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Wednesday, March 14, 2007
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U.S. Spy Case Will Be Heard. A Northern California judge will hear arguments in the case of two American lawyers who say they can prove the U.S. spied on them without a warrant. The government says the case should never be heard. In 27B Stroke 6. [Wired News: Top Stories]
4:17:14 PM 
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TAMPA, Florida (CNN) -- The Transportation Security
Administration carried out surprise inspections on workers at five
airports in Florida and Puerto Rico on Monday, one week after a baggage
handler in Orlando allegedly used his airport credentials to smuggle
more than a dozen firearms into a commercial jetliner. Some 160
TSA officers, backed by Federal Air Marshals and local police, searched
airplanes for contraband, shined flashlights in airport vehicles and
patted down contractor employees involved in airport security. The five airports inspected were in Tampa, Orlando, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The
airport crackdown will continue through the week, spreading to other
regions in the country as TSA increases random, unannounced searches
targeting those who could misuse their access within the system. "We realize the insider threat is a real threat, and we have to address it," said TSA spokesman Christopher White.
3:58:40 PM
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An amendment to the No Child Left Behind (NCLB)
Act seeks to keep military recruiters from accessing secondary
students' personal data by requiring parents to choose to share that
information rather than having to opt out of sharing it.
Rep.
Mike Honda (D-Calif.) introduced the legislation March 6. The Student
Privacy Protection Act would require local school systems to obtain
written consent before releasing information on secondary school
students to military recruiters or their agents.
The measure
will next be referred to the House Education and Labor Committee
sometime during this session, said a spokesperson for Honda. That
committee's chairman, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), is a co-sponsor of
the bill.
Because of a provision in the NCLB, school districts
are directed to give information about students to military recruiters
unless parents explicitly request that their children's data remains
private. Since the enacting of NCLB, secondary schools have been
supplying the names, addresses and telephone numbers of students to
recruiters sponsored by the military services.
However, schools often failed to make parents aware of the option to keep that information private, Honda said.
3:54:06 PM
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n a rare instance of public dissent, an American Health Information
Community AHIC) workgroup has split over whether to recommend that
product certification be available for personal health record software.
AHIC, a high-level advisory committee to the Department of
Health and Human Services, sided with the majority on its Consumer
Empowerment Workgroup and voted unanimously in favor of the
certification recommendation.
A minority -- five members of
the 23-person workgroup -- took the position that certification would
be premature and the top priority should be privacy and security
policies for PHRs. "The risks [of certification now] outweigh any
potential benefits," the dissenters said in a letter to AHIC.
The
workgroup's task is to foster widespread adoption of PHRs. One of its
leaders, Dr. Rose Marie Robertson, told AHIC that the group believes
PHRs will be more widely used if consumers do not have to sit at a
computer and enter all their health information. Instead, the PHRs
could be populated by data from doctors, health plans, drug stores, or
elsewhere.
3:51:04 PM
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HONG KONG - Investigators said Wednesday there was not enough evidence
to show that Yahoo Inc.'s Hong Kong branch provided private information
that helped convict a Chinese reporter accused of leaking state
secrets.
The case raised questions about whether Internet companies should
cooperate with governments that deny freedom of speech and frequently
crack down on journalists.
Yahoo! Hong Kong Limited was
accused of helping Chinese authorities by Hong Kong lawmaker Albert Ho,
who filed a complaint last year with the city's privacy commissioner.
Ho alleged the Internet company provided information that helped
convict journalist Shi Tao, sentenced to 10 years in jail in 2005 on
mainland China.
3:43:01 PM
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CDT Calls for Judicial Approval of National Security Letters. CDT is calling on Congress to require judicial supervision of FBI requests for access to the sensitive records of US citizens to protect privacy and national security. Recent revelations regarding violations in the use of so-called "national security letters" have shown that no matter how many internal controls the FBI adopts, self-certification is not sufficient when the government is obtaining the sensitive financial and communications records of citizens. CDT believes Congress should reform the law and adopt a reasonable system of judicial checks and balances. [Center for Democracy and Technology]
3:35:59 PM
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OpenCongress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind each bill.
3:30:38 PM
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Google Cooperating with Mumbai & Brazilian Police. Boing Boing has two good posts detailing how Google has been cooperating with Mumbai and Brazilian authorities to help censor content and track down offenders on their Orkut social networking service.
In the Mumbai case:
The police are said to be targeting a number of [base "]problematic[per thou] Orkut posts, including items that criticize various public figures in India, others that glorify Indian mobsters, and [base "]anti-Indian words.[per thou] The latter probably has to do with a group on Orkut called [base "]I Hate India,[per thou] which pissed off Indian officials so much, they decided to sue Google over it last October.
Google has designed a special Orkut admin tool for deleting or blocking illegal content, and given Brazilian police access to this tool. This means that if you[base ']re on Orkut and you say something that in Brazil could be considered illegal (such as celebrity gossip, Consumerist-style corporate bashing, mistreating animals), the Brazilian police can censor the community where this [base "]illegal[per thou] speech is seen.
Much more if you follow the links.
[michaelzimmer.org]
11:39:49 AM
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© Copyright 2007 Paul Hardwick.
Last update: 3/18/07; 6:11:06 PM.
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