Privacy

For a mere $82 a computer scientist and electronic voting critic managed to purchase five $5,000 Sequoia electronic voting machines over the internet last month from a government auction site. And now he's taking them apart.

The hard drive stolen from the Birmingham VA Medical Center may have contained personal information on 535,000 people - 10 times the number VA originally estimated, The Birmingham News relates.

The hard drive also may have included data, not all of it sensitive, on about 1.3 million non-VA physicians, both living and dead, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson said in a statement.

Sen. Richard Shelby Sen. Richard Shelby was "outraged" by the discrepency in the figures. He said he hoped "it was not meant to mislead the public.

A SOFTWARE company and the Commission on Elections have adopted adequate security measures to prevent hackers from destroying the system of Internet voting, which will be tested in Singapore.

At a forum, Pere Valles, the chief executive of Scytl, gave the assurance that electronic voting can be as secure as the traditional paper-based voting.

?Or even, in many cases, more secure [than the paper-based],? he said.

At least 20,000 Filipino workers in Singapore will be the first to try Internet voting for the May elections.

Backup tapes with personal data on more than 135,000 Johns Hopkins patients, employees and retirees were lost by a contractor and are believed to have been destroyed, the hospital and university said Wednesday.

The Johns Hopkins Hospital patient information on one missing tape included names and limited information such as sex and date of birth, but did not contain medical information, Social Security numbers, addresses or financial information, patients were told in an e-mail alert.

An Aberdeen woman who asked for her bank statement was sent details of 75,000 other customers.

Stephanie McLaughlan, 22, was sent the financial details by Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS).

She received five packages each containing 500 sheets of 30 customers' names, sort codes and account details.

HBOS apologised and said it was carrying out an investigation. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said it would probe the "negligence".

State and federal lawsuits alleging negligence by the Chicago's Board of Elections were filed Monday after it was discovered that computer discs containing more than a million voters' Social Security numbers had been distributed to aldermen and ward committeemen.

It was the second discovery in four months of possibly compromised voter Social Security numbers.

About 100 computer discs distributed to aldermanic campaigns in 2003 inadvertently included voters' Social Security numbers, along with names, addresses and birth dates, board spokesman Tom Leach said.

CIBC is the latest major company to lose sensitive customer data, making 470,000 clients vulnerable to dreaded identity theft.

The bank announced Thursday that a file being transported between Montreal and Toronto went missing while in transit.

The file in question contained sensitive information like Social Insurance numbers, signatures and account numbers of both current and former clients of Talvest Mutual Funds.

President Bush has decided not to renew a program of domestic spying on terrorism suspects, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said on Wednesday, ending a tactic criticized for infringing on civil liberties.

Gonzales said electronic surveillance will be subject to approval from a secret but independent court, which Democrats in Congress and other critics have demanded during more than a year of fierce debate.

Brits planning a trip to the US will now have to surrender all 10 of their digits to the authorities for fingerprinting. The prints will then be added to the same FBI database which stores the prints of convicted criminals.

Deep into an updated Army manual, the deletion of 10 words has left some national security experts wondering whether government lawyers are again asserting the executive branch's right to wiretap Americans without a court warrant.

The manual, described by the Army as a "major revision" to intelligence-gathering guidelines, addresses policies and procedures for wiretapping Americans, among other issues.