Privacy

bushco Must Be Very Envious

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Where will all the freedom loving Brits move to?

Big Brother-style surveillance is growing on Britain’s roads, where police will have the greatest ability in the world to scrutinise, control and record the movements of drivers by the end of the year.
Thousands of cameras reading vehicle number plates and comparing data with a central data base will analyse some 35 million pieces of information per day.
The data will be transmitted to the police and also MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, to help in the hunt for suspected criminals or terrorists. It will be kept for two years, but the period may be extended to five years.
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s centre-left government has invested some 15 million pounds (27 million dollars, 22 million euros) in the project this year.
“The plan is to deny criminals the use of the road,” said retired police officer John Dean, who is coordinating the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) programme.
“We will combine our efforts in a national network which, we hope, will be active from May,” Dean told AFP.
The entire country will be hooked up to the ANPR system between now and the end of 2006.
The network of cameras will automatically alert the authorities when it finds a car listed as stolen, with an out-of-date tax disk or a vehicle that is not insured.
The system also raises the alarm if it recognises there is an arrest warrant out for the driver of a vehicle. And it can be used simply to track the movement of a certain person who is of police interest.

You shouldn’t feel all that secure in the US either. Surely you’ve noticed the increasing numbers of cams at intersections in your community…well, maybe only in larger cities. Once installed it is a relatively simple step to interface the imagery to a system similar to what the British are using.

Via Lew Rockwell.

Good For Google

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Is there any reason to believe the bush administration could be trusted with this data?

The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.
The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.
In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for one million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.
The Mountain View-based search engine opposes releasing the information on a variety of grounds, saying it would violate the privacy rights of its users and reveal company trade secrets, according to court documents.

No, I don’t think they are trustworthy at all and they shouldn’t be in the censorship business anyway.
Some other search companies aren’t quite so sensitive:

The government indicated that other, unspecified search engines have agreed to release the information, but not Google.

If we can find out jwho they are we can make sure not to use their services.
In the meantime let’s help out the bushies:

…government lawyers said in court papers they are developing a defense of the 1998 law based on the argument that it is far more effective than software filters in protecting children from porn. To back that claim, the government has subpoenaed search engines to develop a factual record of how often Web users encounter online porn and how Web searches turn up material they say is “harmful to minors.”

Here is a data point for them: in the last two years of daily performing multiple searches on a wide variety of subjects I have never accidently encountered a porn site. I have, though, on several occasions been in schools or libraries that had filtering systems and found them so effective that I couldn’t even get to this blog.

Update 1/20: I’ve never liked the fact that the search companies retain history and identifying information but they all do it. So, here is a good reason to not use any of them except Google:

Federal investigators already have obtained potentially billions of Internet search requests made by users of major Web sites run by Microsoft, Yahoo! and America Online, which all complied with the government request, issued in August, a Justice Department official said Thursday.

Finding Subversives

This entry was posted in Government Privacy on by

If this guy can mine Amazon Wishlists to identify your subversive tendencies just imagine what someone with resources like, say, the nsa or the fbi, might be able to do on behalf of their master. Think about what a mccarthy or a young jackboots for w group would do with this.

That someone can do this is probably an unintended consequence of a pretty cool Amazon feature. It does, though, point out that businesses like Amazon and Google have gathered large amounts of data on individuals and that this data can be misused if it is not well protected.

How much more data do you want to give them?

Via fergie’s tech blog which picked it up from Boing Boing.