The panelists trace the history of air and space surveillance technology and share personal insights and expertise on how that technology has been used, from locating a terrorist camp and analyzing enemy terrain, to counting missile sites.

Sorry about the late announcement. You might want to keep an eye on the C-SPAN site to see if it is going to be rebroadcast. Their schedule doesn't go very far in advance.

Unwanted e-mail advertising has become the latest quality-of-life nuisance -- not unlike squeegee men -- that politicians love to attack.

This spring, a consensus on spam seemed to be emerging among House and Senate leaders, Internet service providers and the direct marketing industry, which had dropped its objection to any regulation of e-mail. Several bills were introduced, all narrowly focused on fraudulent e-mail that misrepresented the sender or the product for sale.

Then a monkey wrench landed in this otherwise smooth legislative process. In June, the Federal Trade Commission started collecting phone numbers from people who do not want to be called by telemarketers. Phone solicitors who call numbers on the list, once it takes effect in October, can be punished with large fines. Overnight, the do-not-call list became one of the most popular government initiatives in recent memory, with people registering an average of a million phone numbers a day in the first month.

Suddenly, public support for a do-not-spam list began to build. A bill to create such a registry, which had little support earlier this summer when it was introduced by Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, is at the center of much of the spam debate in Washington.

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So far, the trade commission has largely agreed that such a registry would not work. "Most spam is already so clearly illegitimate that senders are not likely to comply," J. Howard Beales III, director of the commission's consumer protection bureau, wrote in a letter last week to Representative Anna G. Eshoo, a California Democrat.

Ray Everett-Church, an opponent of spam who is now a consultant with the ePrivacy Group, agrees that the proposed registry would have more effect on big companies than fly-by-night spammers. But he argues that it is worth creating anyway.

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Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School who supports some antispam laws, says he objects to the do-not-spam registry in part because he thinks it would not be effective. In addition, he said that it offered users only a very crude yes or no choice about e-mail solicitations. His proposal instead would require commercial e-mail to be labeled clearly with the product being sold, allowing users to read offers only for the products that interest them.

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The European Union has declared that an e-mail account is more private than a mailbox and therefore a business needs explicit permission before sending an e-mail message. Few in Congress are sympathetic to this "opt in" approach, and most of the antispam bills take the "opt out" approach, which would give e-mail recipients the right to ask a marketer to take them off their lists after being contacted.

A hearing in California later this month will address privacy issues that surround the wireless technology, which can monitor everything from clothing to currency.

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Lawmakers in California have scheduled a hearing for later this month to discuss privacy issues that surround a controversial technology that's designed to wirelessly monitor everything from clothing to currency.

Sen. Debra Bowen, a California legislator recently on the forefront of an antispam legislation movement, is spearheading the Aug. 18 hearing, which will focus on an emerging area of technology that's known as radio frequency identification (RFID), a representative for Bowen has confirmed. The hearing, which is open to the public, will take place at the state capitol in Sacramento.

Retailers and manufacturers in the United States and Europe, including Wal-Mart Stores, have begun testing RFID systems, which use millions of special sensors to automatically detect the movement of merchandise in stores and monitor inventory in warehouses.

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Albrecht is scheduled to testify at Bowen's hearing, as is Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearing House, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group in San Diego.

Givens said retailers should be required to notify consumers about merchandise containing RFID chips and that they should not only disable, but destroy, the chips at the checkout counter.

"It's troubling that MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and other developers of RFID appear to have left privacy to the last minute," Givens said.

Also expected to speak at the hearing are Dan Mullen, head of the trade group Association for Automatic Identification and Data Capture Technologies, and Greg Pottie, an electrical engineering professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. Pottie is involved in the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, a based at UCLA that's funded by the National Science Foundation.

Bowen's office has also invited key members of MIT's Auto-ID Center, a research group that has been on the forefront of RFID development, to participate in the hearing. The group has yet to accept or decline the invitation, Bowen's office said.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is putting together a computer network that would allow police to analyze government and commercial records on every Florida resident, and the agency is planning to share that information with police in at least a dozen other states.

Critics say the system - known as the Multistate Anti-Terrorist Information Exchange, or MATRIX - is an Orwellian technology that would allow police to assemble electronic dossiers on every Floridian, even those not suspected of crimes.

Law enforcement officials say MATRIX will simply speed up criminal investigations by allowing police to perform quicker searches of information that is already publicly available in government records and commercial databases.

But they aren't offering many details on the types of commercial records the system would be able to search.

"I can tell you that it's all public information," FDLE spokeswoman Jennie Khoen said. "We'll have public records from agencies like the property appraiser's office, the county clerk, the sexual predator database, and some private sector information."

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One organizer of the system said MATRIX would "primarily" contain information from government records such as tax forms, driver's license information and criminal backgrounds. It also would include "commercially available" material, including credit applications and credit reports, Khoen said.

But FDLE officials remain tight-lipped about other "commercially available" sources MATRIX might use. And in the age of Internet marketing - when companies routinely collect and sell information about their customers - that has civil liberties advocates worried.

"What does 'commercially available' mean?" asked Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. "Are they going to look at what I buy on my credit card? Are they going to look at what I check out at Blockbuster? Who knows?"

While several lawmakers are trying to repeal some of the more onerous sections of the Patriot Act, local library officials are taking a stand of their own on the privacy issue.

Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold has introduced a bill that would limit the FBI's ability to collect library, bookstore and other records. Feingold's belief is that America can fight terrorism without resorting to the violation of every American citizen's First Amendment rights.

