Fortunately, they can call on an old graduate to nuke the thieves...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070808062016103

Computers containing 10,000 SSNs are stolen

Wednesday, August 08 2007 @ 06:20 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

Social Security numbers for over 10,000 current and former students, faculty and staff were compromised last month following the theft of two University computers, officials said Tuesday.

The computers were stolen from the Yale College Dean’s Office on July 17, in only the latest in a series of data security breaches that have plagued universities nationwide. The computers were password-protected, and were probably stolen to be sold rather than for the data stored on them, University officials said. Yale has sent letters to the individuals whose personal information may now be at risk.

A review of back-up tapes after the theft found files on the two computers that included names and Social Security numbers for approximately 10,000 current and former students and about 200 current and former faculty and staff members, but no financial account information.

Source - Yale Daily News

Walk it poor, walk out richer?

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070807131504331

Merrill Lynch reports computer theft

Tuesday, August 07 2007 @ 01:21 PM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. said on Tuesday a computer with personal information on some employees had been stolen from one of its offices.

Merrill Lynch, the world's largest brokerage, said the theft did not involve client information.

It did not give other details and declined to say how many employees records were on the computer.

Source - Reuters

Related - CNBC's Charlie Gasparino is reporting that "According to sources, the device contained sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, about some 33,000 employees of the financial firm."

Related - Merrill Lynch had another incident of a stolen laptop affecting client information in February 2007. Not reported in the media, it was reported to New Hampshire under their mandatory disclosure law. They also reported other incidents involving stolen laptops to New York State in February [pdf] of 2006 and April [pdf] of 2006; those incidents were not reported in the media, either, and we would not know about them but for mandatory disclosure laws -- and Chris Walsh, who takes the time and expense to obtain the reports under FOIA.

It's all perception...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070807112601700

IBM Lost His Data... A Follow Up Story

Tuesday, August 07 2007 @ 11:26 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

... Enter George -- who is not revealing his last name. George received notification from IBM in May about the data breach, which was a surprise for George because he said he never worked for IBM. He looked into the offer but figured that it may not be worth it to him since he already pays for credit monitoring.

George e-mailed me to say he recently had a 75-minute detailed conversation with IBM about their data breach. "IBM insists on calling it "lost" data tapes," he said. Of course George said he had several questions about the investigation status and IBM's records retention policy. He had heard very little about whether someone found the tapes and what authorities were doing about it.

But George's bigger beef is that "there are problems with the way IBM is handling their data breach."

Source - InformationWeek

Related - "I've Been Mugged... One person's experience with identity theft and corporate responsibility" blog

Just look for the new Disease Center?

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2167936,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

$22M Worth of CDC Equipment Disappears

August 7, 2007 By Lisa Vaas

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports it cannot account for $22 million worth of computers and other equipment, according to a July 12 story from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Thievery is suspected [What? No alien abductions? Bob] behind some of the missing gear. According to news reports, the Inspector General's office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will investigate the loss and will look into procedures and allegations of theft, at the request of a congressional oversight committee that reported "troubling" findings in June.

Listen on your iPod!

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/015658.html

August 07, 2007

Two Courts Offer Digital Audio Recordings Online

Press release: "Two federal courts today became the vanguard of a pilot project to make digital audio recordings of courtroom proceedings publicly available online. The U.S. District Court in Nebraska and the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina have integrated their recording and Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) systems to make some audio files available the same way written files have long been available on the Internet."

Not that I've told you so...

http://techdirt.com/articles/20070807/071003.shtml

R.I.P TimesSelect?

from the good-riddance dept

The New York Times' plan to lock up its premium content known as TimesSelect was a terrible idea to begin with, and every piece of data that came out about it merely confirmed that the program was unpopular. Sure, the company drew a modest amount of revenue from it, but in exchange it severely limited the exposure of its top columnists, not to mention all of the foregone advertising revenue from the lower traffic. Now comes word that the paper is set to pull the plug on the offering (via Romenesko). At this point, it's still just a rumor, but either way, the company has to arrive at this conclusion eventually. Newspaper publishers cling to the dream that one day all of their content will be safely behind paywalls and that readers will suddenly wake up with an allergy to money and favor this model. But the trend is only moving one direction, as there's even talk about the Wall Street Journal, the one paper that's had a moderate amount of success charging for access, making its content free.

