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 »

Big Data Gets Bigger/Watch Out Privacy as Vivaki Partners with Bluekai

"VivaKi’s dedicated R&D entity, the Nerve Center, and BlueKai, the world's most connected customer data cloud for data management, analysis and activation, have co-developed a new data platform called Audience Insights that will provide marketers with unmatched scale, data aggregation capabilities and safety standards. ...By ingesting data from campaigns on DoubleClick and Atlas, Audience Insights synchs data via

The problem with nerd politics

Here's a podcast of my last Guardian column, The problem with nerd politics: Since the earliest days of the information wars, people who care about freedom and technology have struggled with two ideological traps: nerd determinism and nerd fatalism. Both are dangerously attractive to people who love technology. In "nerd determinism," technologists dismiss dangerous and … [Read more]Read More »

EPIC to Testify on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg is scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee at a hearing on May 31, 2012 regarding the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. For more information, see EPIC: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and EPIC: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
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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, [...]
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Move to Declassify FISA Court Rulings Yields No Results

Steven Aftergood writes: An initiative that was started two years ago to declassify significant rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court regarding domestic intelligence surveillance has produced no declassified records, a Justice Department official confirmed last week. Read more on FAS.
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Washington Post: Newly identified computer virus, used for spying, is 20 times size of Stuxnet

The Washington Post reports on a new type of computer virus that is used for spying and surveillance: Researchers have identified a sophisticated new computer virus 20 times the size of Stuxnet, the malicious software that disabled centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear plant. But unlike Stuxnet, the new malware appears to be used solely for [...]
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Interview with a Safecracker

The legal kind. It's interesting:

Q: How realistic are movies that show people breaking into vaults?
A: Not very! In the movies it takes five minutes of razzle-dazzle; in real life it's usually at least a couple of hours of precision work for an easy, lost combination lockout.

[...]

Q: Have you ever met a lock you couldn't pick?

A: There are several types of locks that are designed to be extremely pick-resistant, as there are combination safe locks that can slow down my efforts at manipulation.

I've never met a safe or lock that kept me out for very long. Not saying I can't be stumped. Unknown mechanical malfunctions inside a safe or vault are the most challenging things I have to contend with and I will probably see one of those tomorrow since you just jinxed me with that question.

Meet ‘Flame’, The Massive Spy Malware Infiltrating Iranian Computers

A massive, highly sophisticated piece of malware named Flame has been newly found infecting systems in Iran and elsewhere and is believed to be part of a well-coordinated, ongoing, state-run cyberespionage operation.
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