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Villain
of the week:
No-fly stonewallers
June 18,
2004 |
US District Court Judge Charles Breyer for Northern California ruled this week that the FBI and the Transportation Security Agency have been illegally stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests by travelers demanding details on the so-called “no-fly” list which grounded them.
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Villain
of the week:
Office of Foreign Assets Control
June 7,
2004 |
Newsweek has pointed out yet another egregious provision of the USA PATRIOT Act, one that both violates privacy and raises costs - and does so inefficiently to boot. It comes into play whenever someone buys some real estate.
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Privacy Hero:
CAPPS II plaintiffs
June 1,
2004 |
Four hearty Alaskans have challenged the federal government in federal court (good luck on that...) over the coming CAPPS II system. CAPPS II is a program wherein the federal government trolls through corporate databases on every American who buys an airline ticket, in order to decide whether the traveler should be arrested, subjected to extra robust friskings, or just subject to the same run-of-the-mill indignities as everyone else. |
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Villain
of the week:
Homeland MATRIX
May 24,
2004 |
New information has emerged this past week about the MATRIX database system, supposedly a state-level program that digs through commercial and government databases that allegedly can “spot terrorists.” It turns out that the program received support from the federal government – and that Florida authorities followed up and investigated a list of 120,000 people deemed to have a “high terrorist factor.”
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Villain
of the week:
DC's money cameras
May 14,
2004 |
A recent report on the traffic spycams installed throughout Washington, DC gives the lie to the oft-repeated claims that forced loss of privacy is balanced by greater security.
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Villain
of the week:
Federal anti-medical-privacy push
May 7,
2004 |
President Bush issued this past week an executive order mandating that the health care industry keep all its records in electronic format. With the HIPAA 'privacy' rules now in effect, and Rep. Ron Paul's annual crusade to render inoperative the national health identification number facing an unsure fate, the move holds the potential to seriously negatively impact the de facto state of patient privacy. |
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Villain
of the week:
California state Sen. Figueroa
April 23,
2004 |
When Google announced they were starting a free email service that included message-based advertising, the regulation advocates immediately came out in full force. But the attempt to outlaw 'Gmail' has a number of anti-privacy facets of its own.
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Villain
of the week:
The IRS
April 16,
2004 |
Did you file intimate financial details with the Internal Revenue Service yesterday? Have you ever paused to wonder what happens with that sensitive information after it gets to the P.O. Box in Memphis or Puerto Rico?
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Villain
of the week:
International Civil Aviation Organization
April 9,
2004 |
The United Nations' International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) finished a meeting last week where they worked to 'harmonize' passports issued all over the world into something rapidly approaching an standardized global biometric identification system.
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Villain
of the week:
TSA's Anthony "Buzz" Cerino
April 2,
2004 |
Perhaps you thought we were too hard last week when we slammed those who would volunteer for the Transportation Secuity Administration's pilot program for "Registered Travelers." But this week, a high-ranking bureaucrat in that agency revealed the mentality behind such ideas. Anthony "Buzz" Cerino, who heads up communications security technology projects at TSA revealed the next layer of control and tracking should the "registered traveler" idea come to pass -- radio-tracking of every passenger from the time they get a boarding pass.
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Villain
of the week:
'Registered Traveler' enablers
March 26,
2004 |
The Transportation Security Administration announced last week that it will be initiating a pilot test program of its long-touted "trusted traveler,' now rechristened 'registered traveler' program. The program will be a 'voluntary' (at the outset, anyway) internal biometric passport system set up at airports around the country.
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Villain
of the week:
FBI's online wiretap push
March 19,
2004 |
At the very close of last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation delivered unto the Federal Communications Commission an 83-page demand that the federal government unilaterally mandate how the infrastructure of the Internet will be built.
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Villain
of the week:
Pinellas County, Florida School Board
March 12,
2004 |
Proving once again that the absence of choice more often than not means the absence of privacy, the government schools of Pinellas County in Florida will soon be scanning the thumbprints of children whenever they board or disembark from their school bus. Who needs reading, writing or arithmetic when you have biometrics? It seems most government schools these days are lacking in literacy, but if there's one thing done well, it's training tomorrow's leaders (not to mention followers) to expect nothing vis-a-vis privacy rights.
