Companies ain't people! What a concept.
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=21279
SCOTUS: Corporations do not have personal privacy rights
March 1, 2011 by Dissent
In an 8-0 ruling with Justice Kagan recused, the Supreme Court has reversed a Third Circuit decision in FCC v. AT&T (No. 09-1279). The upshot of the ruling is that corporations cannot withhold information or block its release in response to a freedom of information request by claiming that the information is protected under the personal privacy exemption to FOIA (Exemption 7c).
Joan Biskupic of USA Today reports:
Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized that, ” ‘Personal’ ordinarily refers to individuals. We do not usually speak of personal characteristics, personal effects, personal correspondence, personal influence or personal tragedy as referring to corporations or other artificial entities.”
The chief justice acknowledged that “adjectives typically reflect the meaning of corresponding nouns but not always” and cited as examples “corn” and “corny,” and “crank” and “cranky.”
More broadly, Roberts said that when it comes to the word “personal,” little support exists, even in the law, for the notion that it refers to corporations.
He closed the decision against the telecommunications giant with a bit of levity: “We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.”
Read more on USA Today.
Big Brother loves you. Doesn't all this technology make you feel so much safer? (We can, therefore we must!)
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=21305
UK: Unmanned spy drones and facial recognition cameras could soon be the norm
March 2, 2011 by Dissent
Tom Whitehead reports on the consideration of the Protection of Freedom Bills:
Unmanned spy drones, CCTV that recognises faces and cameras in the back of taxis could soon be the norm on the streets of Britain, the Home Office admitted yesterday.
Ministers signalled that advances in technology meant there was nothing to stop such controversial surveillance measures becoming commonplace.
The warning came in proposals for a code of practice to better regulate the spread of CCTV amid fears there will be “unchecked proliferation” without it.
Read more in The Telegraph. In related coverage, The Drum’s headline is “Home Office concedes Britain likely to become a surveillance state.” There are many who would argue that it’s already become one.
For more information on yesterday’s debate, see the U.K. Human Rights Watch Blog.
Isn't there a TV ad that claims one in five couples meet on the Internet?
Facebook Linked To One In Five Divorces In US
"yes, in theory if you're single, Facebook can help you meet that special someone. But for those in even the healthiest of marriages, improper use can quickly devolve into a marital disaster. A recent survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found that Facebook is cited in one in five divorces in the United States. Also, more than 80 percent of divorce lawyers reported a rising number of people are using social media to engage in extramarital affairs."
For my Computer Security students,
SSDs Cause Crisis For Digital Forensics
"Firmware built into many solid state drives (SSDs) to improve their storage efficiency could be making forensic analysis at a later date by police forces and intelligence agencies almost impossible to carry out to legally safe standards, Australian researchers have discovered. They found that SSDs start wiping themselves within minutes after a quick format (or a file delete or full format) and can even do so when disconnected from a PC and rigged up to a hardware blocker."
So either SSDs are really hard to erase, or really hard to recover. I'm so confused.
[From the article:
The detailed findings contained in Solid State Drives: The Beginning of the End for Current Practice in Digital Forensic Discovery? by Graeme B. Bell and Richard Boddington of Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, will make unsettling reading for professionals in the digital forensics field and beyond.
… Paradoxically, only last week researchers in California uncovered a separate but related problem with SSDs, namely that it could be hard to securely wipe data from them in a guaranteed, controlled way.
This could be handy...
CrocoDoc is an excellent online tool to share and annotate PDF files. If your friends do not have PDF file reader, you can upload the file to CrocoDoc and it will become viewable in the site’s HTML5 interface. The PDF file can also be annotated. The original and annotated versions can be downloaded separately by visitors to the PDF’s URL.
No comments:
Post a Comment