NewsTrust - Privacy - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

More Secrets on Growing State Surveillance: Exclusive Part 2 With NSA Whistleblower, Targeted Hacker

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez - Apr. 23 (Interview) - In part two of our national broadcast exclusive on the growing domestic surveillance state, we speak with National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney, and two targeted Americans: Oscar-nominated filmmaker Laura Poitras, and hacker Jacob Appelbaum, who has volunteered for WikiLeaks and now works with Tor Project, a nonprofit organization that teaches about internet security. Binney left the NSA after the 9/11 attacks over his concerns about the agency’s widespread surveillance of U.S. citizens. He describes how the FBI later raided his home and held him at gunpoint and notes there is still no effective way of monitoring how and what information the NSA is gathering on U.S. citizens, and how that data is being used. "Click here to watch part one of our special report.":democracynow.org/shows/2012/4/20 [Transcript to come. Check back soon.]

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Supreme Court ponders constitutionality of 24/7 GPS tracking

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Ars Technica - Nov. 08 (Opinion) - On Tuesday, the government told the Supreme Court the Fourth Amendment allowed it to conduct 24/7 tracking of anyone's car—even those of Supreme Court Justices—without a warrant.

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Special Investigation: Who’s Behind the “Information Attacks” on Climate Scientists?

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Think Progress - By Climate Guest Blogger - Nov. 01 (Opinion) - by Sue Sturgis, in an Institute for Southern Studies repost This week, in a courtroom in Prince William County, Virginia, a hearing will take place that could have implications for the privacy rights of scientists at colleges and universities across the country. It’s part of a lawsuit brought by the American Tradition Institute, a free-market [...]

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Why Parents Help Tweens Violate Facebook's 13+ Rule

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Danah Boyd - Nov. 01 (Opinion) - "At what age should I let my child join Facebook?" This is a question that countless parents have asked my collaborators and me. Often, it's followed by the following: "I know that 13 is the minimum age to join Facebook, but is it really so bad that my 12-year-old is on the site?" While parents are struggling to determine what social media sites are appropriate for their children, government tries to help parents by regulating what data internet companies can collect about children without parental permission. Yet, as has been the case for the last decade, this often backfires. Many general-purpose communication platforms and social media sites restrict access to only those 13+ in response to a law meant to empower parents: the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). This forces parents to make a difficult choice: help uphold the minimum age requirements and limit their children's access to services that let kids connect with family and friends OR help their children lie about their age to circumvent the age-based restrictions and eschew the protections that COPPA is meant to provide.

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Heather Brooke: Data Dealing Is A Bigger Scandal Than Phone Hacking

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

huffingtonpost.co.uk - By Dina Rickman - Aug. 17 (Interview) - When the woman who exposed the MPs expenses scandal says sheâ€™s uncovered the next big public outrage, itâ€™s impossible not to take notice. Heather Brooke explains to the Huffington Post UK why data dealing is even bigger than phone hacking and the reasons she lost faith in WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

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Is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg Tone Deaf About Privacy?

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Writing Corner - By Beth Wellington - Jun. 15 (Opinion) - Remember the uproar when Facebook made your list of friends, pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region and networks publicly available to everyone? Now, the social networking behemoth has silently enabled facial recognition software without your permission under the rather benign tag "Suggest photos of me to friends." Even if you choose to disable the option, Facebook still will have the technical ability to connect your name with your image.

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Combating Gay Teen Suicide: What Parents Can Do

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Dr. Harold Koplewicz - Oct. 14 (Opinion) - Over the past few weeks it has been impossible to miss the flood of news stories about gay teens ending their own lives after enduring anti-gay bullying. Eighteen-year-old Tyler Clementi, 15-year-old Billy Lucas, and 13-year-olds Asher Brown and Seth Walsh were living in different corners of America -- New Jersey, Indiana, Texas, and California -- but each of them was subjected to the same kind of intolerance and cruelty, which included callous disregard for their online privacy.

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Cookie Madness!

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - Jul. 31 (Opinion) - I just don’t understand Julia Angwin’s scare story about cookies and ad targeting in the Wall Street Journal. That is, I don’t understand how the Journal could be so breathlessly naive, unsophisticated, and anachronistic about the basics of the modern media business. It is the Reefer Madness of the digital age: Oh my God, Mabel, they’re watching us!