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Villain
of the week:
California 4th District Court of Appeals
March 5,
2004 |
The California Fourth District Court of Appeals has upheld the legality of outrageous surveillance placed on customers of cybercafes in the city of Garden Grove. Cybercafe patrons in that city can now expect “literally. . . a 'Big Brother' style telescreen to look over one's shoulder while accessing the Internet," as Judge P.J. Sills’ dissent put it. [Opinion and dissent - PDF]
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Villain
of the week:
Palm Beach County State Attorney
Privacy Hero: AAPS
March 1,
2004 |
Whether or not Rush Limbaugh is the victim of a coordinated political vendetta, as he has opined on his radio broadcast, the behavior of the Palm Beach County State Attorney's office has certainly made it seem that way. Both Limbaugh's attorney and the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons have laid out the case that the State Attorney's search warrant for Limbaugh's medical records was filed in violation of the state Constitution of Florida.
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Villain
of the week:
Department of Justice
February 23,
2004 |
The United States Department of Justice has taken a rather disturbing position on medical privacy in court papers filed this month. According to the New York Times, DOJ argued that in light of "modern medical practice," "individuals no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential."
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Villain
of the week:
South Carolina Rx-database pushers
February 13,
2004 |
It seems to be a trend. Not only are Florida politicians anxious to create a massive new database of consumers' prescription drug habits, but South Carolina politicos are jumping on the bandwagon as well. State House Majority Leader Rick Quinn pushed through a budget panel this week a measure to create just such a system.
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Villain
of the week:
Port Authority
February 6,
2004 |
The Attorney General of New Jersey this week announced a seven-count indictment against Haynes Security Inc., and its founder. Haynes is a major 'security' contractor for the airports, bridges and tunnels run by the Port Authority of New York-New Jersey, a joint agency of those two state governments.
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Hero
of the month:
Utah Gov. Olene Walker
February 2,
2004 |
The "MATRIX" database has had a mixed fate since it was first announced last year. "MATRIX" is short for "Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange" and like Total Information Awareness, Matrix will search not only government databases, but consumer databases as well. It is a federally-funded project that is designed for use by state and local law officials, tying together government and commercial databases from several states. One state's database that isn't in the system is Utah.
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Villain
of the week:
NASA-Northwest redux
January 23,
2004 |
After two years, the public has finally learned that Northwest Airlines did indeed give the National Aeronautics and Space Administration sensitive consumer data for use in a bizarre research program that combined data-mining and "brain-monitoring" technology.
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Villain
of the week:
Mike Fasano
January 30,
2004 |
Two years ago, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush expanded the mandate of a special session of the legislature to include consideration of a bill creating a state database to track the pharmaceutical purchases of Florida consumers. The effort failed, but now state Sen. Mike Fasano has resurrected the idea in a bill currently pending.
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Villain
of the week:
NASA-Northwest redux
January 23,
2004 |
After two years, the public has finally learned that Northwest Airlines did indeed give the National Aeronautics and Space Administration sensitive consumer data for use in a bizarre research program that combined data-mining and "brain-monitoring" technology.
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Villain
of the week:
IRS
January 16,
2004 |
With the turn of the calendar, many Americans find themselves slogging through piles of paperwork in order to figure out how much is needed to pay off the demands of the Internal Revenue Service for the previous year. The IRS is eager to turn this paperwork into bytes and bits so that their agents and other agencies can more easily comb through their databases looking for folks to audit or otherwise hammer down the nail that sticks out.
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Villain
of the week:
Treasury Department's TTB
January 12,
2004 |
When businesses violate the privacy policy they've promised consumers, it is a violation of contract and often the subject of a Federal Trade Commission investigation, as well. Yet the Treasury Department's Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) has unilaterally decided citizens who participated in a recent rule-writing procedure have no right to expect the federal government to follow its own promised privacy policy.
