U.S.-China Surveillance

Last week, a Supreme Court ruling deserving of much more attention than it has received to date, added to the steady erosion of Fourth Amendment protections Americans have been suffering since the September 11th attacks. Just how much the ruling has diluted the Fourth Amendment is open to debate, but there is little doubt that [...]

A recent blog post by Hal Roberts at the The Berkman Center for Internet & Society raises concerns about popular anonymizing and censorship circumvention services DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix selling their individual user data to third parties. In the post, Roberts infers from a curiously-worded FAQ entry at Edoors.com that these three partner services [...]

A federal appeals court in Oregon will hold a hearing next month on a government appeal of a 2007 judicial ruling that said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is unconstitutional.
Full story at Secrecy News.

The Information Office of China’s State Council released an English-language report on human rights in the US today. Section III of the report, On Civil and Political Rights, deals with issues of surveillance and data privacy. Here are some excerpts:
From January 2005 to September 2007, Verizon provided data to federal authorities “on an emergency [...]

The Fourth Amendment:

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 [...]

Good opinion piece be Leslie Harris on the Real ID program….
Most disappointing, the hard decisions on how to implement Real ID — including how to protect privacy — have been left to the states. Simply put, there are no privacy rules. States are simply encouraged to follow a set of “best practices” for protecting privacy. [...]

Privacy International’s 2007 annual report ranking privacy in the major nations of the world now classifies the U.S. as an “endemic surveillance society,” putting it in the same company with eight other countries, including Russia, China, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan and the UK. The U.S. was one of 14 nation states in which surveillance grew significantly. [...]

A scheme to train firefighters in major cities to look out for terrorists has raised fears that their iconic standing in American society could be damaged.
Unlike police, firemen and paramedics do not need warrants to get into homes and other buildings during technical inspections of emergency facilities, making them particularly useful for spotting signs of [...]

A journalism professor in Oregon, exchanging emails with a friend in Sudan, begins to wonder if he needs to “watch” what he is writing:
As I wrote him back, expressing my relief and my on-going concern for his safety, I also wanted to tell him about my concern for my own country and about my opposition [...]

I’ve added a new feature to this blog, a real-time feed of surveillance-related news items and other documents as I find them. There is a link to it on the navigation bar to the left. Comments welcome.