Here is the new and improved Privacy Page, which is much smaller than the old
one because many of the subtopics have been moved to pages of their own. The
protection of privacy has been a topic of great interest to me for a long time,
and while studying this issue I have run across a number of interesting books,
and more recently, many interesting web sites.
Cryptography has become
a hot topic in the last ten years or so, because many people see a day coming
when the federal government will read all e-mail hoping to find
evidence of criminal activity.
Technology now exists which would make a
cashless society feasible, but when you pay for everything with your "smart card",
you can forget about anonymity. Moreover, if and when those "smart cards" are
in widespread use, many other problems will come to light. At the
moment, nobody cares if it's possible to counterfeit a nickel, but an infinite
supply of nickel and dime electronic cash coupons could wreck the national economy.
I hope that you'll read some of these articles and develop an awareness and appreciation
of the individual liberties we have and the importance of protecting them.
Carnivore, Einstein, Tempest, and Echelon:
An assortment of programs and systems developed and implemented over the last 20 years, in an apparent
attempt to wiretap the entire Internet, tap every phone call and monitor every radio transmission.
Carnivore Trigger Words: A
discussion of the "suspicious" words and phrases that the Carnivore system looks for.
Toll Road RFID Tags and license
plate scanners are a threat to privacy, anonymity and individual liberty. In my opinion, so
is OnStar. This page also includes
a section about odometer taxes.
Domestic surveillance has recently become
a hot topic. Maybe that's why the Trigger Words page is getting so many hits lately.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,
shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon
probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and
particularly describing the place to be searched, and the
persons or things to be seized."
The
Cult of Our Betters. [Scroll down] The most closely held freedom to destroy is
your privacy. That threatens them. They know and understand that they cannot succeed
without knowing your innermost secrets. If control is desired, there must be perfect
knowledge about those you wish to enslave. Individual privacy is a dagger to the heart of
COOB. To that end, governments allow and partner with large tech companies to collect and
monetize data on their subscribers. How many understand that virtually all the big mega-media
companies read all your mail and rob you of your privacy, even mining your contacts
simultaneously? That allows them to create individually accessible data points defining your
life in over two hundred searchable metrics, which can be bought for the right price or used to
support secret government FISA Court warrants. It can also be for an international warrant, a
Justice Department warrant, or even your local prosecutor. Remember, your information is
commercial property for sale to any number of companies and groups, and your control or ability to
opt out is limited in practice.
The Freedom to Be Left
Alone. If one were to come up with a bumper-sticker definition of personal liberty, it would be something like
"the freedom to be left alone." A society that respects the liberty of its citizens is one in which the citizen can be
left to live his life as he sees fit, beyond the basic duties incumbent upon all citizens. In other words, the public
duties are a narrow domain, while private life is a broad domain, with only a small overlap of the two. At the root of
this, the spring that provides the impetus for such an arrangement, is the cultural understanding that everyone has a duty to
mind their own business. What must animate a "free society" is the understanding that you are not only free of the
unwanted gaze from others, including the state, but that you and your fellow citizens must avoid looking into the private
lives of others. A free society minds its own business. That would be the opposite of what we see in modern America.
Privacy
is dead, Harvard professors tell Davos forum. Imagine a world where mosquito-sized robots fly
around stealing samples of your DNA. Or where a department store knows from your buying habits that
you're pregnant even before your family does. That is the terrifying dystopian world portrayed by a
group of Harvard professors at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday [1/22/2015], where the
assembled elite heard that the notion of individual privacy is effectively dead.
Your Tax Return Could Reveal
Private Information. Connie Barber of Philadelphia assumed her private financial
information stayed between her and the IRS. … Like many taxpayers, she never knew her tax
preparer could share or even sell her information, and all it took was her signature.