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Facebook Apologists Miss The Point:Facebook Isn't The Future

Sat, 15 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

stoweboyd.com - By Stowe Boyd - May. 15 (Opinion) - As the Facebook 'privacygate' affair swells and swells, most recently fed by the leaking of Zuckerberg instant messages from years ago, various members of the tech commentariat are starting to come forward to defend Zuckerberg and suggest that the media have gone too far.My sense is that these apologists are going too far in supporting Zuckerberg

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Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant)

Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

zephoria.org - By Danah Boyd - May. 14 (Opinion) - At SXSW, I decided to talk about privacy because I thought that it would be the most important issue of the year. I was more accurate than my wildest dreams. For the last month, I’ve watched as conversations about privacy went from being the topic of the tech elite to a conversation that’s pervasive.

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Farewell, Facebook

Tue, 11 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

American Prospect - By Laura Mcgann - May. 11 (Opinion) - Why one super-connected internet enthusiast decided it was time to pull the plug.

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Confusing a public with the public ?

Sat, 08 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - May. 08 (Opinion) - I think Facebook’s problem lately with its disliked like button (and Google’s problem with the start of Buzz) is that they confuse the notion of the public sphere—that is, all of us—with the idea of making a public—that is, the small societies we create on Facebook or join on Twitter. Private v. public is not a binary decision; there is a vast middle inbetween that is about the control of our own publics.

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FCC hands Hollywood the keys to your PC, home theater and future

Sat, 08 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Boing Boing - By Cory Doctorow - May. 08 (Opinion) - The FCC has given Hollywood permission to activate the "Selective Output Control" technologies in your set-top box. These are hidden flags that allow the MPAA to deactivate parts of your home theater depending on what you're watching. And it sucks. As Dan Gillmor notes, "Fans of old TV science fiction will remember the Outer Limits. Given Hollywood's victory today at the FCC -- they'll be able to reach over the lines and disable functions on your TV -- the intro to the show takes on modern relevance."

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No-Fly Fail Fault?

Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Volokh Conspiracy - By Stewart Baker - May. 05 (Opinion) - The government put Shahzad on its terror watchlists, including the no-fly list, and DHS recognized his name when Emirates airline gave its passenger manifest to DHS. This of course was just before takeoff, so the plane had already pulled back the jetway when Customs and Border Protection stopped the flight: “By the time [DHS/CBP] officials spotted Shahzad’s name on the passenger list and recognized him as the bombing suspect they were looking for,” AP says, ” he was in his seat and the plane was preparing to leave the gate.”

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Exodus! Movement of G People… From Facebook After F8

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Mike Butcher - Apr. 23 (Opinion) - Well I bet they didn't quite expect that. In the wake of Facebook's F8 conference this week, where it apparently bid to become the new Sheriff of the Internet, Facebook's plans to effectively put 'social' into the very structure of the Web has a few people a little concerned. The main issue is that Facebook, by default, now opts you in to allowing third party sites access to your social graph. In other words, your friends unknowingly give your information away. The result is that lots of geeks are considering leaving Facebook, and perhaps even more interestingly, veritable droves of Google software engineers are among them.

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Bizarro identity

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - Apr. 22 (Opinion) - I’m still trying to get my head around Facebook’s moves to become the king of identity online. Hell, if Leo Laporte couldn’t quite figure it out on yesterday’s taping of This Week in Google, then I’m not capable. But here’s where I am. Help me advance this…. I think my problem is this: I want the exact opposite of what Facebook did. I want the Bizarro Facebook. Instead of Facebook controlling my identity, I want to be able to control and publish and set access to and rules for the use of my identity online, allowing Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, anyone access to it under my terms. When I tweeted that, ad man Rishad Tobaccowala tweeted: “you are right. What we want closed (our data) they want open. What we want open (create and transfer) they want closed.” He then added: “When it is so easy to “like” is it really like? A profusion of “liking” will soon be like… Noise.” Agree.

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The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, Part II

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Balkinization - By Margot Kaminski - Apr. 21 (Opinion) - This post is a follow-up to my earlier post regarding the leaked draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The big picture issues are unchanged: 1) ACTA establishes a new institution outside of existing international law; 2) ACTA pushes the international standard for IP law to an IP-maximalist’s dream; and 3) when you establish the information-sharing and investigative infrastructure, bad things (civil liberty violations) will follow.

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How US Government Spies Use Facebook

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Marshall Kirkpatrick - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - The US Department of Justice this week released slides from a presentation deck titled Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites. The document was released in response ...

