A U.S. Senate vote that took place two hours ago reveals how much three of our leading presidential candidates are committed to electronic privacy and the rule of law.

Barack Obama passes the test. John McCain failed. Hillary Clinton gets an incomplete.

The vote was on an amendment to deny AT&T and other telecommunications companies legal immunity if they are proven in court to have violated federal privacy law by opening their networks to the National Security Agency.

Obama voted for the amendment. That's a vote for electronic privacy and for the rule of law. It … Read more

With all of the attention that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) update (and the administration's vigorous attempts to immunize the criminals telcos), it seems like a good time to explore the issues surrounding surveillance and privacy in America today.

While there are so many scary things being done by intelligence and law enforcement, hope is not far away. Easy to use privacy technologies are upon us, and with them, comes a radical shift in the balance of power. As this article will explain, the scalable techniques with which the NSA, FBI and other agencies can spy on innocent … Read more

In a direct slap in the face to consumers, tech industry giants including Microsoft, AT&T, and Verizon are frantically engaged in an effort to kill pro-consumer provisions in a data breach notification bill currently being considered by the Indiana State Senate.

The bill would require that the state attorney general act as a single point of contact for data breaches. Any company that suffered a breach impacting one or more Indiana consumers would be required to notify the AG's office. The bill would also make Indiana the only state in the country to to require the attorney … Read more

Who would be the most tech-friendly president?

The short answer: it depends. Do you like the idea of Net neutrality so much that you'd hand the Federal Communications Commission the authority to levy open-ended Internet regulations? Do you support pro-fair use changes to copyright law, which many programmers and computer scientists do--but which practically all software and video game companies oppose?

To help clear things up for our readers living in the 24 states that are holding primaries or caucuses on Tuesday, we've assembled a sketch of the leading contenders' technology-related positions in the following chart.

And to … Read more

A high-stakes political debate over wiretapping and immunity for telecommunications companies has been pushed back by at least one day.

In two votes on Monday, senators failed to reach the 60-vote supermajority required to curb debate and force a vote on either of two wiretapping-related proposals, one favored by Republicans and the other backed by Democrats. Each vote was 48 yea to 45 no.

That means the debate on how to rework the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will continue later this week. In his State of the Union address Monday evening, President Bush is expected to press Congress to … Read more

Facebook is no stranger to the complaints of privacy activists. First, it was the site's News Feed feature back in 2006. Most recently, the company's Beacon service drew widespread criticism. This blog post will outline yet another major privacy issue, in which Facebook recklessly exposes user data.

Facebook launched its widely popular application developer program back in May 2007. As of press time, there were more than 14,000 applications. Some, including most of the popular apps, are made by companies, while a few of the popular apps, and a significant number of the long tail of the less popular applications are made by individual developers.

But a new study suggests there may be a bigger problem with the applications. Many are given access to far more personal data than they need to in order to run, including data on users who never even signed up for the application. Not only does Facebook enable this, but it does little to warn users that it is even happening, and of the risk that a rogue application developer can pose.

Privacy problems for the user

In order to install an application, a Facebook user must first agree to "allow this application to...know who I am and access my information." Users not willing to permit the application access to all kinds of data from their profile cannot install it onto their Facebook page.

What kind of information does Facebook give the application developer access to? Practically everything. According to the Application Terms of Service,

… Read more

A zealous band of pro-regulation privacy groups made a valiant effort a few days ago to convince the Feds to forcibly pull the plug on a new feature on the Ask.com search engine.

The groups, which include the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy, told the Federal Trade Commission on Saturday that a formal injunction was necessary to halt some supposedly pernicious practices on the part of Ask.com.

The only problem? Those supposedly pernicious practices don't actually exist.

Ask.com already had voluntarily changed the way it handled its new privacy feature weeks … Read more

It's time to take another look at the intriguing case of United States v. Boucher, which may set the ground rules for whether or not criminal defendants can be compelled to divulge encryption passphrases.

When I last wrote about the Boucher case, the U.S. Department of Justice was refusing to comment on the matter. Here's my original article from last month for background.

The case arose because federal agents believe Boucher has child pornography on his laptop, and obtained a warrant to search it. But part of the hard drive was PGP-encrypted, and the Feds obtained a … Read more

Government investigators were able to easily break the ZIP file encryption that a Texas man allegedly used to conceal illegal images, a recent court case shows.

The investigation of John Craig Zimmerman began when his employer, the Brownsville Fire Department, received an anonymous voice message in February 2007 alleging that Zimmerman was a pedophile and had child pornography on his department-owned work computer. A city programmer named Albert Castillo searched Zimmerman's computer and found adult pornography (technically a violation of department policy but not a crime) on an external hard drive.

What Castillo also found were some password-protected ZIP … Read more