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The ACLU has tested President Obama early, requesting dozens of secret documents covering the Bush administrations’ justification for its spying and interrogation programs. If we could gleam even a bit of insight into the real excuses for the warrantless wiretapping and NSA eavesdropping, it could set a precedent for future government transparency.

For years, the Bush administration refused to release them, citing national security, attorney-client privilege and the need to protect the government’s deliberative process. The ACLU’s request, however, comes after President Barack Obama last week rescinded a 2001 Justice Department memo that gave agencies broad legal cover to reject public disclosure requests.

Obama also urged agencies to be more transparent when deciding what documents to release under the Freedom of Information Act. … “The president has made a very visible and clear commitment to transparency,” said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “We’re eager to see that put into practice.” The collection of memos, written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, are viewed as the missing puzzle pieces that could help explain the Bush administration’s antiterrorism policies. Critics of the prior administration also see the release of the documents as necessary to determine whether former administration officials should be held accountable for legal opinions that justified various antiterrorism measures, including the use of waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning.

This is crazy, with all we know about network security and how important it is to safeguard our data, companies are still not getting the messages, so data breaches continue to increase.  With all of the information people give up online ever increasing, this has the makings of a privacy disaster.

Given an IT security landscape highlighted by regulatory compliance,
publicly-disclosed data breaches, and increasingly sophisticated
threats, we often ask survey respondents whether their organization
suffered a data breach in the last 12 months. ESG has probably asked
this very question in several research projects over the past few
years. In the past, about 30 percent of large organizations (i.e. 1,000
employees or more) claimed that their organization had suffered a data
breach within the last year.

This pattern was fairly consistent from 2005 through 2007, so I
expected to see similar results when we conducted another research
survey focused on application and database security at the end of 2008.
I was shocked to see that things have actually grown much worse. In a
November 2008 survey of 179 North American-based security
professionals, 56 percent claimed that their organization had suffered
a data breach within the past 12 months. In further analysis, 61
percent of organizations with 1,000 to 5,000 employees suffered a data
breach in that time frame. It’s easy to assume that these smaller firms
are more at risk since they are likely to have fewer security
technologies in place and smaller security staffs. Perhaps this is true, but even bigger companies are suffering data breaches - 49 percent of organizations with 5,000 employees or more endured at least one data breach of their own.

So what good is it if I rotate my passwords constantly, encrypt my personal data, and am careful not to send 500$ to someone in Nigeria so that they can send me millions? Once your data is out of your hands you have some company with a bottom line to protect that fails to include funds to hire competent IT staff to secure data and systems. Perhaps this bodes well for the idea of companies offloading their systems’ data to the cloud, that way a company that *only* holds data might be better able to secure access to it. (maybe)

Anyone who qualifies as directionally challenged will tell you Google maps are a godsend. They can get you from one end of town to the other without ever having to stop for directions.

It's a modern marvel, but how much of a good thing is too much? If the goal is to get from Point A to Point B, do we really need Google Street View to give us a bird's eye view of the houses we pass and the cars we see?

Google technology has made voyeurism hard to resist, but if the shoe were on the other foot, would we be as eager to have cars with roof-mounted cameras inching down our boulevards, snapping 360-degree panoramic street-level views of our kids, our dogs, our weeds?

the Department of Homeland Security disclosed that traveler’s laptop computers “or other electronic devices” can be confiscated, without any suspicion of a crime! Better yet, they can make and share copies of your data, have the data translated, unencrypted, etc. This is especially topical for me since I’ll be leaving the country on Sunday with the laptop that I’m typing this on. “Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed. Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “The policies . . . are truly alarming,” said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who is probing the government’s border search practices. He said he intends to introduce legislation soon that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches, as well as prohibit profiling on race, religion or national origin.” So while congress is now looking at it, the article points out that these procedures have been in place for a long time, but only revealed last month, “…because of public interest in this matter.” So this makes me ask, what else should we be interested in that our government is doing so we can discover other ways our rights are being shoved aside? These tactics are excessive and a violation of individual rights, could at least can cause an interruption of business, but at most are a direct invastion of privacy and a violation of civil rights.

I found this pretty interesting, to find out names of sources that a journalist talked to about the government’s secret wiretapping of Americans without court orders, federal investigators are using phone records. So they look to the phone companies for names to find out who talked to the Times about the investigation into how the Feds used the phone companies to spy on its citizens.

In the leak investigation, Justice Department officials are using phone records in an Arlington, Va. federal grand jury proceeding to ferret out James Risen’s sources, according to the New York Times. One presumes the government is using subpoenas or National Security Letters to get Risen or his suspected sources’ phone records, then hauling former government officials in front of the grand jury. But given that this Administration operates on the belief that the Fourth Amendment does not apply during wartime, that the Justice Department is not pursuing criminal charges against officials involved in wiretapping Americans without court approval and that the Administration claims to have King-like powers in the Time of Terror, the presumption that legal process was involved might be quaint.

When American forces in Iraq wanted to lure members of Al Qaeda into a trap, they hacked into one of the group’s computers and altered information that drove them into American gun sights.

When President George W. Bush ordered new ways to slow Iran’s progress toward a nuclear bomb last year, he approved a plan for an experimental covert program — its results still unclear — to bore into their computers and undermine the project.

And the Pentagon has commissioned military contractors to develop a highly classified replica of the Internet of the future. The goal is to simulate what it would take for adversaries to shut down the country’s power stations, telecommunications and aviation systems, or freeze the financial markets — in an effort to build better defenses against such attacks, as well as a new generation of online weapons.

Just as the invention of the atomic bomb changed warfare and deterrence 64 years ago, a new international race has begun to develop cyberweapons and systems to protect against them.

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