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Hero of the month:
Verizon and DC Circuit Court of Appeals
December 31,
2003 |
A three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned a nonsensical anti-privacy ruling in the case of Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) vs. Verizon Communications, Inc. The Appeals Court overruled U.S. Circuit Judge John Bates who had ordered Verizon to turn over to the RIAA the names of two subscribers of Verizon's broadband service. Verizon appealed, and the Appeals Court judges this month found Bates' ruling to be a blatant misreading of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
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Villain
of the week:
Sheriff Joe Arpaio
December 19,
2003 |
Joe Arpaio is a repeat offender. The Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff whom we spotlighted last year for ordering his deputies to spy on political opponents is at it again. This time, he's put up face-scanning cameras at a Phoenix school.
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Villain
of the week:
Principal McCrackin - SWATting school privacy
December 15,
2003 |
Seventeen high school students have launched a federal lawsuit against a number of persons and institutions in South Carolina. The legal ruckus arises from a fruitless, over-the-top police search of Stratford High School last month.
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Villain
of the week:
Online Privacy CANners
December 8,
2003 |
The pushers of the so-called CAN-SPAM bill [pdf] now making its way through the U. S. Senate, eager to make a show of standing up against junk mail, have written a prescription for less privacy online. And their plan will do little if anything to actually curb the tide of spam in the inboxes of Internet users.
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Hero of the month:
ZoneAlarm and TRUSTe
December 3,
2003 |
As if last week's update on the scheme to build an elaborate network to record and tax consumer purchases made online wasn't enough, some tax-hungry bureaucrats are already chasing down and subpoenaing records about cigarette consumers who shop online. And it appears at least one delivery company is turning over that consumer information to the tax hawks despite pledging not to.
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Villain
of the week:
Congress' warrantless snoop authorizers
November 21,
2003 |
A U.S. Congressional Conference Committee, and now the House of Representatives, has passed an Intelligence Appropriations bill that gives the FBI the power to search through the consumer records of a wide variety of businesses without the benefit of a search warrant, as required by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution's Bill of Rights. All that remains between passage into law is the vote of the Senate and the signature of the President.
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Villain
of the week:
LAPD's tabloid cop
November 14,
2003 |
Another example of the dangers of large government databases on the citizenry comes to us this week from the city of Los Angeles. It seems that an officer was using the Department's surveillance databases, as well as some maintained at the state and federal level, to not only stalk a former paramour but also to gather dirt on celebrities to sell to supermarket tabloids.
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Villain
of the week:
Internet Excise Taxers
November 7,
2003 |
As if last week's update on the scheme to build an elaborate network to record and tax consumer purchases made online wasn't enough, some tax-hungry bureaucrats are already chasing down and subpoenaing records about cigarette consumers who shop online. And it appears at least one delivery company is turning over that consumer information to the tax hawks despite pledging not to.
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Hero
of the month:
Christine Dahl
October,
2003 |
Like the weather, people often complain about the growing state of state surveillance, but don't do anything about it. Christine Dahl of Portland, Oregon isn't one of those people. She's been fighting a speeding ticket issued her by an automatic photo radar system and this week brought it all the way to the Supreme Court of Oregon.
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Villain
of the week:
Internet Sales Taxers: Gray Davis, Mike Enzi, etc.
October 31,
2003 |
Consumer privacy online is threatened again by the specter of a scheme to tax Internet sales. This past month has seen outgoing California Governor Gray Davis sign a bill joining California into the compact of states building the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP). And bills to give Congressional approval to the compact have been introduced in both the U.S. House and Senate.
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Villain
of the week:
EU ID push
October 24,
2003 |
This space noted a couple of weeks ago that efforts to unify Canadian and U.S. drivers' licenses into one bi-national ID card had flared up again. Looking across the Atlantic, things don't seem much better. This past week has seen plans for a biometric continentwide "health ID card" unveiled, as well as one for EU-wide drivers' licenses. And the Blair government in the UK is desperately trying to push through national identification cards over domestic opposition even within his own Cabinet.
