Very misleading headline. Making it
legal for them to violate privacy is not the same as avoiding the
violation.
USPS
acts to avoid customer privacy violations
January 3, 2012 by Dissent
Jim McElhatton reports:
The
U.S. Postal Service has quietly sought to “immunize” itself from
Privacy Act challenges to its address-correction service,
a program that gives credit, marketing and data-service providers
access to updated name and address information for tens of millions
of Americans.
Postal officials
say the program helps reduce costly undeliverable mail that can clog
up the mail stream, but its failure to obtain consent to sell
customers’ information is raising alarm bells from within and
outside the agency.
Read more on The
Washington Times.
An older article (Oct 2011) Pointing
to articles like this helps to sell the security budget.
"Kevin Mandia has spent his
entire career cleaning up problems much like the recent
breach at Stratfor where Anonymous defaced Stratfor's Web site,
published over 50,000 of its customers' credit card numbers online
and have threatened to release a trove of 3.3 million e-mails,
putting Stratfor is in the position of trying to recover
from a potentially devastating attack without knowing whether the
worst is over. Mandia,
who has responded to breaches, extortion attacks and economic
espionage campaigns at 22 companies in the Fortune 100 in the last
two years and has told Congress that if an
advanced attacker targets your company then a
breach is inevitable (PDF), calls the first
hour he spends with companies 'upchuck hour' as he asks for firewall
logs, web logs, and emails to quickly determine the 'fingerprint' of
the intrusion and its scope. The first thing a forensics team will
do is try to get the hackers off the company's network, which entails
simultaneously plugging any security holes, removing any back doors
into the company's network that the intruders might have installed,
and changing all the company's passwords. 'This is something most
people fail at. It's like removing cancer. Y ou have to remove it
all at once. If you only remove the cancer in your leg, but you have
it in your arm, you might as well have not had the operation on your
leg.' In the case of Stratfor, hackers have taken to Twitter to
announce that they plan to release more Stratfor data over the next
several days, offering a ray of hope — experts
say the
most dangerous breaches are the quiet ones that leave no trace."
[It just takes a bit of training... Bob]
Was he at least frisked? Is this the
new (low) TSA standard?
Man
says he popped into U.S. with iPad passport
… The rules state
that Canadian visitors need to have an enhanced driver's
license--which are special documents that are compliant with the
Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. Or they need to be part of
something delightfully called the Trusted Traveler Program. Or they
need to have, well, a passport.
… U.S. Customs and Border
Protection hasn't commented on this tale of an apparently indulgent
representative of the USA.
Many will believe the very notion of an
electronic passport seems to represent an obvious future. If people
can fling their iPhones beneath the tired eyes of baristas to pay for
a mocha, they can surely fling them in front of the suspicious nose
of a border control officer in order to prove who they are.
There's
logic and then there's politics... “Computer viruses are evil,
therefore we must develop a computer virus!” A fine example of
“government knows best.”
"Japanese Defense Ministry has
awarded Fujitsu a contract to develop
a vigilante computer virus, which will track down and eliminate
other viruses, or rather — their sources of origin. Are 'good'
viruses a bad
idea? Sophos seems
to think so, saying, 'When you're trying to gather digital
forensic evidence as to what has broken into your network, and what
data it may have stolen, it's probably not
wise to let loose a program that starts to trample over your hard
drives, making changes.'"
Not sure I understand this at all. If
a child “12 or older” is pregnant, shouldn't someone tell the
police? And under what circumstances would it be safe for a 12 year
old to contract for an abortion?
CA:
School Counselor Need Not Tell Parent of Child’s Pregnancy
January 3, 2012 by Dissent
Kenneth Ofgan reports:
A school counselor
may inform a parent or principal that a student is pregnant or has
had an abortion, in order to prevent a clear and present health or
safety danger, but is not required to do so and cannot be held liable
for not doing so, California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris has
opined.
The attorney
general Thursday released her opinion regarding Education Code Sec.
49602(c), which was requested by Sen. Mark Wyland, R-Carlsbad.
Read more on Metropolitan
News-Enterprise.
[From the article:
“To
read it as requiring school counselors to disclose
confidential information in every case of perceived danger to a
student would seriously undermine counselors’ ability to exercise
their best judgment under the most difficult circumstances,” Harris
wrote.
Part of the “Art of Lawyering” is
the secret knowledge required to find the law you have no excuse for
violating...
January 03, 2012
Updated
edition of Locating the Law: A Handbook for Non-law Librarians
"The Southern California
Association of Law Libraries (SCALL) Public Access to Legal
Information (PALI) Committee has just posted the updated edition of
Locating
the Law: A Handbook for Non-law Librarians. We've corrected
links, added a few more sources, and moved the "Common
Abbreviations in the Law" from the end of Chapter 2 to Appendix
B. You can view individual chapters or the entire publication in one
large PDF (274 pages)." [June Kim, Senior Reference Librarian,
UCLA Law Library]
File this in your “Swiss Army Folder”
January 03, 2012
LLRX
- Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide - Completely
Updated
Competitive
Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide - Completely Updated -
December 2011: Sabrina I. Pacifici's comprehensive, current
awareness guide focuses on leveraging a wide but selected range of
reliable, focused, predominantly free websites and resources to
effectively track, monitor, analyze, background and review current
and historical data, news, reports, and profiles on companies,
markets, countries, people, and issues, from a global perspective.
Sabrina's guide is a "best of" web resource that
encompasses search engines, databases, alerts, publisher specific
services and tools, along with links to content targeted sources
produced by leading media organizations, governments, academia, NGOs
and independent researchers.
Geeky stuff.
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