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Italy endangers the Web

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - Feb. 24 (Opinion) - Dangerous precedent: A judge in Milan has convicted 3 Google execs for privacy violations, holding them responsible for a user-uploaded video on YouTube. Google's response: "It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built."

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Free speech vs. surveillance in the digital age

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

dailytidings.com - By Amy Goodman - Jun. 27 (Opinion) - The Chinese government now requires any computer sold there after July 1, 2009, to include software called "Green Dam," which critics say will further empower the government to monitor Internet use. Josh Silver, executive director of media policy group Free Press, says Iran and China should alert us to domestic surveillance issues in the U.S.

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Keith Olbermann's scathing criticism of Obama's secrecy/immunity claims

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Apr. 08 (Opinion) - Last night, Keith Olbermann -- who has undoubtedly been one of the most swooning and often-uncritical admirers of Barack Obama of anyone in the country (behavior for which I rather harshly criticized him in the past) -- devoted the first two segments of his show to emphatically lambasting Obama and Eric Holder's DOJ for the story I wrote about on Monday: namely, the Obama administration's use of the radical Bush/Cheney state secrets doctrine and -- worse still -- a brand new claim of "sovereign immunity" to insist that courts lack the authority to decide whether the Bush administration broke the law in illegally spying on Americans. The fact that Keith Olbermann, an intense Obama supporter, spent the first ten minutes of his show attacking Obama for replicating (and, in this instance, actually surpassing) some of the worst Bush/Cheney abuses of executive power and secrecy claims reflects just how extreme is the conduct of the Obama DOJ here.

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Help EFF Make Open Government a Reality

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

eff.org - By David L. Sobel - Mar. 15 (Advocacy) - On his first day in office, President Obama took the advice of EFF and other nonprofits, ordering federal agencies to share more information with the public — particularly emphasizing openness in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. This is a great first step, but we need your support to make sure it becomes a reality. Over the past two and a half years, EFF has filed hundreds of FOIA requests and made thousands of pages of once-secret documents available to the public on our website. Our FOIA work has revealed details about the FBI’s improper use of National Security Letters, which helped prompt Senator Leahy to call for an investigation of former Attorney General Gonzales shortly before Gonzales’ resignation. We’ve also uncovered the Department of Homeland Security's internal policies on searching and interrogating travelers at the border, as well as information about the technology the government uses to wiretap cell phones. As part of Sunshine Week, we're posting scores of never-before seen documents on several controversial government initiatives, including the FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse and DCS 3000 surveillance program, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Automated Targeting System and ADVISE data-mining project. We're also making all of our FOIA documents more accesssible than ever before with a new search tool that will let anyone conduct keyword searches across all the documents in our collection.

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Facebook changes policy, now owns rights to your content forever

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

tgdaily.com - By Samantha Rose Hunt - Feb. 17 (Opinion) - February 4th brought a change in the Terms of Use (ToU) at Facebook. The majority of users didn't even notice. I know I wasn't notified, so I had no idea -- that was until the blogs began buzzing and users became outraged. Facebook's Terms of Use has quickly become the meme of the moment.

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NewsTrust - Privacy - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

More Secrets on Growing State Surveillance: Exclusive Part 2 With NSA Whistleblower, Targeted Hacker

Supreme Court ponders constitutionality of 24/7 GPS tracking

Special Investigation: Who’s Behind the “Information Attacks” on Climate Scientists?

Why Parents Help Tweens Violate Facebook's 13+ Rule

Heather Brooke: Data Dealing Is A Bigger Scandal Than Phone Hacking

Is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg Tone Deaf About Privacy?

Combating Gay Teen Suicide: What Parents Can Do

Cookie Madness!

Facebook Apologists Miss The Point:Facebook Isn't The Future

Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant)

Farewell, Facebook

Confusing *a* public with *the* public ?

FCC hands Hollywood the keys to your PC, home theater and future

No-Fly Fail Fault?

Exodus! Movement of G People… From Facebook After F8

Bizarro identity

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, Part II

How US Government Spies Use Facebook

Italy endangers the Web

Free speech vs. surveillance in the digital age

Keith Olbermann's scathing criticism of Obama's secrecy/immunity claims

Help EFF Make Open Government a Reality

Facebook changes policy, now owns rights to your content forever

Confusing a public with the public ?