Cameras, safety and
privacy: For years, privacy advocates have warned of the risks and costs of
constant electronic monitoring of streets, subway stations and other sites. But events
in London show cameras have a distinct upside. … Like any crime-fighting strategy, this one
has to be evaluated on whether it produces tangible gains. But for the police and citizens
of London, who may have been saved from further carnage by video cameras, I suspect the
debate is over.
Technology and Privacy: A
handful of voices – mine included – have long insisted that sacrificing
privacy for security represents a Faustian bargain that will have decidedly undesirable
repercussions over the long term. Unfortunately, the weight of history strongly
confirms what thinkers from Machiavelli, to Benjamin Franklin have told us for
centuries: faced with a choice between liberty and security, the majority
will choose security.
"Privacy"
by decree: Nowhere does the Constitution guarantee the right to privacy. The
word "privacy" isn't even mentioned in the text. But if all you had to go by was the
obsessive interest in the subject whenever there is a Supreme Court vacancy, you might imagine
that privacy is the very bedrock of American constitutional law. Few legal cows today
are more sacred.
Trashing Privacy: You
probably wonder why you haven't read about this. Frankly, there's not much reason you would have, unless
you read some relatively obscure publications that focus mostly on technology issues. Another reason you
wouldn't likely have heard of it is, of course, that most major media outlets ignored the issue entirely, largely
due to how the Senate essentially trashed your online privacy — by voice vote the night before heading
home for another summer recess.
Speaking of trash... Agent poses as sanitation worker,
now trash evidence is in doubt. Agent Mark Nickel [of the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal
Investigation] slipped on a blue jumpsuit and hopped into the garbage truck, just like the other city
sanitation workers on the morning of April 13. … Now, attorneys are arguing over whether Nickel
lawfully grabbed the garbage, which helped lead to murder charges against a Fargo man.
Voting 6 to 2, the Court held that garbage placed at the curbside is
unprotected by the Fourth Amendment. The Court argued that there was
no reasonable expectation of privacy for trash on public streets "readily
accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members of
the public." The Court also noted that the police cannot be expected to
ignore criminal activity that can be observed by "any member of the public."
Privacy 101: by Bartlett
D. Cleland, director of the Center for Technology Freedom at the Institute for Policy Innovation.
Right to Privacy Destined for Endangered
List. While electronic surveillance or eavesdropping was obviously unknown to our Founding Fathers
when they crafted the Fourth Amendment, 20th-century court decisions have made clear that Americans' electronic
communications are covered within the sphere of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment's edict.
Threats to privacy highest in history:
Threats to individual privacy have never been greater due to the spread of electronic databases in government,
medicine, business and the workplace. However, unwise legislation could destroy many benefits of
information sharing for private individuals, according to a new study issued today by the National Center for
Policy Analysis (NCPA).
Internet Encryption and the
Second Amendment: The founding fathers blessed us with the right to keep and bear
arms so that the people would always have a safeguard against tyranny. Encryption techniques
are a similar bulwark protecting liberty.
Fifth Amendment: Passphrase
cannot be forced. U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man
accused of transporting child pornography has a Fifth Amendment right to keep his password
in his head, not give it to prosecutors. In other words, the Fifth Amendment protects
the right to keep passwords.
Data
Mining: What if every telephone call you make, every credit card
purchase you make, every flight you take, every visit to the doctor you make, every
warranty card you send in, every employment application you fill out, every school
record you have, your credit record, every web page you visit … was all collected
together? A lot would be known about you! This is an all-too-real
possibility. Much of this kind of information is already stored in a database.
EPIC's web page about Student Privacy. Students
do not shed all of their rights at the schoolhouse gate, including the right to privacy. Although recent
Supreme Court decisions have diminished this right, there are substantial federal and state protections for the
privacy of students' educational records. The most prominent of the federal protections for student
privacy is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) [which] protects the confidentiality of
student educational records. The Act applies to any public or private elementary, secondary, or
post-secondary school and any state or local education agency that receives federal funds. All public schools
and virtually all private schools are covered by FERPA because they receive some sort of federal funding.