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Villain
of the week:
Medicare drug-pushers
October 17,
2003 |
This space has at least twice before warned of the anti-privacy rules embedded in the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). As the Congress debates whether and how to incorporate prescription drug benefits into the Medicare leviathan, Sue Blevins, president of the Institute for Health Freedom, has pointed out the chilling implications such a scheme could have for the privacy of American senior citizens.
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Villain
of the week:
Denis Coderre
October 10,
2003 |
Canada's Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Denis Coderre recently announced that, rather than watching who enters the country, he would prefer to install a biometric control grid to track and trace everyone. His suggestion of "a national identity card with biometrics" earlier this year was followed up this past week by a forum apparently intended to lay out the rationale for the effort.
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Villain
of the week:
Gen. Wesley Clark & Acxiom
October 6,
2003 |
More information has come to light in the JetBlue/CAPPS II incident regarding the role of data broker Acxiom and its rainmaker-slash-board-member (and now-presidential candidate) Gen. Wesley Clark.
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Hero of the month:
SBC
(Runner-up: Verizon)
October 1,
2003 |
Since a blizzard of administrative subpoenas was unleashed in the wake of a June decision in the Verizon v. RIAA case, only SBC among major Internet service providers has refused to provide the names of their customers in response to administrative subpoenas that are vetted by no judge. |
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Villain
of the week:
Alabama State Trooper snoopers
September 26,
2003 |
The intrepid reporters at The Crimson White, the student newspaper of the University of Alabama have uncovered a bit of malfeasance on the part of Alabama State Troopers operating traffic cameras in Tuscaloosa. It appears the trooper in charge late one recent night got bored of watching the quiet streets and instead turned the cameras to the pedestrians in the area.
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Villain
of the week:
CAPPS BLUE
September 22,
2003 |
Discount airliner JetBlue had been receiving rave reviews from customers for their leather seats and nifty seatback television screens. How was the carrier able to provide such amenities at discounted rates? It appears part of the answer may be that JetBlue sold information to a Department of Defense contractor in order to help build the Big Brother CAPPS II system which is now "color-coding" all Americans who dare travel by air.
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Villain
of the week:
Kevin Morris, (British) Police Superintendents' Association
September 12,
2003 |
It is always instructive for Americans to look at the current political situation in the United Kingdom. For it seems, unfortunately, that it is often only a matter of time before police-state powers undertaken there are often put into effect here in the United States. Thus the news that Kevin Morris, chairman of the Police Superintendents' Association, proposed this week a compulsory DNA database for everyone in the country is particularly troubling.
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Villain
of the week:
Government RFID pushers
September 5,
2003 |
Later this month in Chicago, something called the Auto-ID Center will be holding a big to-do unveiling the latest in RFID technology. And what is RFID? RFID stands for radio-frequency identification, and many retailers and suppliers of consumer products would like to see the teeny tiny microchips-cum-radio-transponders replace the ubiquitous UPC bar code. The thing is, many in government seem to want this as well, which raises troubling questions.
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Hero of the month:
Ward Connerly
August 29,
2003 |
Ward Connerly, who previously led a successful ballot initiative barring the state's use of "affirmative action" quota programs in government hiring, contracting and university admissions, has a new brainchild: the "Racial Privacy Initiative," otherwise known as California ballot Proposition 54:
"The state shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity, color or national origin in the operation of public education, public contracting or public employment."
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Villain
of the week:
Amtsgericht Frankfurt / Main
August 29,
2003 |
In the information age, sometimes even a court can move quickly. That seems to be the lesson of this week's privacy villain story. Earlier this month a local court, or Amtsgericht in Frankfurt, Germany, ordered the creators of a popular online anonymizing service to "backdoor" their software so that the government could see who using the service was accessing a particular IP address. (I.e., who was accessing a particular computer with a unique Internet Protocol number.)
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Villain
of the week:
Federal Trade Commission
August 22,
2003 |
The Federal Trade Commission has failed in an attempt to bring attorney-client confidentiality under the regulatory dicta of, of all things, financial privacy rules enacted under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. But last week, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said the FTC overstepped its authority when it tried to extend G-L-B to legal services.
