A long, but decent summary. Send this to any manger who doesn't “get” the need for information security...
Keeping Your Enemies Close
By GARY RIVLIN Alpharetta, Ga. November 12, 2006
IF you found yourself running a company suddenly branded one of the most reviled in the country — if, for example, you noticed that visitors to Consumerist.com, a heavily visited consumer Web site, voted yours as the second “worst company in America” and you had just been awarded the 2005 “Lifetime Menace Award” by the human rights group Privacy International — you might feel obliged to take extraordinary steps. You might even want to reach out to your most vocal critics and ask them, “What are we doing wrong?”
... “These guys were more sophisticated than anyone thought,” Mr. Lee said, echoing the sentiment of many inside the company.
But the F.T.C. seemed to reach the opposite conclusion in a 33-page report it released earlier this year, after it completed an investigation of ChoicePoint. The commission found that ChoicePoint ignored “obvious red flags” because the company “did not have reasonable procedures to screen prospective subscribers.” The report cast ChoicePoint’s criminal interlopers as sloppy and amateurish — but ultimately successful because their prey, a major company in the business of handling sensitive information, was alarmingly lax in its protection of its data repositories.
Signs that it was amateur hour inside ChoicePoint abounded, according to the F.T.C. report. The fraudsters faxed applications to ChoicePoint from a neighborhood Kinko’s, listed post office boxes as primary business addresses and offered cellphone numbers as sole telephone contacts — which no one at ChoicePoint ever bothered to call anyway to establish the numbers’ legitimacy. In at least one case, an approved applicant failed even to provide a last name, the F.T.C. found.
... It also took a state law. The data thieves who conned their way into ChoicePoint’s system downloaded information about at least 166,000 individuals. In years past, the company would alert law enforcement officials when it suffered a data breach, according to Mr. Lee, and leave it at that. But under a California disclosure law passed in 2003, the company was required to notify every Californian whose personal details might have fallen into criminal hands.
“No one knows for sure, and no one can say, how many breaches occurred before California,” Mr. Hoofnagle said. “This is an ‘known unknown,’ as Donald Rumsfeld would say.”
Not the most un-biased web site?
http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/11/12/big-brother-big-business/
Big Brother, Big Business
By Michael Hampton Posted: November 12, 2006 1:12 pm
The Privacy Act of 1974, as amended, places a few restrictions on how the federal government can compile dossiers on Americans. It was passed in response to multiple scandals in which, for instance, former Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover would spy on Americans for his own purposes.
But does it go far enough? When the government can’t get the information on you that it wants because of the Privacy Act, it can always turn to a commercial data broker. And they know more about virtually everyone than anyone else, including the government itself.
On November 2, the cable network CNBC aired a two-hour special called “Big Brother, Big Business” which explored the issues of privacy and technology which can be used to track people.
I don’t want to ruin the ending, so I’ll just say that the Liberty Coalition put a copy of the special up on Google Video, and invite you to watch for yourself and make up your own mind. See what the commercial data brokers have to say for themselves.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/13/0732249&from=rss
Google Envisions Free Cell Phones For All
Posted by Zonk on Monday November 13, @04:20AM from the i-have-no-friends-you-insensitive-clod dept. Google Communications Businesses The Almighty Buck
Salvance writes "Google's CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a day when all cell phones are free if the user agrees to watch targeted ads. While he provides no specific plans for Google to give away phones, the implication is that he expects such moves in the future given Google's current pilot successes with delivering text ads on phones."
From the article: "Schmidt also said his company was working on how to allow users to maintain basic control of their personal data. Currently, Google stores consumer data on hundreds of thousands of its own computers in order to provide additional services to individual users. The company is looking to allow consumers to export their Web search history or e-mail archives and move them to other sites, if they so choose." [Where you can modify them to “prove” your innocence... Bob]
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=387
Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:55 am
Google skipped right past the third dimension and landed directly in the fourth (time) by offering historical maps on Google Earth. Now you can travel back in time — for example, I am looking at the globe of 1790. Don't expect detailed high resolution photography from days gone by, but it's still interesting to see old maps overlaid on the satellite imagery of today.
Just remember how simple this is...
http://majorgeeks.com/Wiretap_Professional_d5329.html
Wiretap Professional 6.0.1.4
Wiretap Professional is the premiere application for monitoring and capturing all important PC activity. Employing state-of-the-art packet sniffing techniques, Wiretap Professional can capture all Internet activity.
This means it can monitor and record Email, Chat Messages, and Web Sites Visited. In addition, powerful OS Monitors allow for the monitoring and recording of keystrokes, passwords entered, and all documents, pictures and folders viewed.
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