Privacy

A series of events at international airport security checkpoints -- and not just the all-gadgets-out-of-bags issue that Ben reported last week -- are troubling privacy and civil liberties advocates.

In the last few months, travelers have found their cell phones and laptops seized by officials, at least temporarily. In at least one case, an engineer was asked to turn on the PC, enter his password, and allow agents to copy a record of all the web sites he had visited on the machine. The laptop was then taken away from him altogether.

HACKERS are targeting state departments for sensitive information. More than 80 government laptops have been stolen or are missing, raising fears about the protection of confidential data.

The Irish Independent has learned the laptops and computers have been lost or stolen over the past five years, triggering concerns sensitive information may be vulnerable.

Four government-controlled websites were also recently the victim of cyber-attacks and telephone hacking incidents.

In keeping with its mandate to gather intelligence, the CIA is watching YouTube.

U.S. spies, now under the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), are looking increasingly online for intelligence; they have become major consumers of social media.

The FBI is gearing up to create a massive computer database of people's physical characteristics, all part of an effort the bureau says to better identify criminals and terrorists.

But it's an issue that raises major privacy concerns -- what one civil liberties expert says should concern all Americans.

The bureau is expected to announce in coming days the awarding of a $1 billion, 10-year contract to help create the database that will compile an array of biometric information -- from palm prints to eye scans.

Anonymity systems designed to allow users to carry out actions on the Internet without identifying themselves can often be cracked with a bit of unorthodox thinking, according to a Cambridge researcher.

Stephen Murdoch, a researcher in the University of Cambridge's Security Group, outlined a number of different anonymity-cracking techniques in a recently published PhD thesis.

The debate over changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—the legal framework governing how agencies like the NSA conduct wiretaps—is typically framed as a contest between the competing values of security and privacy. But in an article published in the latest issue of IEEE Security & Privacy, a team of top network security experts argue that large-scale digital surveillance creates new security risks and vulnerabilities as well.

German police have hired a company to create Trojans capable of capturing traffic from Skype and SSL, leaked documents appear to show.

The two scanned documents , which appear on the Wikileaks website in their German form, are difficult to verify, but one appears to describe how a security company, Digitask, was asked to create a “Skype Capture Unit” based around Trojans planted on targeted PCs covertly transferring data to a remote server.

For the second time in as many months, private information from a Newfoundland and Labrador agency has been exposed over the internet.

In late November, the provincial government disclosed that lab test results had leaked out after an external consultant removed a computer from the Provincial Public Health Laboratory and then installed a file-sharing program.

Don't send any text messages or e-mails you don't want to see in the newspaper was a lesson Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick learned this week, and one repeated by area attorneys and business consultants.

Senate Democrats concede they probably lack the votes needed to stop a White House-backed plan to give immunity to phone utilities that helped the National Security Agency's eavesdropping, and they are seeking to put off the vote for another month.

The Senate delayed a vote in December, and it is scheduled to take up the issue again beginning Thursday.