U.S.-China Surveillance

Wired has an update featuring Yahoo!’s official response to claims it likely knew from the start that the government was pursuing a dissident, since the security bureau’s official request for evidence indicated it was a state secrets case. Yahoo! spokesman Jim Cullinan defended attorney Callahan’s testimony:
It is important to realize that there are a variety [...]

An interesting post today at Rebecca MacKinnon’s RConversation blog describes recently publicized documents contradicting congressional testimony by Yahoo General Counsel Michael Callahan regarding the case of Chinese journalist, writer and poet Shi Tao. Shi Tao was jailed for ten years in 1995 after Yahoo complied with a Chinese government request to provide information that would [...]

I will be presenting my paper “Surveillance at the Edge of Chaos: reconceptualizing intensity in terms of discursive structures” at IAMCR 2007 in Paris (CP&T: Session 1, Room 3) next Monday. This represents a schedule change from the current program, which had me on Wednesday, session 11. This is very much a work in progress [...]

A recent federal court decision raises the question of whether antivirus companies may intentionally overlook spyware that is secretly placed on computers by police.
Full CNET story here.

From Saturday’s PC World story:
The FBI is using data mining programs to track everyone from potential terrorists to individuals who file fraudulent automobile insurance claims, according to a U.S. Department of Justice report filed with Congress this week.
The DOJ report, which is required under the Patriot Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005, details six pattern-based [...]

This has been in the news a few days. A PBS program aired last night with details about the plan and comments from privacy advocates and NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly. The New York Times added an addendum to its original story today that the plan does not need City Council approval “because the Council has [...]

Abstract: In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the “nothing to hide” argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” According to the “nothing to hide” argument, there is no threat to privacy [...]

I missed this decision when it originally came out on June 18th, but the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an important ruling that preserves the spirit of the Fourth Amendment as applied to email. In the case Warshak v U.S., the Justice Department had argued that when email is stored with an ISP [...]

Transcript and audio files for two reports here.

After the highly successful public protest against the Haicang PX chemical plant in China’s Xiamen Special Economic Zone (SEZ), the city government has announced draft rules banning anonymous web posting for city residents. The move, first reported in the Beijing Youth Daily, is causing considerable controversy and has reignited the debate over a recently shelved [...]