Perhaps the intimidation strategy has run its course? (Or maybe one lawyer smells blood?)

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/07/2316248&from=rss

Oklahoma Security Expert Attacks RIAA Claims

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday August 07, @08:50PM from the resting-on-shifting-sands dept. The Courts Music

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A group of Oklahoma University students has made a motion to vacate the ex parte order the RIAA had obtained compelling the university to turn over their names and addresses. In support of their motion was the expert witness declaration (PDF) of a computer security and forensics expert who essentially attacked the entire premise of the RIAA's lawsuit, characterizing the declaration upon which the RIAA based its motion as 'factually erroneous' and 'misleading.' Among other things he pointed out that 'An individual cannot be uniquely identified by an IP address,' and that 'Many computers can be connected to the Internet with identical IP addresses as long as they remain behind control points.' The students are represented by the same Oklahoma lawyer who recently obtained a award for $68,000-plus in attorneys fees against the RIAA in Capitol v. Foster."

More perspective?

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005394.php

Op-Eds in the Aftermath of Warrantless Spying Legislation

August 07, 2007

Op-ed pages and blogs around the country are bleeding with palpable outrage, as the country wakes up to exactly what happened when Congress radically expanded surveillance powers. Most are asking the same question: faced with this atrocious legislation, how could its many opponents shrink from the moment and let it pass?

Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post has an excellent round-up of editorials and news reporting since the weekend. Here are a few choice bits from opinion pieces around the Web:

• The NY Times Editorial Page: "[T]he problem with Congress last week was that Democrats were afraid to explain to Americans why the White House bill was so bad and so unnecessary — despite what the White House was claiming.... While serving little purpose, the new law has real dangers. It would allow the government to intercept, without a warrant, every communication into or out of any country, including the United States. Instead of explaining all this to American voters — the minimal benefits and the enormous risks — the Democrats have allowed Mr. Bush and his fear-mongering to dominate all discussions on terrorism and national security."

• The Washington Post Editorial Page: "To call this legislation ill-considered is to give it too much credit: It was scarcely considered at all. Instead, it was strong-armed through both chambers by an administration that seized the opportunity to write its warrantless wiretapping program into law -- or, more precisely, to write it out from under any real legal restrictions."

• The LA Times Editorial Page:"That this flawed legislation was approved by a Democratic Congress is a reminder that many in the party are still fearful that they will be labeled 'soft on terror' if they don't give this administration what it wants when it wants it. But the party may be equally injured by the perception that it won't stand up for what it believes."

• Professor Jack Balkin:"Do not be mistaken: We are not hurtling toward the Gulag or anything that we have seen before. It will be nothing so dramatic as that. Rather, we are slowly inching, through each act of fear mongering and fecklessness, pandering and political compromise, toward a world in which Americans have increasingly little say over how they are actually governed, and increasingly little control over how the government collects information on them to regulate and control them. Slowly, secretly and imperceptibly, the mechanisms of government surveillance are being freed from methods of political control and accountability; and the liberties of ordinary citizens are being surgically removed under a potent anesthesia concocted from propaganda, fear, ignorance and apathy."

• Salon's Glenn Greenwald: "Those who fail to defend [the Constitutional] framework, or worse, those who are passively or actively complicit in its further erosion, are all equally culpable. With each day that passes, the radicalism and extremism originally spawned in secret by the Bush presidency becomes less and less his fault and more and more the fault of those who -- having discovered what they have been doing and having been given the power to stop it -- instead acquiesce to it and, worse, enable and endorse it."

• Meteor Blades at DailyKos, speaking directly to Democratic leadership: "Weak is bad enough. Must you be simpletons as well? How many times has he [The President] marketed this crap? How many times have you bought it? Do you also fall for those late-night $19.95 television deals for a double-set of knives that never need sharpening?"

E-Discovery Doesn't this suggest that governments can use “not government business” “excuse” to eliminate e-mails, but businesses have to keep to the “you own the computer, therefore it's your e-mail?”

http://ralphlosey.wordpress.com/2007/08/05/are-government-employee-emails-always-a-public-record/

Are Government Employee Emails Always a Public Record?

