Choose Privacy Week 2012: Why We Should Care About Privacy

Doug Archer, chair of the ALA-IFC Privacy Subcommittee, closes our Choose Privacy Week observance with a thoughtful reflection on why individuals should care about privacy:

It never ceases to amaze me when people ask “Why do you care about privacy if you don’t have anything to hide?“ The implication, of course, is that you do have some deep, dark, dirty little (or big) secret and, if found out, you’d be ostracized by friends and neighbors if not sent to the big house for 10 to 20. Of course in the real world everyone has things to hide, things they would prefer that the world not know. Usually these are simply private normal matters of everyday life that would be merely embarrassing if viewed by the general public. In other cases, however, they are private concerns that once made public could have a devastating impact on the… Read More »

New Choose Privacy Week Documentary: “Vanishing Liberties”

The Office for Intellectual Freedom is excited to debut a new short documentary, “Vanishing Liberties: The Rise of State Surveillance in the Digital Age,“ in observance of Choose Privacy Week 2012. The documentary examines the government’s growing use of surveillance tools to track and spy on immigrant communities and the proposals to adopt these same tools to monitor and track the activities of all Americans.

CPW 2012: The Perils of Social Reading

By Neil Richards
Professor of Law
Washington University School of Law

Sharing, we are told, is cool. At the urging of Facebook and Netflix, the House of Representatives recently passed a bill to “update” an obscure 1988 law known as the Video Privacy Protection Act (“VPPA”). Facebook and Netflix wanted to modernize this law from the VHS era, because its protection of video store records stood in the way of sharing movie recommendations among friends online. The law would have allowed companies to obtain a single consent to automatically share all movies viewed on Facebook and other social networks forever. The bill stalled in the Senate after a feisty hearing before Senator Franken, though some modernization of our video privacy law is inevitable.

But the VPPA debate is just the start; merely one part of a much larger trend towards “social reading.“… Read More »

Online Industry Giants Fearful of Do-Not-Track/Will Online Users Have Some form of Protection Against Tracking?

Last week, I spent several days working with privacy and consumer NGOs, along with Mozilla and privacy tech maven Jonathan Mayer advancing the interests of consumer/citizen privacy in the digital era. The forum was the Worldwide Web Consortium's Tracking Protection Working Group in-person meeting in Washington, DC. As my colleagues at EFF and

Advance praise for Pirate Cinema

My next YA novel is Pirate Cinema, which hits stands on Oct 2. The book has been complete for a long time, and now is the part in its lifecycle where it is in ballistic flight, having been launched from my device with all the skill and concentration that I can muster, with nothing else … [Read more]Read More »

"Privacy And Security: An Evening Conversation With Leading Experts"

Marc Rotenberg,
EPIC Executive Director

Stanford Law School and Microsoft Innovation & Policy Center
Washington, D.C.
May 16, 2012

Is the problem with the TSA the leader? Or the concept?

Rep. Paul Broun, MD, a Georgia Republican member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, has called for the resignation of the Administrator of the TSA, John Pistole. We agree with Rep. Broun that “The time has come for serious action to be taken” with respect to the TSA, that “drastic change” is required, and that, [...]
Read More »

Jack Straw: ‘Breach of privacy’ should be in Human Rights Act

Paul McNally reports: The former justice secretary, Jack Straw, has called for the Human Rights Act to be amended to include a new clause on breach of privacy. Giving evidence at the Leveson inquiry today, Straw said that when the Human Rights Act was passed in 2008 parliament felt the privacy element was best left [...]
Read More »

Times Colonist (Canada): Privacy watchdog slams four B.C. bills

The Times Colonist reports on controversy in British Columbia, Canada, concerning pending legislation and personal privacy: B.C.’s privacy watchdog is demanding the government change four pieces of legislation – and in one case scrap a bill altogether – because of concerns over personal privacy and government transparency. Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham has sent [...]
Read More »

Security Vulnerabilities in Airport Full-Body Scanners

According to a report from the DHS Office of Inspector General:

Federal investigators "identified vulnerabilities in the screening process" at domestic airports using so-called "full body scanners," according to a classified internal Department of Homeland Security report.

EPIC obtained an unclassified version of the report in a FOIA response. Here's the summary.

Banned PlayStation Hacker Sees Hope of Return in Jailbreaking Deliberations

George Hotz settled a civil suit filed against him by Sony for figuring out how to let people play homebrew games on the PlayStation -- in violation of a federal law that prohibits getting around encryption in hardware and software, even if the reason to do it is perfectly legal. He settled the suit by agreeing never to tinker again with a Sony product, but his hacker itch has him anxiously awaiting a looming decision by federal copyright regulators that, for the first time, could legalize videogame-console jailbreaking.
Read More »