In its current form, SB 1 would require a financial institution to provide a consumer with an option to "opt-out" of the disclosure of his or her nonpublic personal information to affiliated entities and to obtain a consumer's written consent ("opt-in") before sharing information with third parties. The bill passed the Senate earlier this year, but has been rejected twice by the Assembly Banking and Finance Committee. It would create the country's most restrictive privacy standards, according to the Association of California Insurance Companies (ACIC).

"ACIC believes current state law and Department of Insurance regulations give insurance policyholders adequate protection from any unauthorized use of personal financial information by insurance companies," said ACIC president Sam Sorich. "The imposition of stricter requirements would only make it more difficult for insurers and other financial institutions to do business in the state."

Privacy will remain a legislative issue until proponents of a privacy initiative file the needed signatures to qualify for the March 2, 2004 statewide ballot. The ballot initiative would require a consumer's consent before a company shares information with affiliates or non-affiliates. At a July 30 news conference, the backers of a statewide privacy initiative said they would delay the submission of signatures to the secretary of state until Aug. 19 to give the Assembly another chance to pass SB 1.

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A spokesperson for IBM, one of the many companies working with the USPS on intelligent-mail technologies, declines to comment on the program, citing the sensitivity of technologies related to homeland security.

"There are no obvious technological barriers to the postal commission suggestion," says FreightDesk Technologies' Quartel. "But is that what we want? Do Americans really want every facet of their lives inventoried by a federal bureaucrat? I don't."

Call it a spycam or an electronic invigilator - whatever they end up dubbing it, the University of Newcastle reckons it will stop online cheats.

Newcastle has developed a camera that can monitor off-campus students doing exams online so they do not have to go to a supervised location.

The camera sits on top of the computer and every 20 seconds sends a low-resolution picture to the university server.

It also records sound, which means it can monitor conversations.

Dean of the school of graduate studies Scott Holmes said the university moved into online delivery about three years ago and now had about 1000 students enrolled this way.

Geeks who barely trust spouses to touch their digital devices are perturbed that security checker at airports are going to be fiddling with their laptops and other gadgets.

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Screeners will now ask passengers to turn on every electronic item they plan to carry on board. Previously that was an optional procedure. In addition, it's likely that most electronic devices will be "sniffed" for trace residue of chemicals used to make bombs.

This involves swiping the device with a cloth or swab, and then analyzing the contents to see if it has come into contact with an explosive chemical. But few of the digitally obsessed were comforted by this knowledge. Many fear that even a basic search, conducted by someone who is not technically inclined, could harm their computers.

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"A couple of my clients were worried about whether their cameras and computers would be taken apart," said Mary Jo Ellens, of Ellen Travel Services. "But I checked with the airlines and was told that there were no plans in place to disassemble electronics."

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Many passengers at New York airports said they appreciate the increased security. "If it comes down to a choice between my life and the sanctity of your laptop, you better believe I'll be first in line to help the security folks rip apart your computer," said Peter Vengelle, who was waiting for a flight at Newark airport on Wednesday night.

kreide writes "Spam e-mail has become an ever increasing problem, and these days it is next to impossible to use e-mail without receiving it in large amounts. Although various techniques exits to combat the problem, spammers seemed to be winning the war - until a new, powerful weapon appeared on the scene: Bayesian filters, our last, best hope for spam-free inboxes. In this review I compare POP3 based bayesian spam filters." --- We did an Ask Slashdot on this a few weeks ago.

A 24-year-old Milford hacker accused of breaking into one of the world's largest consumer database companies has been charged three other times this year for similar crimes and is expected to be charged federally soon, according to court records and authorities.

Daniel J. Baas appeared in Hamilton County Municipal Court Saturday on the fourth and most recent charge of unauthorized use of property. He remains jailed on $120,000 bond at the Hamilton County Justice Center.

When Baas appeared before Municipal Judge Nadine Allen Saturday on his latest charge, Sheriff's Detective Rick Sweeney of the county's Regional Electronic Computer Investigative unit told the judge that Baas soon would be charged federally.

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He was charged with the same crime against an unnamed company on June 3, also for another April 10 offense, records show. In that case, Baas is accused of hacking into the computer database of an unnamed company and providing "personal information regarding a subject's name and home address and telephone number without the consent or permission of the owner," records show.

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pgrote writes "As mentioned previously, the Acxiom consumer database company was compromised. More details have emerged including the background of the alleged hacker and the method used to gather access. It turns out he had access since December of 2002 and came in through an unsecured FTP server. The suspect was not a former employee of Acxiom as previously reported, but an employee of data mining company."

Other valuable information comes from national database companies that assemble huge volumes of information, gathered from people who respond to surveys, sign up for magazine subscriptions and fill out product-warranty cards. That allows Market Intelligence Group to attach demographic characteristics to a company's name-and-address-only files. The national databases typically include information on age, number of children, salary ranges and whether the person rents or owns a home. Privacy activists criticize the practice, but Migliara said his company never deals with information on an individual basis. Instead, it uses aggregate data to develop a customer profile. Then, the company can buy mailing lists full of people that match that profile.

"It allows you to target the right customer with the right product and the right message at the right time," Migliara said.

In recent years, Congress has passed laws limiting the use of government data and requiring banks and financial companies to reveal how customer files are used. But lawmakers have yet to address the topic of data mining directly. That, combined with technological innovations that make data mining more practical, have inspired lots of companies to take a deeper look at their customers.

"It's not uncommon for companies to go to outside sources to profile their customers and not tell their customers about it. Eventually, the more people find out about this, the more they're not going to like it," said Evan Hendricks, editor of Privacy Times, a Washington, D.C. -based publication that follows the issue.