Seven Misconceptions about
E-mail: This is an article about the many hazards of sending personal e-mail messages
to or from your office.
Top 12 Ways to Protect Your Online
Privacy: You may be "shedding" personal details, including e-mail addresses and other contact
information, without even knowing it unless you properly configure your Web browser.
Privacy Concerns: More than just cookies.
When you submit a form (a warning box comes up when you do this unless you tell it to never warn you again) it
is often sent to the website by means of "method=post, action=email." When you submit a form this way, your web
browser uses the email software which comes with it to send your name and email address to any site that
requests it so long as you send the form.
Web Bugs FAQ: A Web bug is a
graphic on a Web page or in an Email message that is designed to monitor who is reading the Web page or Email
message. Web bugs are often invisible because they are typically only 1-by-1 pixel in size. They
are represented as HTML IMG tags.
Document Web Bugs FAQ: Within
Microsoft Word is the ability to link an image file located on a remote Web server. Each time the Word
document is opened, the Web bug image is automatically requested and fetched from the remote server. In
other words, this causes Microsoft Word to "phone home".
Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic
and Solid-State Memory: With the use of increasingly sophisticated encryption systems, an attacker
wishing to gain access to sensitive data is forced to look elsewhere for information. One avenue of attack
is the recovery of supposedly erased data from magnetic media or random-access memory. This paper covers
some of the methods available to recover erased data and presents schemes to make this recovery significantly
more difficult.
IP Address Changer: Concerned
about Internet privacy? Want to hide your IP address? This easy to use tool
lets you change your IP anytime by routing your Internet traffic through overseas
servers. A small dropdown box appears on your Internet Explorer toolbar with
a list of 15 foreign countries. Select one and your IP address will change so
that you appear to be located in that country. You can quickly jump back and
forth between the 15 locations around the world.
ENUM is
a developing technology that enables a user to store contact information that can be
accessed by another person through the use of a single number. The system may
facilitate spam and other unsolicited commercial messages. [i.e., spammers,
telemarketers, stalkers, bill collectors, TV reporters, the IRS.]
Resources:
Privacilla: A massive collection of
privacy-related information, and "an extremely efficient, high-quality resource to use
when researching or formulating positions on privacy."
About CALEA: The Center for
Democracy and Technology maintains this compendium of information of the FBI's pet
wiretapping law: the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.
IP Address Changer: Concerned
about Internet privacy? Want to hide your IP address? This easy to use tool
lets you change your IP anytime by routing your Internet traffic through overseas
servers. A small dropdown box appears on your Internet Explorer toolbar with
a list of 15 foreign countries. Select one and your IP address will change so
that you appear to be located in that country. You can quickly jump back and
forth between the 15 locations around the world.
Books:
Ben
Franklin's Web Site: Privacy and Curiosity from Plymouth Rock to the
Internet. Explore the hidden niches of American history to discover the tug
between our yearning for privacy and our insatiable curiosity. This 407-page book
provides the complete story of privacy in the U.S. since its beginnings. It delves into
the hidden niches of American history, from monitoring during the Colonial period and the
devotion of the Founders to privacy, to the clamorous newspapers of the Nineteenth Century and
the creation of a right to privacy in 1890; then the story of wiretapping and of credit bureaus
and how Social Security numbers grew into national ID numbers, and finally the impact of all
of this on our current use of the Internet.
Invasion
of Privacy: How To Protect Yourself in the Digital Age: The intimate details of
your life — your home address and phone number, Social Security number, bank
accounts, credit history, shopping habits, work history, medical records, travel
habits — are readily available to anyone who might be interested in them. And
you may be shocked to learn just how many groups are clamoring for your information: corporations,
criminals, private investigators, government agencies and more. Although we’ve embraced the
Internet and other technological innovations that have brought convenience to our everyday lives,
these technologies have made us more vulnerable than ever.
