Author: Luke Stark

Today’s news roundup:

• Google continues to run afoul of European antitrust regulators.
• A newly-declassified FISA Court judgement from November ruled that “backdoor” warrantless email searches are legal under the Constitution.
• Microsoft has sued the US Department of Justice over ECPA gag orders.
• The 6th Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that cell-site location information is not protected under the 4th Amendment.
• The Supreme Court heard oral arguments regarding whether applicants for a drivers license can be compelled to agree to warrantless breathalyzer testing under the 4th Amendment.
• Shortened URLs can be used to spy on people.
• The 7th Circuit makes it easier for individuals to sue for prospective future harm resulting from data breaches.
• And the New York Times gets a little muddled on the parameters of Google’s responsibilities regarding the “right to be forgotten.”

As per today’s conversation, Ed Amoroso’s keynote introduction to network security from the Princeton 5G Summit is viewable here.

Facebook files a patent for identifying cameras through the vagaries of their hardware profiles.

The ECJ Advocat General rules that the US/EU data “safe harbor” agreement fail to meet European data protection standards.

Hi all – if anyone’s interested, the (perhaps too cryptic) slides which accompanied my talk last week are available below. Many thanks for everyone’s feedback – more is certainly welcome!

PRGPresentation

Courtesy of Salon‘s Andrew Leonard:

“Let’s file this one under the category of things we were reasonably sure were happening already, but are still greatly annoyed to have confirmed. New York City, reports Kashmir Hall in Forbes, has been tracking the movements of cars equipped with E-ZPass RFID tags all over the city — not just at the toll booths for which New York drivers presumably purchased their E-ZPasses to get through.

The surveillance was uncovered when an electronics tinkerer who styles himself  ”Puking Money” hacked his E-ZPass to, no joke, go “moo cow” each time it was pinged by a reader.”

Click through for the grizzly details.

location white paper

NYU/Princeton Conference on Mobile and Location Privacy: A Technology and Policy Dialog

Date: Friday, April 13, 2012
Time: 9:30 AM – 5:00 PM
Location: Lipton Hall, 108 West 3rd Street [between Sullivan & MacDougal Streets], New York University School of Law, NYC

Co-sponsored by the New York University Information Law Institute and the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, with generous support from Microsoft.

For more, click here.

From Prof. Rubinstein…

BEFORE THE
DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
NATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATION ADMINISTRATION

Docket No. 120214135-2135-01
Multistakeholder Process To Develop Consumer Data Privacy Codes of Conduct

Request for Comments
________________________________________________________________________
COMMENTS OF
PROFESSOR IRA RUBINSTEIN, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW
AND
PROFESSOR DENNIS HIRSCH, CAPITAL UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL

(link to full document below the fold)
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…or so says Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel.net:

“NCTC turning NCTC’s authority to sometimes get domestic terrorism information into authority to get any dataset maintained by any executive agency that NCTC believes might include some information that might be terrorism information.

Those of us in the US Government’s tax, social security, HHS, immigration, military, and other federal databases? We’ve all, by bureaucratic magic, been turned into domestic terrorists.”

Read more here.

Not a great outcome…

“The Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that a private pilot whose H.I.V.-positive status was improperly shared between government agencies cannot collect damages for the emotional distress he suffered when he was punished for hiding his medical condition from the Federal Aviation Administration.

In a case that pitted competing interests of public safety, personal privacy, and the broad immunity of the government from liability lawsuits, the court’s more conservative majority found that Congress had not allowed compensation for mental anguish when violations of the Privacy Act of 1974 inflicted no actual damage, like a loss of income.”

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