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Villain
of the week:
VICTORY (over privacy) Act
August 15,
2003 |
Attorney General John Ashcroft has kicked off a road show, a 10-day, 20-stop tour to bolster flagging support for the USA PATRIOT Act and promote an as-yet unintroduced piece of legislation called the VICTORY Act. The NCC Privacy Group has recently obtained a draft copy of the VICTORY legislation, and it has some chilling implications for consumer privacy.
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Villain
of the week:
Attack of the mini-TIAs
August 8,
2003 |
It was only three weeks ago that the U.S. Senate had voted to defund the Pentagon's Terrorism (nee Total) Information Awareness program. But like the mythological Medusa, two new heads are sprouting up for the one removed. Two very similar programs have suddenly popped up this week at the (supra)state level. One would connect Washington, D.C, and four states in a government data-sharing network. The other, based in Florida, would connect 13 states and link both government and commercial databases.
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Villain
of the week:
CAPPS II redux
August 1,
2003 |
Following hundreds of negative comments from the public, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has issued an updated Privacy Act Notice concerning its Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPS II. CAPPS II is a program wherein the federal government trolls through corporate databases on everyone who buys an airline ticket, in order to decide whether the consumer should be arrested or subjected to extra robust friskings. The new CAPPS II.I, or what have you, despite some promising changes, may not offer a net gain in consumer privacy from the previous plan.
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Hero of the Month:
House of Representatives
July 31,
2003 |
The House of Representatives is to be commended for turning back the abuses of the USA PATRIOT Act this month, passing amendments to spending bills in order to defund some activities related to Sections 213 or 215 of the Act. Rep. Butch Otter's amendment to one bill defunded Section 213, "sneak" searches of suspects' homes without a search warrant or even notification that the search had taken place. Similarly, after legislative maneuvering, the House amended Section 215 to defund searches of bookstore and library records without the knowledge of customers.
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Villain
of the week:
President's Commission on the United States Postal Service
July 25,
2003 |
Next week, a special commission created by President Bush will present him with a final report on "articulating a proposed vision for the future of the United States Postal Service." (PDF.) That vision includes the idea that no person should be able to mail a letter without the USPS and their pals in Homeland Security knowing about it.
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Villain
of the week:
Federal camera operators
July 17,
2003 |
The federal government owns one third of the land in the country and half of the land west of the Mississippi. And as far as the Beltway bureaucrats are concerned, we have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" on any of it. To prove they're serious, they've begun to piece together a near-all-encompassing surveillance dragnet in the Washington, DC area. And according to a report recently issued by the General Accounting Office (TXT, PDF), the federal agencies have failed to demonstrate their cameras do anything to stop evildoers and have been lax in responding to Congressional oversight concerns about the cameras' effect on privacy.
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Villain
of the week:
Overton County Schools, TN
July 10,
2003 |
Advocates of competition and choice in education have another reason to point to their distrust of government schools this week as information emerges about an outrageous violation of children's privacy in Overton County, Tennessee. Students at Livingston Middle School in that county were watched by digital cameras in gymnasium changing rooms
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Villain
of the week:
Talon - TIPS for the Pentagon
July 3,
2003 |
First the FBI renamed Carnivore "DCS-1000" -- but their little black boxes still suck up data from your friendly neighborhood ISP. Then DARPA renamed Total Information Awareness (TIA) "Terrorist Information Awareness" -- but the totality of consumer "transactional data" will still go into Defense Department computers as though you are a terrorist. And now it appears that the Justice Department's Operation TIPS has switched masters and set up shop in the Pentagon as Talon -- the new clearing house for unverified data from your friendly neighborhood snoops and snitches.
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Villain
of the week:
SODA overseers
June 30,
2003 |
In an era of rapidly accumulating usurpations of privacy by the federal government, the checks and balances of the constitutional system set up by the nation's founders should play an increasingly important role. One group of Congressmen is trying to check up on the new surveillance state by exercising some oversight over the executive powers granted by the PATRIOT Act and other legislation. Their would-be vehicle to do so is called The Surveillance Oversight and Disclosure Act (SODA).
