PATH: BS | Privacy

Chinese Hack Google Through Government Snooping Back Door

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Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn't that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated -- we knew that already -- it's that the U.S. government inadvertently aided the hackers.

In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.

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Congress Makes Operating WiFi Dangerous And Potentially Illegal

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The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including "obscene" cartoons and drawings--or face fines of up to $300,000.

That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail, and it may require that the complete contents of the user's account be retained for subsequent police inspection.

READ MORE | 1 comment since 2009-07-27 14:28:11 | Comment on this Article

Who's Reading Your Communication And Where?

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Believe it or not, the government is outsourcing surveillance of Americans to two Israeli companies.

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FEMA Investigates Katrina Victims' Personal Data Put Online

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Personal information on people who applied for disaster aid after Hurricane Katrina was recently published on the Web without authorization, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said.

FEMA is investigating the unauthorized posting of the names, Social Security numbers, telephone numbers, addresses and other personal information that the agency collected from applicants, FEMA announced in a news release dated Dec. 19 and modified Dec. 23. FEMA was alerted Dec. 16 to a Web site posting of a spreadsheet that contained 16,857 lines of personal information about Hurricane Katrina evacuees from the Gulf Coast to Texas, the news release states.

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Feds Say Air Fresheners Are Now Probable Cause

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Federal appeals court ruled that motorists can be stopped for 30 minutes and searched if they are nervous and use an air freshener.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson. A federal appellate court ruled last week that police can delay a routine traffic stop as long as necessary to conduct a search for drugs. In its decision, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the validity of a thirty-minute traffic stop in Maryland because the arresting officer claimed the nervous driver had an air freshener hanging from his rear-view mirror and had previously been spotted driving in a run-down neighborhood.

READ MORE | 3 comments since 2009-11-17 00:12:15 | Comment on this Article

Have You Used A Phone In The Last Five Years?

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The ACLU wants you to know something...

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All Of Congress Covers Up Administration's Crimes

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For six years, the Bush Administration and the nation’s communication companies have been illegally spying on Americans’ phone calls and e-mails. They did this in direct violation of the Constitution’s 4th Amendment and a federal statute – FISA. Both laws emphatically forbid such surveillance unless the government first obtains a warrant from an independent (eg, FISA) court.

Your Congress, including the Democrats are now working to give the companies that colluded with the administration immunity for these crimes.

By the way, both Barak Obama and John McCain sold out on this one. Obama voted for it; Every single republican voted for it. McCain was too much of a coward to even vote, but we all know which way he would have voted - certainly not against party lines.

READ MORE | 4 comments since 2008-07-16 21:38:41 | Comment on this Article

Charter To Sell Your Web Surfing History To Other Companies

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Charter Communications, the fourth-largest cable system in the United States, has started telling its high-speed Internet customers that it is going to keep track of every site they visit on the Web.

The cable company will sell the data to a firm called NebuAd, which in turn will use it to show ads to Web-surfing Charter customers that are meant to be related to their interests. (Visit a knitting site yesterday and see yarn ads today.)

READ MORE | 1 comment since 2008-05-18 09:58:40 | Comment on this Article

Uncle Sam Wants Your Newborn's DNA

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President Bush last week signed into law a bill which will see the federal government begin to screen the DNA of all newborn babies in the U.S. within six months, a move critics have described as the first step towards the establishment of a national DNA database.

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Fighting the Advil menace, one strip search at a time

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There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who think it's perfectly reasonable to strip-search a 13-year-old girl suspected of bringing ibuprofen to school, and the kind who think those people should be kept as far away from children as possible. The first group includes officials at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, who in 2003 forced eighth-grader Savana Redding to prove she was not concealing Advil in her crotch or cleavage.

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FBI Caught Doing Widescale Improper Surveillance

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Senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation repeatedly approved the use of “blanket” records demands to justify the improper collection of thousands of phone records, according to officials briefed on the practice.

The bureau appears to have used the blanket records demands at least 11 times in 2006 alone as a quick way to clean up mistakes made over several years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a letter provided to Congress by a lawyer for an F.B.I. agent who witnessed the missteps.

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Bush Declares He Can Open Your Mail

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President Bush quietly has claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant.

