Angelique Chrisafis reports:
France runs a vast
electronic surveillance operation, intercepting and stocking data
from citizens’ phone and internet activity, using similar methods
to the US National Security Agency’s Prism programme exposed by
Edward Snowden, Le Monde has reported.
An
investigation by the French daily found that the DGSE, France’s
external intelligence agency, had spied on the French public’s
phone calls, emails and internet activity.
Read more on The
Guardian.
Apparently when the FBI could not find
the person who sent the first anthrax letters, someone said, “Do
whatever it takes” and cost/benefit analysis was tossed out the
window. Is this why the Post Office is going bankrupt?
NYT-
Postal Service Is Watching, Too: Outside of All Mail Is Recorded
Postal
Service Is Watching, Too: Outside of All Mail Is Recorded,” by Ron
Nixon: “Under “the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking
program…Postal Service computers photograph the
exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United
States – about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not
known how long the government saves the images… The Mail Isolation
Control and Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in
late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal workers.
Highly secret, it seeped into public view last month when the F.B.I.
cited it in its investigation of ricin-laced letters sent to
President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. It enables the
Postal Service to retrace the path of mail at the request of law
enforcement… Law enforcement officials need warrants to open the
mail… In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to
suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, who started a
computer crimes unit in the fraud section of the criminal division of
the Justice Department and worked on several fraud cases using mail
covers. “Now it seems to be, ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail
so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating
with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of
Americans.”
Interesting. Not only use the
company's computers for private browsing but store personal data on
them as well. How difficult would it be to store your private stuff
on a thumb drive?
Larry Page of Davis LLP discusses a
case in which an employee was fired for cause for snooping/improper
accessing of a file:
In a recent
decision of the British Columbia Supreme Court, the Court upheld the
termination for cause of a help desk analyst in the IT department who
had been employed for over 20 years at Coast Capital Savings Credit
Union. (Steel v. Coast Capital Savings Credit Union, 2013 BCSC 527)
Employees at
Coast were permitted to have a personal folder in which they
would keep confidential business documents. Under the privacy policy
at Coast, the files in the personal folder could only be read or
edited by the employee who had the folder. Help desk employees were
allowed to access personal folders but could only do so to resolve a
technical problem and only if the employee who had the personal
folder first gave permission to the help desk to access the folder.
Read more about the case on Mondaq.
What, you thought Texas had a sense of
humor?
… In the state of Texas, a
19-year-old man named Justin Carter sits in prison, ruthlessly
stripped of his freedom for making an offensive joke. After a
Facebook friend with whom he played video games described him as
“crazy” and “messed up in the head,” Carter replied —
sarcastically, one imagines — “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in
the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat
their still, beating hearts.” He added “lol” and “jk” for
good measure. For this he was arrested by Austin police, charged
with making a “terroristic threat,” and thrown into prison. He
may languish there until the start of the next decade.
So the settlement was, “Fix it and
try not to do it again?” Wow, harsh!
Following a public
comment period, the Federal Trade Commission has approved a final
order settling charges that HTC America Inc. failed
to take reasonable steps to secure the software it developed for its
smartphones and tablet computers, introducing security flaws that
placed sensitive information about millions of consumers at risk.
The settlement
with HTC America, announced
by the FTC in February 2013, requires the company to develop and
release software patches to fix
vulnerabilities in millions of the company’s devices. The
company is also required to establish
a comprehensive security program designed to address security risks
during the development of HTC devices and to undergo
independent security assessments every other year for the next 20
years.
In addition, the
settlement prohibits HTC America from making any false or misleading
statements about the security and privacy of consumers’ data on HTC
devices. Violations of the consent order may be subject to civil
penalties of up to $16,000 per violation.
The Commission
vote approving the final order and letters
to members of the public who commented on it was 3-0-1, with
Commissioner Ohlhausen recused. (FTC File No. 122-3049; the staff
contact is Nithan Sannappa, Bureau of Consumer Protection,
202-326-3185.)
Each service must have a policy for
each country and they must be up to date.
An ICO spokesperson said:
“We have today
written to Google to confirm our findings relating to the update of
the company’s privacy policy. In our letter we confirm that its
updated privacy policy raises serious questions about its compliance
with the UK Data Protection Act.
“In particular,
we believe that the updated policy does not provide sufficient
information to enable UK users of Google’s services to understand
how their data will be used across all of the company’s products.
“Google must now
amend their privacy policy to make it more informative for individual
service users. Failure to take the necessary action to improve the
policies compliance with the Data Protection Act by 20 September will
leave the company open to the possibility of formal enforcement
action.”
Read the full press release on the
ICO’s
site.
I posterd this back on June 18th,
but their website was screwed up until yesterday. If you want one of
these, now you can actually order one.
Get
a Kobo Mini e-reader for $39.99
Dilbert points out one minor risk when
using the Cloud.
No comments:
Post a Comment