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Villain
of the week:
TSA's bag-screener thieves
June 27,
2003 |
The Transportation Security Administration has finally made their first arrest of their employees for theft. Two TSA employees at Miami International Airport are said to have been caught on video surveillance taking hundreds of dollars worth of compact discs and other goodies. Other reports of thefts from air travel baggage are pouring in as well. This was a predictable state of affairs ever since the announcement that a total federal takeover of airport security was imminent.
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Villain
of the week:
Sen. Orrin Hatch
June 20,
2003 |
Are you worried about malicious hackers snooping through your hard drive, perhaps even disabling your computer? One Senator is worried that your PC may be too private -- and he aims to do something about it. Sen. Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee this week expressed his enthusiasm for for proposals lifting liability from copyright holders who wish to search through and destroy PCs they think might have copyrighted material.
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Villain
of the week:
The Internet Taxers
June 13,
2003 |
State legislatures continue to jeopardize the online privacy of consumers by passing bills authorizing their states' entry into the so-called Streamlined Sales Tax Project. The SSTP, as it's known in bureaucratese, is a project consisting of a number of states that are working to harmonize sales tax rules and make sure none of their citizens even thinks of buying something from somewhere else without their state government recording and taxing the transaction. The state Senate of California passed just such a bill this week. The bill is currently awaiting action in the House. And the governor of Tennessee signed into law his state's "streamlined" tax bill at the end of May.
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Villain
of the week:
Akron, Ohio School Board
June 6,
2003 |
Reading, writing and artithmetic may not be the strong points of most government schools these days, but if there's one thing these institutions do well, it's training tomorrow's leaders (not to mention followers) to expect nothing vis-a-vis privacy rights. To that end, the Akron School Board has decided to spend $700,000 installing a new system that would mandate that schoolchildren pay for their lunch, not with cash or voucher, but rather their thumbprint.
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Hero of the month:
Gov. Robert Ehrlich
May 30,
2003 |
It is refreshing when a politician does something to actually protect privacy -- even if it's just preventing other politicians from violating it. And that is just what Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich did this month in vetoing a bill that would have set up radar-activated "speed cameras" throughout the state.
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Villain
of the week:
Fort Meyers, Fla. McSTING
May 30,
2003 |
The drive-thru window at the McDonald's on U.S. 41 in Fort Meyers, Florida is an unfortunate metaphor for all that is wrong with the current state of consumer privacy. It seems that customers expecting no more than a Big Mac and fries got a free bonus -- a citation from a police officer.
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Villain
of the week:
DARPA Strikes Back
May 23,
2003 |
We bring you this week another update in the continuing saga of the DARPA follies. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week released to Congress a long-awaited report about its Information Awareness Office's Total Information Awareness system. The report was not encouraging. And neither was news that IAO is working on a new project described as "TIA cubed" -- a comprehensive indexing of each individual's history as revealed through electronic artifacts called "LogLine".
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Villain
of the week:
Inland Revenue
May 16,
2003 |
This space has featured more than once the dirty dealings of the Internal Revenue Service and its employees. It should come as little surprise its sister agency across the pond in the homeland of Big Brother has its share of privacy violations as well. The United Kingdom's Internal Revenue bureau is under fire this week for misappropriation of taxpayer data.
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Villain
of the week:
G8
May 9,
2003 |
Word from Paris this week is that the G8 nations -- the governments of France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, Canada, and Russia -- have agreed to develop a biometric passport system, perhaps complete with barcode, eye scan, and fingerprints.
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Villain
of the week:
Senate Backroom Negotiators
May 2,
2003 |
More often than not, villains operate away from the light. Thus many deals of old were struck in the "cloakrooms" of the US Capitol, deals that would be frowned upon were they made in the light. Though the cloakrooms are outmoded in these days of instant communication, the behind-the-scenes dealing remains. This week we examine an attempted deal that should it ever come to fruition would represent a serious diminuntion of privacy and civil liberties for Americans.
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Hero of the month:
Patriot Librarians
April 30,
2003 |
We revisit this month Section 215 of the infamous USA PATRIOT Act. For those of you just joining us, this provision amended the U.S Code so as to give the FBI the power to get a secret warrant from a federal magistrate (almost a judge!) to enter a library (and many other businesses), demand certain customer records, and to forbid the library and its employees from ever telling anyone about the search. A number of librarians find this notion repugnant and are working to preserve patron privacy in spite of the law.
