How many of these must occur before we can certify management as incompetent or negligent?

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070804170838215

Credit union: members' data stolen

Saturday, August 04 2007 @ 05:08 PM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

A computer containing personal information on an undisclosed number of Kellogg Community Federal Credit Union members was stolen during a break-in sometime in the third week of July. In a letter dated July 25 sent to affected customers, the credit union said the computer was taken along with other items from "the offices of a vendor who has been providing services to the Credit Union."

A file containing some members' names, addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, social security numbers and account numbers was on the computer's hard drive.

Source - Battle Creek Enquirer

...and should it be twice as easy to certify SECURITY VENDORS as incompetent and/or downright stupid!

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070805001052189

Laptop Theft Leaves VeriSign Employees Data Exposed

Sunday, August 05 2007 @ 12:10 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

VeriSign, Inc., the company that operates the digital infrastructure that enables and protect billions of interactions across the world's voice and data networks every day, notified current and former employees this week that their employee data was lost in a recent laptop theft. The market leader in SSL certificates and secure web transactions left an unknown number of current and former employees' exposed to identity theft because the data on the stolen laptop was not encrypted. [Doesn't this suggest that the computer was not setup to encrypt by default? Why would a security company do that? Bob]

Source - WizBang (blog)

Related - Mandatory Disclosure to NH [PDF]

Hey, it could have been the prisoners!

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070804070551218

Computer breach gives prison staff access to employee information

Saturday, August 04 2007 @ 07:05 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

Officials at a Wabash Valley prison confirmed Friday that an internal computer security breach allowed prison staff access to Social Security numbers and other identifying information of employees for an unknown period of time. [My dog ate my access logs. Bob]

Rich Larsen, public information officer for the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in Carlisle, said a database containing Social Security numbers, dates of birth and names of people employed at the facility between 1997 and 2002 was unintentionally [but deliberately Bob] moved “from a secure private drive that was accessible only by the human resources department to a shared directory that could be accessed by other employees here.”

Source - Tribstar.com

[From the article:

Larsen said officials are not sure how long the database was accessible.

“We are estimating the length of the breach to be as short as a week to up to nine months,” he said.

So they don't know when the data was moved or who accessed it. They probably have no record of who moved it, either. Makes you wonder if they know where their prisoners are... Bob]

Training children to be second class citizens. (Some folks got more rights than others!) This is a good case to push the law -- no one will have much sympathy for a sex abuser.

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=2007080407462189

Court: Parents can record kids' calls

Saturday, August 04 2007 @ 07:46 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Minors & Students

The Iowa Supreme Court ruled Friday that parents can wiretap their children's telephone conversations.

The court said conversations a Marshalltown man recorded between his daughter and the teacher he suspected of sexually abusing her will be admissible in court, stating that guardians may record their minor children's telephone conversations if it is necessary for the child's welfare.

Source - Des Moines Register

[The decision: http://www.judicial.state.ia.us/Supreme_Court/Recent_Opinions/20070803/06-0565.pdf

Interesting NPR comment: Would the Democrats like the President to call them back to pass an anti-terrorist bill?

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN0328188520070804

Bush urges House to pass spy bill

Sat Aug 4, 2007 4:05PM EDT By Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush pushed for approval by Congress on Saturday of the temporary expansion of his power to conduct electronic surveillance without a court order.

Bush hailed the Senate for passing the bill, denounced as excessive by civil liberties groups, which would allow eavesdropping on communications between U.S. residents and people abroad. He urged the House of Representatives to provide needed concurrence before lawmakers begin a monthlong recess.

But it was not immediately clear if the Democratic-led House would approve the Senate measure or try again to pass a bill rejected by Republicans on Friday. The Democratic bill would have expanded the electronic surveillance program, but also required greater court scrutiny.

"We're looking at our options," a Democratic aide said. Another said, "Likely we will pass it (the Senate bill)," but party leaders were planning their course of action as many lawmakers packed up to go home.

Do you suppose this author will get free books on Privacy next year?

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2007/08/noteworthy_priv.html

Noteworthy Privacy Law Scholarship: 2006

posted by Daniel J. Solove August 02, 2007

As there are tons of new scholarly works in the privacy law field each year, I thought it might be useful to point out a few books and articles that I found particularly interesting and useful from the past year. This post will cover only those books and articles published in 2006.

Tools & Techniques There are thousands of articles like this on the Internet.

http://www.hackthissite.org/articles/read/649

Rooting

Published by: paranoiahax, on 2007-05-31 20:56:16

An article on gaining root to a remote system:

Too often have I seen articles that claim to teach how to hack into a server, but all they do is just show you how to scan open ports, and many many people have no idea what to do with an open port. So I am going to show you pretty much all the basics, to get you well on your way to your first ever successful hack of a server, giving you root privileges.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote (years ago) about third world countries bypassing the technology the US uses for the latest available... Here is another example – while cities dither about WiFi, technology has moved on.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20070804/tc_pcworld/135367

Public Wi-Fi: Past its Prime?

Tim Wilson, Network World Canada Sat Aug 4, 12:00 PM ET

For the average Internet user, wireless means Wi-Fi. Most routers used in offices and at hot-spots in local cafes and-libraries use Wi-Fi technology. However, the increasing development and use of the fledgling WiMAX technology has some questioning whether cities should invest in the older standard.

...from back in the days when government did something useful...

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/04/125207&from=rss

Digitized Apollo Flight Films Available Online

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday August 04, @10:07AM from the earth-to-the-moon dept. NASA Space Science

Pooua writes "SpaceRef reports that NASA and Arizona State University have teamed up to offer all of NASA's Apollo lunar films online at no charge. The images are scanned from the original films at high resolution, then offered as 16-bit TIFF or 8-bit PNG or ISIS files. The project is expected to take 3 years, but some images are already available. The ASU-NASA website is located at the Arizona State University Apollo Image Archive."

Mostly for my Web Site class, but too much fun to ignore...

http://www.killerstartups.com/Blogging-Widgets/largeanimal--Create-game-widgets/

LargeAnimal.com Playwidgets - Create game widgets

posted 7 Hours 42 Minutes ago by rachsig | Visit http://www.largeanimal.com/playwidgets/

Jazz up your MySpace page or personal website with Playwidgets, brought to your by LargeAnimal, a gaming site.

Most successful students will already know about this site, the rest won't go there unless force is used.

http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/cafescribe--E-Textbooks/

CafeScribe.com - E-Textbooks

posted 8 Hours 1 Minutes ago by rachsig | Visit http://www.cafescribe.com/

CafeScribe is a site that that lets you download electronic copies of your textbook, so you can have a copy on your home computer or laptop. It's handy because you don't have to lug around heavy books, like when you go to the library to study. Also it makes it easy to cite the texts with you are writing papers. you join for free, and then you purchase the books. They are offered at about half the price as you would find online or at a bookstore.

... You can also add friends to your CafeScribe network and publish your school notes so that they are shared.