Bush asserted the new authority Dec. 20 after signing legislation that overhauls some postal regulations. He then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open mail under emergency conditions, contrary to existing law and contradicting the bill he had just signed, according to experts who have reviewed it.

READ MORE | 1 comment since 2008-03-13 01:25:39 | Comment on this Article

BillBoard Liberation Front Makes AT&T Ads Truthful

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A rogue activist group that adds creative touches to advertising campaigns has announced their new target: AT&T

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Hillary Clinton Campaign Rented Out Her Donor Mailing List

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Political campaigns spend thousands, even millions of dollars to acquire good mailing lists.

Last year, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton took the unusual step of renting out some of her lists. The transaction once again highlights the Clintons' connections to a businessman who now faces questions from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Sears And K-Mart Installing Spyware On Users' Computers

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Visiting Sears.com (and Kmart.com) a few weeks ago, a user was offered a chance to join My SHC Community, for free, but what they received was, from a privacy perspective, very costly.

Sears.com is distributing spyware that tracks all your Internet usage - including banking logins, email, and all other forms of Internet usage - all in the name of "community participation." Every website visitor that joins the Sears community installs software that acts as a proxy to every web transaction made on the compromised computer.

Sears' response? ..It also states in simple English that if you don't want to participate, you don't have to and you can opt out at any point... Uh huh...

If this wasn't bad enough, now there are ways you can see everything your neighbors have ever purchased at Sears!

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Why You Should Always Install It Yourself

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It seems that a man in Pennsylvania brought his computer in to Circuit City so that he could have a new DVD burner installed. It was when the techs went to test the new burner, searching for video files to make a test burn, that they discovered the child pornography videos on the hard drive....

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AT&T's Internet Tapping: Massively Unconsitutional and Illegal

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Chris Dodd sat down with AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein. He’s the technician who revealed that the NSA has secret rooms for sweeping up massive amounts of electronic communications on the internet.

Klein is calling on the Senate to not grant telecommunications companies retroactive immunity. He's also testifying to the scale of the Bush administration's electronic surveillance:

"Everything you could imagine you use the internet for flows through these cables. It's not only international traffic, but a huge amount of domestic traffic too."

Watch the video of Klein talking about why he opposes retroactive immunity.

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Microsoft Is Secretly Updating PCs Without Permission

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Even if you have Windows Updates turned off, people are discovering that their operating system is still contacting Microsoft and downloading and installing software on the system behind your back. And nobody really knows what's going on...

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TD Ameritrade's User Database Compromised

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Financial trading company, TD Ameritrade announced that some of its databases may have been compromised. The company discovered the security breach after their customers complained that they started to receive spam.

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"Storm Worm" Takes Over Millions Of Computers

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The authors behind a specific strain of malware are trying every trick in the book to get users to succumb to their ill-meaning plans. You name it, they've used it: weather news, personal greetings, reports that Saddam Hussein is still alive, reports that Fidel Castro is dead, sexy women, YouTube, and even blogs. The group seems hellbent on creating the largest botnet to date, and as long as users are stupid enough to click on things without thinking, they just might do it.

READ MORE | 1 comment since 2007-09-03 15:44:29 | Comment on this Article

Nobody Knows What's Going On With The U.S.'s "No Fly" List

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The government's terrorist screening database flagged Americans and foreigners as suspected terrorists almost 20,000 times last year. But only a small fraction of those questioned were arrested or denied entry into the United States, raising concerns among critics about privacy and the list's effectiveness.

Supposedly more than 230,000 names are on the list and there are many stories of innocent people getting snagged on the list, but nobody knows how to remove innocent people from the list.

READ MORE | 2 comments since 2008-08-18 05:42:48 | Comment on this Article

Monster.com Site Hacked; 1.6 Million Users Compromised

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Web site Monster.com has suffered an online attack with the personal data of hundreds of thousands of users stolen, says a security firm.

A computer program was used to access the employers' section of the website using stolen log-in credentials.

The most amusing part of this is that Monster.com didn't even know about this until a security company noticed phishing spam with stolen customer information within and contacted Monster.com.

As usual, it's the European press which break stories like this. Why do I have to read in English papers what happens to U.S. companies? Never mind, don't answer that. We all know why.