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Villain
of the week:
Judge John Bates
April 25,
2003 |
U.S. Circuit Judge John Bates this week issued a ruling that threatens the privacy of Internet users across the country. The ruling in the case of Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) vs. Verizon Communications, Inc. requires that Verizon turn over to the RIAA the names of two subscribers of Verizon's broadband service. The ruling arises from an erroneous reading of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and an utter disregard for the Fourth Amendment.
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Villain
of the week:
HIPAA redux
April 18,
2003 |
This space warned readers exactly one year ago today about the medical "privacy" rules coming down the pike from the Department of Health and Human Services. This week, the federal regulations arising from the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) finally went into effect. The regulations will destroy consumer medical privacy. This week we'll update you on the situation and narrowing but still extant options to remedy the situation.
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Villain
of the week:
Transportation Security Administration
April 11,
2003 |
Two different media reports this week point to evidence that the new federal agency that has taken over airport security is both horribly inefficient and shockingly heavy-handed in its dealings with airline passengers.
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Villain
of the week:
Anti-encryption putsch
April 4,
2003 |
Information has surfaced this week that state houses across the nation have been considering and even passing poorly-drafted legislation that makes it illegal for consumers to protect the privacy of their communications and computers using encryption and firewalls.
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Privacy Hero of the Month:
Visa International
April 1,
2003 |
Identity fraud is a worry of many consumers, as perhaps it well should be. The identity fraudster often needs little more than a sequence of numbers to wreak havoc with a consumer's credit rating and his life in general. Visa announced this March a new policy that will give worried consumers an option to help protect against identity fraud.
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Villain
of the week:
Department of Justice
March 28,
2003 |
The Department of Justice quietly announced in the Federal Register this week that accuracy is no longer a concern for the builders of one of the world's largest databases -- the NCIC 2000, a.k.a. the National Criminal Information Center.
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Villain
of the week:
Minnesota Dept. of Health
March 21,
2003 |
The Minnesota Department of Health and Human Services just can't get enough private sensitive health information on that state's citizens. This space reported in December about the Department's quest to set up a massive database with every procedure done and every pill prescribed to patients by hospitals and doctors in the state. And now, the Minnesota HHS is renewing its push for a mandatory battery of tests of children fresh out the womb.
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Villain
of the week:
Federal Agencies Lax with SSNs
March 14,
2003 |
A report out this month reveals something shocking but sadly not altogether unexpected - federal agencies are incredibly lax when it comes to protecting the integrity of your Social Security numbers.
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Villain
of the week:
Oklahoma Senate
March 7,
2003 |
Politicians in the Sooner State seem to be determined to undermine Oklahoma's friendly, trusting image with their latest move. The Oklahoma state Senate this week voted to join a handful of other states in demanding that its citizens turn over their fingerprints in order to exercise their "privilege" to drive on the public roads.
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Villain
of the week:
Latest Patriot Act rules
February 28,
2003 |
One of the most fearsome monsters of ancient mythology is the many-headed Hydra. As soon as one head was cut off, two more would grow in its place. So it is with the USA PATRIOT Act. This week, almost sixteen months after it was passed sight unseen by the U.S. Congress and signed into law, the Treasury Department has issued proposed rules requiring precious metal and jewelry dealers to spy on their customers for the federal government. In addition, Treasury has also announced an intent to draw up similar rules for vehicle sellers and travel agents. All of these notices are open for comment and possible change, and privacy-minded citizens can give the Treasury Department a piece if their minds before the rules are finalized.
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Hero of the month:
Bear Pond Books
February 27,
2003 |
One of the many controversial aspects of the so-called "USA PATRIOT Act," was a provision granting the federal government the power to secretly root through the records of bookstores and libraries to find out who has been reading what. One bookstore in Vermont has given its customers the opportunity to do something about it.
