News & Commentary

Figures released last week by the London Assembly of Liberal Democrats suggest that London's video surveillance network, totaling over 10,500 cameras in all, does not help solve crimes.

Various companies report being able to purchase anonymized, but user-specific internet activity logs from big ISPs. Comcast has been accused of selling its voice over IP customers' account information as soon as the phones leave their box. When t

The American Civil Liberties Union today announced the launch of a new "Surveillance Society Clock" to symbolize the reality that we are fast approaching a genuine surveillance society in the United States. The clock is set at six minutes before the "midnight" of such a dark end to privacy. Also being released is a new report summarizing the state of privacy today, and video of "Monster Among Us," a new piece written and performed by spoken-word artists Steve Connell & Sekou (tha misfit).

In August, privacy advocates applauded the Defense Department's decision to close its Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) system. While the decision to shut down the much maligned program is a good one, it certainly does not mean the end to the intelligence database threat to civil liberties.

A federal court today struck down the amended Patriot Act's National Security Letter (NSL) provision. The law has permitted the FBI to issue NSLs demanding private information about people within the United States without court approval, and to gag those who receive NSLs from discussing them. The court found that the gag power was unconstitutional and that because the statute prevented courts from engaging in meaningful judicial review of gags, it violated the First Amendment and the principle of separation of powers.

Earlier this week, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) ruled in support of freedom of speech for bloggers. The FEC dismissed complaints against the DailyKos and a blog site critical of former Representative Mary Bono.

Judge Walker of the Northern District of California heard arguments yesterday on the ACLUs of California case against Verizon for allegedly providing the NSA with California customers' phone records without their consent and without a warrant, court order, or legal process.

The online social networking service Facebook is a popular way to build and maintain groups of friends, family, and colleagues online. Many of the site's users post photo albums of their lives for friends and family. Even more include significant personal information on their own individual profile page- information such as age, relationship status, hobbies, job information, and even address and phone number.

In May and June of this year, we had several blog posts about privacy concerns associated with the new Google Street View service. See here.

The Street View photographs included identifiable people and license plates and the procedures for requesting take-down of that information was more difficult than it should have been.

There was not a direct link from the image to request take-down and Google asked for a significant amount of personal information in order to complete the process and show that you were the actual person or owner of the car that was photographed. See here.