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Man Sues 1-800-Flowers for Uncovering Affair

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A married man is suing 1-800-Flowers for $1 million for revealing that he was cheating on his wife. Just deserts? Sheer stupidity? Or the worst customer service ever?

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All New US Passports Will Include Hidden RFID Chips

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Starting in 2008 all U.S. Passports will have an RFID chip hidden within them, allowing your personal information to be read secretly through the air without you even knowing. Can you do anything about that? Maybe.

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DEFCON Blows The Lid Off Undercover NBC Reporter; Sends Her Away

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[News Media]
Let's say you're a blond producer for NBC, and you think you're going to disguise yourself and infiltrate one of the country's largest conventions of computer hackers & security professionals and try to get people to confess to committing crimes.

What happens then, when you're sitting in the audience and they announce a fun new game for everyone to participate in, called, "Identify the undercover NBC reporter trying to make us all look bad."

READ MORE | 1 comment since 2008-03-07 01:00:55 | Comment on this Article

US Wants Your Religion, Politics, Sexual Pref To Enter Country

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Highly sensitive information about the religious beliefs, political opinions, and even the sex life of Britons travelling to the United States is to be made available to US authorities when the European Commission agrees to a new system of checking passengers.

The EC is in the final stages of agreeing a new Passenger Name Record system with the US which will allow American officials to access detailed biographical information about passengers entering international airports.

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Dry Grass And It's Your Ass

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[Mean People]
A 70-year-old Utah woman has been released from jail after being arrested for failing to water her lawn and refusing to give a police officer her name. A police officer enforcing Orem, Utah's nuisance ordinance against neglected yards (it's unclear which ordinance might cover the roughing-up of little old ladies) knocked on Betty Perry's door a couple of day's ago and she opened up to see what was going on. Big mistake.

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Homeland Security Department Loses Employee Data

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The Transportation Security Administration has lost a computer hard drive containing Social Security numbers, bank data and payroll information for about 100,000 employees.

On the bright side, the TSA has promised they'll enroll their employees in a free credit-monitoring service. Woot!

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If You Shopped At TJ Maxx or Marshalls, Time For New Credit Card

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[Get-Rich-Quick]
At least 45.7 million credit and debit card numbers were stolen by hackers who broke into the computer systems at the TJX Cos. in Framingham and the United Kingdom and siphoned off data over a period of several years, making it the biggest breach of personal data ever reported, according to security specialists.

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eBay Scammers Are Out Of Control

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[Get-Rich-Quick]
The legitimate eBay community is apparently up in arms about a recent infestation of scams and fraudulent activity online. Rumor has it every time the mainstream media tries to do a story on this issue, the story suddenly disappears and then you see a bunch of eBay commercials on the network *cough* CNN *cough*

A special "eBay phish kit" is now being sold on the black market. This kit is complete with all the tools a scammer needs to set up a phony eBay look-alike site to skim peoples user IDs and passwords. It even includes assorted product images for fake auctions to get the unsuspecting user to click his identity away (or whisk the user off eBay and to whatever nefarious site you want to promote).

The new technique is called "Pharming" and it is rampant and after more than four months, the folks at eBay seem incapable of stopping it.

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FBI Constitutional Privacy Violations May Top 3,000

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The Justice Department's inspector general told a committee of angry House members yesterday that the FBI may have violated the law or government policies as many as 3,000 times since 2003 as agents secretly collected the telephone, bank and credit card records of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals residing here.

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FBI Wiretapping Scandal Widens

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A front-page Washington Post article reports that the FBI's illegal use of wiretap/record requests was known inside the FBI but continued anyway.

In essence, the FBI and our nation's telecommunications companies have secretly created a framework whereby the FBI can obtain -- instantaneously and without limits -- any information it asks for. The Patriot Act already substantially expanded the circumstances under which the FBI can obtain such records without the need for subpoenas or any judicial process, and it left in place only the most minimal limitations and protections. But it is those very minimal safeguards which the FBI continuously violated in order to obtain whatever information its agents desired, about any Americans they targeted, with literally no limits of any kind.

READ MORE | 1 comment since 2007-03-19 22:31:20 | Comment on this Article

Canadian Company Wants To Photograph Every House In U.S.

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[Get-Rich-Quick]
Photographers from a Canadian company are going house to house, shooting pictures of the roughly 300,000 houses in metropolitan Tucson, Arizona.

