOA).

Legislators and policemen acknowledge the seriousness of the problem, but more pressing offenses often force them to overlook a crime that can be time-consuming to prosecute. Not to mention difficult. The global nature of the Internet means that the culprit could live in another state or country, and is unlikely to be extradited for what's usually a misdemeanor.

Political News from Wired News - Using Terror as a Pretext. In a world obsessed with security, it's tempting to hand law enforcement broad surveillance powers over the Internet and other aspects of people's private lives. Reporters without borders objects to what they say is worldwide trend.

[ ... ]

PARIS -- Several Western democracies have become "predators of digital freedoms," using the fight against terrorism to increase surveillance on the Internet, an international media-rights group said Thursday.

Reporters Without Borders criticized not only authoritarian states such as China that tightly police Internet use, but also Western governments including the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Denmark and the European Parliament.

"A year after the tragic events in New York and Washington, the Internet can be included on the list of 'collateral damage,'" the Paris-based group said in a report. "Cyber-liberty has been undermined and fundamental digital freedoms have been amputated."

DM Review: Business Intelligence and the Myth of Privacy.

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), "Advances in computer technology have made it possible for detailed information about people to be compiled and shared more easily and cheaply than ever." At the FTC's Privacy Initiatives Web site ( http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/), there is a warning about allowing the misuse of personal information. The truth is that as business intelligence professionals, we are somewhat responsible for collecting customer information and manipulating that information for marketing purposes, but are we really guilty of "invasion of privacy?"

[ ... ]

However, the issuing of a privacy statement does not imply that your data is being treated as private data! These statements actually are the opposite - they tell the consumer how the information is not being kept private. For example, one bank's privacy statement says, "... we may share any of the personal information that we collect about you among companies within the family." Later in the statement's text is an enumeration of 30 different companies within the family, including auto leasing, insurance, investment advisors, credit card and real estate advisors, among others.

Not only that, this privacy statement also says that the bank "may disclose any of the personal information that we have collected about you to other financial institutions with whom we have joint marketing agreements and companies that perform services, including marketing services, for us or for us and the financial institutions with whom we have joint marketing agreements."

This essentially opens the door for sharing a consumer's personal data with just about anyone. As long as the consumer does not actively opt out of participation, it is likely that personal information is being widely broadcast!

San Jose Mercury News By Dan Gillmor- Protecting privacy takes initiative.

Bring out the ballot-initiative petitions. Financial privacy is going nowhere in California without direct voter action.

You may live and vote in California, but the Legislature does not work for you. It works for all the financial institutions launching an apparently limitless supply of legislative torpedoes to sink privacy protections that Californians, like other Americans, overwhelmingly desire.

State Sen. Jackie Speier, the San Mateo Democrat whose pro-privacy bill died in the last hours before the Legislature adjourned for the year Saturday, says she's going to try again next year. She shouldn't bother.

The banks, brokerages and insurance companies will never permit such legislation to become law in the conventional way, that is, where the Legislature passes a bill and the governor signs it into law. For the sixth time in three years, the nation's chief data traders have avoided giving you even limited, but still worthwhile, rights to control the way your personal information is used.

O'Reilly Network: 02/15/2002 - P3P: Privacy Primer.

The W3C's Platform for "Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) provides a standard way for Web sites to communicate about their practices" around the collection, use, and distribution of personal information. It's a machine-readable privacy policy that can be automatically fetched and viewed by users, and it can be tailored to fit your company's specific policies. This article has two parts: the first is an overview of P3P, written by Simson Garfinkle; the second section, written by Lorrie Cranor, offers a more in depth look and examples.

Opt-in News - TRUSTe Plans Privacy Partnership.

Truste, a nonprofit privacy organization and Watchfire Corporation, a provider of website management software, announced a partnership to strengthen TRUSTe's certification and compliance efforts.

Beginning immediately, TRUSTe will deploy Watchfire WebXM to perform website content analysis of its members' sites to identify issues affecting privacy compliance. WebXM's privacy management module, PrivacyXM, enables organizations to collect, audit and report on privacy-related website management issues.

MS-NBC - One effect of 9/11: Less privacy. New surveillance laws passed worldwide, report says

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 -- Governments worldwide have made it easier for authorities to augment citizen databases and eavesdrop on telephone and online conversations in order to fight terror, according to a survey of privacy regulations released Tuesday.

Washington College of Law - Panel Three: Privacy: Genetic Profiling and Discrimination This link is an indirect one via Moreover.com that gets you a PDF file.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Slashback: Google, Prince, Bayesian.

After reports that the People's Republic of China was blocking access to Google, an anonymous reader writes: "I'm working in China, and for the last 3 days Google and some other sites were not accessible. But since even sending SMS to europe didn't work I don't think it was censoring, more like routing problems of some sort. Anyway, Google is back and reports of slashdot blocking are also overrated :)"

Hmmm ... I wonder whats up? It failed when I tried it.

The Cato Institute- Copy Fights: Can Politicians or Entrepreneurs Best Protect Intellectual Property?. Panel Debate Thursday, September 19, 2002 11:00 a.m. (Luncheon to follow)

Featuring Rep. Howard Berman, D-California; Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge; Phil Corwin, Butera Andrews; Troy Dow, Motion Picture Association of America; Ed Black, Computer & Communications Industry Association; and James Miller, Smith College.

The Cato Institute 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20001

They will be broadcasting the panel live via RealAudio/RealVideo with the feeds at (Audio or Video)

According to Scripting News where I heard about this, Matt Croydon will blog the event