I don't think adding Denver residents
as CC's on every email would work, so perhaps an open log of Council
emails? And perhaps we could make them wear those tracking ankle
thingies the parolees wear?
Responding
to nagging fears that some city council members are helping unions
organize in Denver, the city's biggest business advocates made the
unprecedented move of demanding to see council e-mails.
The Metro
Denver Chamber of Commerce last week sent formal records requests
under the Colorado Open Records Act to see any correspondence
between council members, the Auditors Office and labor unions. The
request also seeks any complaints from council members to companies
about working conditions for employees.
"Ham-fisted bullying," is what Councilman Chris Nevitt
called the chamber's move, saying that if chamber officials wanted
the information they could have asked. [This IS how
you ask, isn't it? Bob]
No warrant required for commercial
data?
Governments
Won't Need to Issue IDs: Data Brokers Will Identify You for Them
Our government collects a lot of
information about us. Tax records, legal records, license records,
records of government services received-- it's all in databases that
are increasingly linked and correlated. Still, there's a lot of
personal information the government can't collect. Either they're
prohibited by law from asking without probable cause and a judicial
order, or they simply have no cost-effective way to collect it. But
the government has figured out how to get around the laws, and
collect personal data that has been historically denied to them: ask
corporate America for it.
(Related) ...and when they get here,
I'll sic the dogs on them!
Spencer E. Ante reports:
Advertisers
already know what people are up to on their personal computers. But
understanding their online whereabouts on smartphones or tablets has
remained elusive.
A number of
companies are trying to better pinpoint mobile users’ online
activity with new software and techniques they say could help
advertisers track users across devices.
By harvesting
cross-screen identities, the ad industry could serve ads to mobile
phones based on the interests people express when surfing the Web on
their PCs.
Read more on WSJ.
Someone gets it!
From edSurge:
The education data
portal, inBloom,
raised hackles this week among a group of New York City parents and
educators who worry about the nonprofit’s plans to compile student
information into a wide-ranging education data portal–and they’re
organizing against it via email listservs, open forums and
legislative bills.
Local community
opposition to the inBloom plan was palpable on Monday (April 29)
night in the Brooklyn Borough Hall at a “student privacy town hall
meeting” devoted to the issue. Around 150 people gathered to
express their frustrations and hear from New York Department of
Education representatives. Holding handmade posters with slogans
like “Our kids, not your data,” the group voiced unease about the
creation of the portal, which many fear is gathering
too much data about their children, will sell information to
commercial vendors and will be vulnerable to hacking.
Read more on edSurge.
The “State of the Internet?”
April 30, 2013
EFF
Surveys Major Tech Companies' Privacy and Transparency Policies
News
release: "As you search the Internet, visit websites, and
update your social media accounts, you entrust a wealth of data to
service providers: your thoughts, your photos, your location, and
much more. What happens when the government wants access to all of
this information, held by companies like Google and Facebook and
AT&T? Will these providers help you fight back against unfair
demands for data about your private life? Today the Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF) releases its third annual report, Who
Has Your Back?, which looks at major technology service
providers' commitment to users' rights in the face of government data
demands. EFF's report examines 18 companies' terms
of service, privacy policies, advocacy, and courtroom track records,
awarding up to six gold stars for best practices in categories like
"require a warrant for content," "tell users about
government data demands," and "publish transparency
reports."
The techonogy behind anonymity?
April 30, 2013
A
Secure Submission System for Online Whistleblowing Platforms
A
Secure Submission System for Online Whistleblowing Platforms.
Volker Roth, Benjamin Güldenring, Eleanor Rieffel, Sven Dietrich,
Lars Ries (Submitted on 26 Jan 2013) An abridged version has been
accepted for publication in the proceedings of Financial Cryptography
and Data Security 2013.
- "Whistleblower laws protect individuals who inform the public or an authority about governmental or corporate misconduct. Despite these laws, whistleblowers frequently risk reprisals and sites such as WikiLeaks emerged to provide a level of anonymity to these individuals. However, as countries increase their level of network surveillance and Internet protocol data retention, the mere act of using anonymizing software such as Tor, or accessing a whistleblowing website through an SSL channel might be incriminating enough to lead to investigations and repercussions. As an alternative submission system we propose an online advertising network called AdLeaks. AdLeaks leverages the ubiquity of unsolicited online advertising to provide complete sender unobservability when submitting disclosures. AdLeaks ads compute a random function in a browser and submit the outcome to the AdLeaks infrastructure. Such a whistleblower's browser replaces the output with encrypted information so that the transmission is indistinguishable from that of a regular browser. Its back-end design assures that AdLeaks must process only a fraction of the resulting traffic in order to receive disclosures with high probability. We describe the design of AdLeaks and evaluate its performance through analysis and experimentation."
Email or ePhone?
… This new Skype integration is
just a preview for now, and will only be available in the UK at this
time. In the next few weeks, users in the US and Germany will be
able to enjoy the preview as well, with the rest of the world joining
them “in the coming months”.
Skype for Outlook.com brings video and
audio calls to Outlook.com’s interface, making it possible to
initiate Skype calls right from your inbox. So next time you’re
writing an email and suddenly realize text is just not enough, you
should be able to start a voice or video chat with just a click or
two.
For my Stuudents...
… We’ve put together a list of
five key tips to bear in mind when looking for job listings on
Twitter. Whether it’s how you use Twitter to search for a job or
how you use it to present yourself, there’s a lot that you can do
using the social networking site to land your dream job.
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