U.S.-China Surveillance

A new policy for Internet cafe users to register with their real names, announced last March, appears now to be implemented on a widespread basis within the city. First time visitors to a particular Internet cafe locale must have their pictures taken and their national ID cards scanned before sitting down at a terminal. The [...]

The San Franciscos Chronicles’ “TheTech Chronicles,” along with a number of other media outlets, is reporting that Google has will “halve the time it stores logs of user web searches” from 18 to 9 months. Charitably, one could call this a misleading statement, but it really is just plain wrong. Google keeps its search logs [...]

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 [...]

According to a report today in the London-based online journal, The Inquirer, net cafe patrons in metropolitan Beijing must register with their real names starting later this year. Beijing, to my knowledge, becomes the second Chinese city (Xiamen was the first, in the wake of the successful PX Chemical plant protest) to attempt to impose [...]

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. [...]

When China launches the Summer 2008 Olympics, IBM will be there providing real-time surveillance services for public spaces, using its new Smart Surveillance System (S3). S3 can provide real-time alerts via a standard web browser when particular patterns appear in the stream of visual data. Vice President for security and privacy services at IBM, Julie [...]

A report released by the US Government Accounting Office this month, Terrorist Watch List Screening (pdf), indicates that the number of people suspected of having terrorist ties and who appear on the official terrorist watch list ballooned to 755,000 names as of May, 2007. Most of the people on this list are Americans. According to [...]

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.