Last night the House of Representatives approved a temporary amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that passed the Senate on Friday night. President Bush will sign it shortly. The language is here. On the merits, I think this legislation on the whole seems relatively well done.

I really don't agree with this perspective, but there are links from here to lots of others. The idea that the executive has hereby been authorized to monitor ALL international calls to and from the US is a dramatic policy shift. However, there is something unsettling about both the timing of this and its duration. I think pundits may be underestimating the seriousness of statements made by numerous individuals that a terrorist attack is more likely in the coming months. This may, in fact, be a temporary patch done to deal with a specific threat which may be reconsidered later. For the time being, however, anything you say on an international call can and will be used against you in a court of law.

The Volokh Conspiracy - My Take on the New FISA Amendment:

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding Wood's research in the hope that it will lead to stealth surveillance robots for the battlefield and urban environments. The robot's small size and fly-like appearance are critical to such missions.

Technology Review: Robotic Insect Takes Off for the First Time

By the end of this year, police officials say, more than 100 cameras will have begun monitoring cars moving through Lower Manhattan, the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States.

Now THATS what I call passing the costs on to the consumer!

Manhattan takes cue from London's 'Ring of Steel' - International Herald Tribune

Recently, we took another important step to improve our privacy practices by announcing a new policy to anonymize our server logs after 18 to 24 months, becoming the first leading search company to publish a data retention policy. We also posted here to explain the factors that guided our decision to retain server log data for 18 to 24 months.

1. Thank you!
2. I'll need to read further and figure out what "anonymize" means.

Official Google Blog: How long should Google remember searches?

Best google maps image yet. Sparkn' a pipe...

Mission St & 16th St, San Francisco, CA - Google Maps

It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author -- who would have preferred to be named -- is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter.
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Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the way that it did. Some recipients would have spoken out about perceived abuses, and the FBI's actions would have been subject to some degree of public scrutiny.

I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn't been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law.

I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I've now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government's use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.

My National Security Letter Gag Order - washingtonpost.com

(This quote is not directly from the source I'm linking, you'll have to click through.)

At the Open Data 2007 conference in New York today, David Cancel, the CEO of Compete Inc. revealed that ISPs happily sell clickstream data -- and that it's a big business. They don't sell your name -- just your clicks -- but the clicks are tied to you as a specific user (User 1, User 2, etc.).

Holy Fuck! This is a major, major privacy issue. Apparently there are some MemeStreams readers who either use the Compete toolbar (which is not a problem unless you are fooled into installing it) or have their ISPs quietly spying on them and selling the data to Compete (which IS a BIG problem). I expect that there is going to be some fallout from this announcement.

Boing Boing: Are some ISPs selling clickstream data?

Googleis reversing a long-standing policy to retain all the data on its users indefinitely, and by the end of the year will begin removing identifying data from its search logs after 18 months to two years, depending on the country the servers are located in.

Currently, Google retains indefinitely detailed server logs on its search engine users, including user's IP addresses – which can identify a user's computer, the query, any result that is clicked on, their browser and operating system, among other details. Even if a user never signs up for a Google account, those searches are all tied together through a cookie placed on the user's computer, which currently expires in 2038.

27B Stroke 6 | Google To Anonymize Data

Con artists and swindlers in China who try to use fake ID will have a tougher time trying to pass themselves off as someone else now that the public has access to the Ministry of Public Security's population database.

Anyone can now send a text message or visit the country's population information center's website, to check if the name and the ID number of a person's identity card match. If they do match the ID cardholder's picture also appears, said the Ministry, adding that no other
information is available to ensure a citizen's privacy is protected.

This is a novel approach.

Xinhua - China has an open ID database.

dc0de wrote:
And yet another loss of privacy, without so much as a whimper from anyone...

Well, technically they are arguing that they had the right to do this all along. In order to test their theory, you'd have to get standing in court, which would require demonstrating that they have done it, or demonstrating that the possibility that they might do it directly impacts you. The later is what they've tried to do with the telephone surveillance cases. What comes next is their claim that the lawsuit's result is a state secret...

Basically, whatever happens with the phone suits is likely to happen with this, and in the phone suits they are doing everything in their power to avoid having to actually argue, before a court, the points of law that they keep making in contexts like this (inherent power of the president, article II, etc...). In my estimation there is only one currently sitting Supreme Court justice who would accept their perspective on that if push finally came to shove, but they're not ever planning on push coming to shove. The recent change in Congress may have made it difficult for them to pull the issue out of the courts through legislative fiat, but I have been surprised that this thing has gone this far in court and I have a feeling they'll get it out of there through some other means eventually.

Also, suing specifically on this mail question won't get you anywhere, as they haven't actually publicly admitted that they do this, and so their state secrets claim would stick and it would get pulled.

RE: NPR : Federal Government Can Now Open Citizens' Mail