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Metafilter - Ad Aware 6 released. The long awaited (at least for me) king of spyware detectors is now available for download.

SiliconValley.com part of San Jose Mercury News / Dan Gillmor's eJournal  (News, Views and a Silicon Valley Diary) January 10, 2003 - Privacy: Going, Going....

Privacy invaders are like termites. They undermine, eating away at the structure of your personal life, until you wake up one day and realize that the foundation is gone.

The American Civil Liberties Union, battling harder than ever for your basic rights against increasingly nosy corporate and government snoops, has issued a report that should be raising alarms everywhere. The bottom line is evident in the title: "Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society."

We're inundated with examples of this or that invasion of privacy, the ACLU says. The current villain is the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness project, which would scoop up all kinds of public and private personal data to look for hints of bad activity including terrorism, according to its Big-Brotherish planners.

The individual threats are bad enough, the report says, but consider the bigger picture.

"Too many people still do not understand the danger, do not grasp just how radical an increase in surveillance by both the government and the private sector is becoming possible, or do not see that the danger stems not just from a single government program, but from a number of parallel developments in the worlds of technology, law and politics."

The best way to slow this erosion is to change laws, the ACLU says. That means you have to be politically active if you care about protecting what's left of your privacy, much less getting back any of what you've already lost.

It's getting late.

Slashdot | "Ask Slashdot" - Dealing with Employers Who Perform Credit Checks?

Rick asks: "I recently accepted a Director level position at a small, 40 person, technology company. On my first day, I was provided with all of the standard employment paperwork such as the W2, NDA, healthcare, etc., as well as a document that is to provide my permission for the Company to do a comprehensive background check on me, including a credit history check. I am now in a stalemate position with my employer in regards to this background check document. I have refused to sign on the grounds that my personal credit information is of no business to the company and that they have no basis of need. The company argument (COO level so far, CEO is next) is that the company instituted this policy over a year ago for all existing employees and new hires, and to maintain consistency, every employee must comply. The company also maintains that the information allows them to identify potential problems with candidates or employees, in that people who cannot manage their own finances may not be good employees, or that those with troublesome credit may be more likely to steal from the company. The COO used less direct terms, but ultimately that was the argument. Have Slashdot readers successfully negotiated out of a mandatory employee credit check in the past? What arguments did you use?"

PNEWIRE - CRM: mining the rich seams of customer data.

Well-established commercial wisdom has it that the quality of any company's customer relationship management (CRM) can make or break that enterprise. Perhaps it's odd, then, that so many companies still handle their customers with barely concealed disdain--and that some industries are much better at CRM than others.

Internet Magazine (UK) - EU challenged over Net privacy.

The EU has received its first serious challenge to controversial Internet privacy guidelines drawn up last year, reports europemedia.net.

An open letter opposing the electronic surveillance of EU citizens has been signed by 38 European Parliament members and has been sent to the EC.

The 38 are opposed to the commission's proposals, which would force telephone and Internet companies to retain data for a period of 12 to 24 months, during which time it could be accessed by law enforcement agencies. The data could be made up of phone calls, emails, individual web use details or credit card transactions

InfoWorld - Bush's database faces privacy, not technical, concerns. Privacy advocate calls administration move 'bait and switch'

WASHINGTON -- President George Bush's plan for a massive antiterrorism database center, announced in his state of the union address last week, could be up and running within months from a technology standpoint, if the Bush administration chooses to move that fast, but harder to overcome will be privacy concerns of a non-technical nature, experts said.

Allen Shay, president and chief operating officer of NCR Government Systems' Teradata Division, said the U.S. government could quickly put in place the first phase of a terrorist-tracking data-mining system by using commercial data-mining software already available.

"They'll take the first, let's say, 15 or 20 databases that are most critical and put an initial system capability in place, and that can be done in a matter of a few months, rather than years," Shay said. "What the government's trying to do now is something that the commercial world has been forced into years ago. It's not only do-able; it's been done by commercial companies for the last 10 plus years."

Other data-mining experts recommend a system built from the ground up, which would take a year or longer. No matter what the launch date and what technologies are used, the Bush plan is already attracting opposition from privacy groups, and could run into congressional roadblocks, even though the new proposal seems to be a less ambitious data-mining effort than one being researched at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

Bush on Jan. 28 proposed a Terrorist Threat Integration Center that would "fuse and analyze" data from several federal departments, including the new U.S. "Department of Homeland Security", the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Little information on the center is available, except for an eight-paragraph fact sheet at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-12.html .  The CIA, which will run the center, has little to say about it so far. No information is available about a launch date or the technologies the center will use, said a CIA spokesman.

"Right now, everything is under discussion," the spokesman added.

The center's data-mining component, however, seems to be focused on pulling information together only from government databases. In that sense, Bush's proposal may be different from the Total Information Awareness (TIA) research project at the DoD, which privacy advocates and some lawmakers have attacked for its goal of hunting through private databases as well. The TIA program also has attracted criticism because of its leader, Admiral John Poindexter, a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal during President Ronald Reagan's administration in the late 1980s.

ZDNet |UK| - NHS patient data 'insecure', says group.

A think tank accuses the NHS of allowing thousands of unauthorised requests for patient data to slip through the net each year

An information policy think tank has called for the NHS to improve its safeguards on patient privacy, charging that the current system allows thousands of unauthorised people to gain access to patient information every year.

The Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR), a non-profit group, argued that the NHS' patient-data strategy is fundamentally flawed, and is likely to leave personal information increasingly insecure. "Patients entrust some of their most sensitive personal information to their doctors. NHS managers should not be trying to undermine that trust by spreading identifiable patient data around the health service bureaucracy and the civil service," said FIPR chairman Ross Anderson on Wednesday in a statement.

Political News from Wired News - Bush Data-Mining Plan in Hot Seat.

A bipartisan coalition calls for greater scrutiny of the Total Information Awareness program, saying the plan to scan public and private databases for suspicious terrorist threats may endanger civil liberties.

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Despite assurances by the Bush administration that the Total Information Awareness program would not violate Americans' civil liberties, a broad coalition of grassroots organizations called Wednesday for greater oversight of the experimental data-mining program.

The Pentagon is developing the TIA in an effort to scour the Internet, as well as public and private databases, for suspicious patterns that might indicate a potential terrorist threat.

Critics say the system would be Big Brother incarnate, a tool that would pry into the medical, financial, travel and educational transactions of law-abiding citizens. Proponents say the electronic dragnet is necessary to protect the United States against future terrorist attacks.

During a telephone conference with reporters Wednesday, members of groups representing the political spectrum -- from the conservative Eagle Forum to the left-wing American Civil Liberties Union -- united to drum up support for legislation that would withhold funding for the TIA until questions about the program's potential for abuse were addressed.