Privacy News from Wired News - Year in Privacy: Citizens Lose.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." (ed. emphasis added)

Ben Franklin wrote those words over 200 years ago, and, as we reach the end of 2002, the state of important liberties around the world appears to be degenerating rapidly, particularly in the area of privacy concerns.

If one of Osama bin Laden's goals, as has been reported, was to trigger crackdowns against freedoms by Western governments, he got the ball rolling quite effectively on Sept. 11, 2001.

The United States now imprisons its own citizens incommunicado, indefinitely and without lawyers or trials, for the duration of what we're told is an essentially permanent state of war.

In the good old days of the iron curtain, we condemned other countries for such actions, calling them human rights violations. Now some of those same nations are our partners of convenience in the war on terror, and our own government has enthusiastically embraced our former adversaries' old tactics.

Both the USA Patriot and Homeland Security Acts include some elements that are arguably appropriate for national security in today's world. But they also include measures that have nothing to do with the fight against terrorism, and that are likely to have wide-ranging and chilling effects on privacy and liberty.

In the business community, where rampant disregard for privacy concerns has increasingly become the norm, it's financial gain, not national security, that's the driving force.

Willamette Week Online | Cover Story | RUBBISH!. Portland's top brass said it was OK to swipe your garbage--so we grabbed theirs.

[ ... ]

After much debate, we resolved to turn the tables on three of our esteemed public officials. We embarked on an unauthorized sightseeing tour of their garbage, to make a point about how invasive a "garbage pull" really is--and to highlight the government's ongoing erosion of people's privacy.

We chose District Attorney Mike Schrunk because his office is the most vocal defender of the proposition that your garbage is up for grabs. We chose Police Chief Mark Kroeker because he runs the bureau. And we chose Mayor Vera Katz because, as police commissioner, she gives the chief his marching orders.

Each, in his or her own way, has endorsed the notion that you abandon your privacy when you set your trash out on the curb. So we figured they wouldn't mind too much if we took a peek at theirs.

Boy, were we wrong

[ ... ]

Hours later, the chief issued a press release complaining that WW had gone through "my personal garbage at my home." KATU promptly took to the airwaves declaring, "Kroeker wants Willamette Week to stay out of his garbage."

If the chief got overheated, the mayor went nuclear. When we confessed that we had swiped her recycling, she summoned us to her chambers.

"She wants you to bring the trash--and bring the name of your attorney," said her press secretary, Sarah Bott.

Actually, we couldn't snatch Katz's garbage, because she keeps it right next to her house, well away from the sidewalk. To avoid trespassing, we had to settle for a bin of recycling left out front.

[ ... ]

A few moments later, her office issued a prepared statement. "I consider Willamette Week's actions in this matter to be potentially illegal and absolutely unscrupulous and reprehensible," it read. "I will consider all my legal options in response to their actions."

In contrast, DA Mike Schrunk was almost playful when we owned up to nosing through his kitchen scraps. "Do I have to pay for this week's garbage collection?" he joked.

[ ... ]

It's worth emphasizing that our junkaeological dig unearthed no whiff of scandal. Based on their throwaways, the chief, the DA and the mayor are squeaky-clean, poop-scooping folks whose private lives are beyond reproach. They emerge from this escapade smelling like--well, coffee grounds.

But if three moral, upstanding, public-spirited citizens were each chewing their nails about the secrets we might have stumbled on, how the hell should the rest of us be feeling?

Slashdot | Going Through the Garbage.

frankejames writes "This is a very funny piece on how Portland politicians said it was okay for police to seize a citizen's garbage without a search warrant. But when some reporters swiped their garbage (and reported the contents!) they screamed foul play! Read Portland's top brass said it was OK to swipe your garbage--so we grabbed theirs."

Philip Jacob - The SPAM Problem: Moving Beyond RBLs.

Summary: Alternatives to Realtime Blackhole Lists (RBLs) should be actively deployed because of serious well-known problems with the RBL spam filtering technique.

Slashdot | Developers - The Spam Problem: Moving Beyond RBLs.

whirlycott writes "I just published a paper called The Spam Problem: Moving Beyond RBLs on my site. I comprehensively describe RBLs and list eight specific problems with them. I also get into ideas that next generation antispam system creators should read. I hope that this will be useful to anybody who is attending the Spam Conference at MIT on Jan 17th."

Slashdot | Windows Security Holes Go Mostly Unexploited.

murky.waters writes "Wired News has an article with a decidedly different take on security holes in Microsoft Windows: Despite the thousands of known exploits and virii, most MS users aren't target of much harm, and the big guns such as Klez have had almost no effect on home users. An interesting read that, if true, challenges some common arguments."

InfoStructure News from Wired News - So Many Holes, So Few Hacks.

Experts who discover and report security holes seem to be far more industrious than the malicious hackers willing or able to exploit those holes.

Despite the thousands of hackable holes that lurk in e-mail, on websites, in files and operating systems, most users' computers are never afflicted with more than the virtual version of a sniffle.