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Villain
of the week:
Sen. Hillary Clinton
February 21,
2003 |
Sen. Hillary Clinton told WABC radio this week that to combat the scourge of cheap lawn care by migrant wokers, she advocates not only an entry/exit work visa program with biometric identifiers but perhaps even a national ID card for every American complete with a biometric identifier such as a fingerprint or iris scan.
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Villain
of the week:
Ashcroft's PATRIOT II ghost writers
February 14,
2003 |
It has now been one week since news broke last Friday night of a secret bill being drafted by the Justice Department to radically expand the reach of the federal government into the lives of citizens. The official unofficial title of the document that bears Ashcroft's name as its drafter is the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. But it is already widely known as "PATRIOT 2" - a sequel to the USA PATRIOT Act, a law passed in the fall of 2001 that also radically expanded the reach of the surveillance state. The document was leaked to the Center for Public Integrity, along with a "control sheet" showing that Vice President Cheney and Speaker Dennis Hastert had already seen copies of the bill.
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Villain
of the week:
Kentucky Health Services
February 7,
2003 |
When control freaks and would-be regulators hew and cry about the need for government to dictate to private institutions how to manage consumer data, it is prudent to examine what kind of information management quality they are asking for. One typical example is this week's incident in Kentucky where a Health Services surplus computer, marked for resale, was found to be loaded with sensitive medical information, including the names of thousands of AIDS patients.
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Hero of the month:
The shaky voice of the Senate
February 1,
2003 |
As the Executive branch aggregates greater and greater powers, often at the expense of civil liberties and privacy of the citizens it purportedly serves, the political instincts of the legislative branch is too often to play it safe and go with the flow. Any blip in this wholly unfortunate trend deserves recognition and thus the US Senate's decision to scrap the funding for the infamous Total Information Awareness network is spotlighted this month.
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Villain
of the week:
NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence David Cohen
January 31,
2003 |
John Poindexter isn't the only one to jump at the chance to seize power and destroy privacy when the opportunity presents itself. The New York Police Department figures the current climate of fear and forgetfulness is just the right time to overturn a 17-year-old agreement arising frpoma 31-year-old lawsuit to limit its powers to spy on citizens. The restrictions were put in place by a consent decree with the US Department of Justice after several abuses of the police spying powers were exposed during the Vietnam era.
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Villain
of the week:
Sheriff Jim Alderden of Larimer County, Colo.
January 24,
2003 |
As governments build ever-increasing numbers of databases about citizens, the number of inappropriate uses of such data rises with it. Sheriff Jim Alderden of Larimer County in Colorado added to that number recently by adding data about law-abiding citizens to a criminal database simply because they have weapons permits.
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Villain
of the week:
Louisiana police DNA dragnet
January 16,
2003 |
Law enforcement agencies in Lousiana have gone overboard in their search for a serial killer, endangering the privacy of hundreds or even thousands of innocent men. Police in the Baton Rouge and Lafayette areas have so far demanded DNA samples from more than 900 men, often based on nothing more than their race, their car, and/or an anonymous phone call.
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Villain
of the week:
Fairfax County Police Department
January 9,
2003 |
The year 1619 was a big one for Virginia -- the first representative legislature in America, the House of Burgesses, wasestablished, and by it the first public drunkenness statutes. That year also marked the arrival in Virginia of the continent's first slaves. Fairfax County proudly upheld the tradtion of all three this holiday season, stripping citizens of their rights for having a drink, or for that matter just being near others who were.
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Villain
of the week:
Oregon Road User Fee Task Force
January 3,
2003 |
The Oregon state legislature, ever mindful of the need for more and more money to spread around, last year appointed a special task force to recommend how best to extract more money from people who dare to drive their cars on the king's roads. The Road User Fee Task Force came back with the answer last week -- GPS units on every car in the state!
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Hero of the Month:
World Sousveillance Day
January 1,
2003 |
On December 24, while most of America was last-minute shopping and/or celebrating Christmas Eve with family, others were answering the ancient question, Qui custodies custodient? - Who watches the watchers? - by asking another -- If not us, who? If we don't do it, who will?
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2002 Villains & Heros
2001 Villains & Heros
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