Are all emails stored on government computers automatically “public records” subject to disclosure under state and federal Freedom of Information Acts (”FOIA”)? In a sharply divided opinion the Arkansas Supreme Court recently said no. Pulaski County v. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc., No.07-669 (Ark., July 20, 2007). The majority held that it all depends upon the content of the email, not its location in a government computer. Some emails written and received by government employees are personal in nature, and have no “substantial nexus” with government activities. For that reason they are not considered “public records” and thus are not subject to disclosure under FOIA.

In this case a newspaper requested all emails from a management employee of the county who had recently been arrested and accused of embezzling $42,000. [Clearly these e-mails would relate.. Bob] Before his arrest, and the FOIA request, the employee deleted many of his emails. Deleted, but not fully erased, and certainly not gone. A computer tech for the county was able to restore them. The county then produced most of his emails, but withheld others that were “of a highly personal and private nature.” They were emails to and from a woman with whom the accused manager was having an extramarital affair. This “other woman” also happened to work for a company who was a vendor of the county.

The newspaper naturally wanted to see this emails, and argued they must be presumed to be public records because they were written by a government employee during working hours on government computers, and were located and maintained on government computers. The trial court agreed and held that:

Because the emails at issue are maintained in a public office and are maintained by public employees within the scope of their employment, they are presumed to be public records according to the Freedom of Information Act.

Based on the facts before this Court, the emails at issue are public records because they involve a business relationship of the County and are a record of the performance or lack of performance of official functions by Ron Quillin during the times when he was an employee of Pulaski County.

The county, and the girlfriend, who intervened in the suit as “Jane Doe”, asked the court to look at the withheld emails in camera. They wanted the Judge to determine whether the emails in fact pertained to County business, as he presumed, or were instead just “monkey business” with no relevance to any kind of county activities, legal or illegal. The judge declined to do so, and entered an injunction giving the county 24 hours to turn over the emails to the newspaper. The county and Jane Doe immediately appealed.

The Arkansas Supreme Court reversed and remanded the case back for the judge to read the letters in camera. The appeals court noted that since the trial court had declined to review the emails, they were not in the record, and so it was impossible to “discern whether some emails at issue were purely business emails while other emails were purely personal in nature.” The Arkansas supreme court held that:

[I]n this particular case, it is necessary to conduct an in camera review of the e-mails to discern whether these e-mails relate solely to personal matters or whether they reflect a substantial nexus with Pulaski County’s activities, thereby classifying them as public records. See Griffis, supra . Both parties agree that the definition of “public records” is content-driven. The only way to determine the content of the e-mails is to examine them. In this case, no court has reviewed the e-mails at issue. Absent such a review, we have no record on which we can determine the nature and content of the requested documents.

Why go to school when you can hack yourself a degree?

http://www.articlexplosion.com/articledetail.php?artid=19701&catid=260

Why Go to School, When You Can Be Online Learning Law?

By : Trevor Mulholland Submitted 2007-08-08 01:01:56

Now that the Internet has made higher education more accessible, why would anyone still think it was advisable to go to school to become a lawyer? If you can go online learning law, you'd be saved transportation fees, as well as the time it takes to commute from your residence to campus. Time is, in fact, one of the biggest factors that drive people to consider online schooling: some people, notably family people and working professionals, find it hard to afford the time to participate in classroom activities.

... Author Resource:- Bestwebschool.com provides you with info on Online learning education, law enforcement training onlineand much more, come take a look at http://www.bestwebschool.com/

Could be useful for all those English teachers. I wonder if they have plays about hacking>

http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-Photo/thewirelesstheatrecompany--Plays-for-Your-iPod/

TheWirelessTheatreCompany.co.uk - Plays for Your iPod

posted 8 Hours 35 Minutes ago by Siri | Visit http://www.thewirelesstheatrecompany.co.uk

The Wireless Theatre Company intends to catapult theatre back into the limelight of popular conscious by offering free downloads to your iPod. They’ve recorded thoroughly modern, new plays, comedies and short stories with the latest up and coming talents. Preview Wireless’ repertoire and pick the contents you’d like to download to your computer/MP3 device. Or give it a shot yourself. If you’ve a play you’d like to get on the air, or if you’re an actor looking to gain experience, join the ranks of the Wireless Theatre Company, and get heard. Content is updated every two weeks, so make sure you come back to check out what’s new. Enjoy listening to something different.