Privacy

One of America's leading journalists believes that he is being monitored by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

Brian Ross, chief investigative correspondent for ABC News, wrote in his blog that a senior source warned him that his phone calls were being monitored in an attempt to identify his sources.

Ross was one of a number of journalists who broke the story of CIA jails being set up in Eastern Europe.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source warned in an in-person conversation.

Recent reports that the US National Security Agency spied on Americans expand upon allegations in federal lawsuits alleging that telecommunications companies helped the NSA secretly spy on Americans.

In the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class action lawsuit against AT&T, a former phone company technician explained how he thinks he unknowingly assisted the program toward the end of his 22-year career with the company.

The current order to extend CALEA to VoIP and broadband providers has been scrutinized by federal judges required to approve it. The FCC recently confirmed a previously issued a compliance order to VoIP and broadband providers saying that they were to be subject to the 1994 law that was designed to regulate wireless phones. Judges harshly criticized the proposed order to confirm and extend the wiretapping law.

In another reminder of the vulnerability of university networks, the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) over the weekend announced that someone had broken into a computer at its McCombs School of Business and gained access to a database containing confidential information on about 197,000 people.

PRIVATE investigator Chris Cooper wants unfettered access to your personal details but doesn't think you should have access to his. It's a paradox that bedevils much of the privacy debate - how much information should be available in a free society without trampling the rights of the individual?

"Society restricts information from those who investigate crimes while making other personal information more accessible to those who don't really need it," says Mr Cooper, who has written a book that helps people find such information.

Privacy advocates are raising concerns about Google Inc.'s plans to cover San Francisco with free wireless Internet access, calling the company's proposal to track users' locations a potential gold mine of information for law enforcement and private litigators.

The Mountain View search engine intends to use the geographic data to match users with advertising so that they would see marketing messages from neighborhood businesses such as pizza parlors, cafes and book stores.

In Europe, Big Brother is listening — and being allowed to hear more and more.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks and the terrorist bombings that followed in Madrid and London, authorities across the continent are getting more powers to electronically eavesdrop, and meeting less apparent opposition than
President Bush did over his post-9/11 wiretapping program.

A SECURITY hole in Sydney internet provider Astratel's LiveBilling online account management system has seriously compromised its customers' privacy.

Astratel customer Nick Adams notified the ISP after he discovered that he could view billing information and call records for other customers, by lodging their phone number into an online query form.

Mr Adams also demonstrated that non-Astratel member could access the compromised web query service by transplanting code from the page where it was located and placing it at an alternative web address.

In a highly anticipated decision, a federal judge ruled today that Google Inc. has to provide the U.S. government with information about its search engine's index, but denied a request for a sample of search queries.

The case highlights the tension between online user privacy and law-enforcement needs.

Judge James Ware, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, wrote in his decision that Google must provide the government with 50,000 Web addresses in its search engine index.

She is 52 years old, married, grew up in the Kansas City suburbs and now lives in Virginia, in a new three-bedroom house.

Anyone who can qualify for a subscription to one of the online services that compile public information also can learn that she is a CIA employee who, over the past decade, has been assigned to several American embassies in Europe.