It's part of an effort to photograph and appraise every house in the country, creating a database that can be sold to banks and insurance companies.

I wonder if everyone is particularly keen on this Canadian company taking pictures of their house and selling them to the highest bidders?

READ MORE | 1 comment since 2007-02-07 14:49:47 | Comment on this Article

Bush Says U.S. Mail Can Now Be Opened Without Warrants

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President Bush quietly has claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant.

Bush asserted the new authority Dec. 20 after signing legislation that overhauls some postal regulations. He then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open mail under emergency conditions, contrary to existing law and contradicting the bill he had just signed, according to experts who have reviewed it.

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Your Cell Phone Is A Bug

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The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

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Just When You Thought Your Network Was Secure

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Check out this video from England demonstrating what people can find out from you in very short order... and you thought you were taking precautions so nobody could get access to your computer or data right?

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A Great Place for Online Sex

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You can't make this stuff up, folks...it seems that the Foley story just keeps getting more and more icky. Now the investigative reporters at ABC News have discovered that Congressman Foley (R-Florida) was engaging in a little online sexual banter...including description of the extected payoff of such banter...while on the floor of the House of Representatives, awaiting a vote to increase funding for the Iraq war.

READ MORE | 1 comment since 2006-11-01 23:49:29 | Comment on this Article

Now Big Brother Can Talk!

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Britain has one security camera for every 14 of its citizens--over 4 million in all. Middlesbrough has extended the functionality of these cameras so that the operators can actually talk to those they watch. The mayor, an ex-cop whose service nickname was Robocop, says that "there's been too much spoken about human rights, too much about civil liberties of the wrongdoers."

READ MORE | 2 comments since 2006-10-05 12:05:39 | Comment on this Article

Craigslist Ad Responders Revealed

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[Mean People]
A guy who identifies himself as Jason Fortuny, a 30 year old network administrator, posted a graphic ad on Seattle's Craigslist, pretending to be a woman wanting some BDSM sex.

Not surprisingly, many men responded, many with photos and more than a few with pics of their genitals.

Some used their work accounts, provided their real names and gave out their cellphone numbers. One looks to be a contractor for Microsoft, while another used a .mil address to reply.

Fortuny, whose MySpace profile says he likes to "push people's buttons" then posted all the photos and correspondence online.

I'm sure nothing bad will come of this...

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JP Morgan-Chase Accidentally Loses 2.6 Million Users' Data

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About 2.6 million current and former Circuit City credit card account holders are being notified by credit card vendor Chase Card Services that five computer data tapes containing their personal information were mistakenly identified as trash and thrown away by Chase personnel in July.

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The Freaky World of Peoples' Revealed Search Results

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[Dubious Research]
By now most know about AOL's "mistake" of releasing a portion of their search data to the public for research purposes. Even a cursory glance at the so called "anonymous" data (where users were identified with a number), it became obvious people reveal quite a bit about themselves and their social network when using search engines, and this data, in almost any form, could be considered a substantive privacy invasion.

Nonetheless, the data was put online and undoubtedly never to be easily removed, and has prompted many sites to sift through the torrid search queries to reveal a veritable cornucopia of weird and bizarre people... How bizarre? Well, read more if you're brave...

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Bush's Warrantless Wiretaps Ruled Unconstitutional

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[Good News]
A federal judge ruled today that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit became the first judge (of hopefully many, who aren't so afraid as to uphold the Constitution) to strike down the National Security Agency's program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy.

Score another one for the ACLU!

READ MORE | 5 comments since 2006-08-24 01:22:07 | Comment on this Article

Many FEMA Trailers Use Same Key

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FEMA will replace locks on as many as 118,000 trailers used by Gulf Coast hurricane victims after discovering the same key could open many of the mobile homes.

This must be more of that "National Security" the government is so keen at providing.

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Red Cross Donors' Security Compromised; Claims No Big Deal

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Darren Irby, spokesman for the national American Red Cross says, "We haven't viewed this as a security breach at this point."

What would you call it when a laptop containing personal information from thousands of blood donors - including Social Security numbers, sexual and disease history and medical information - was stolen from a local office of the American Red Cross? Sounds like a security breach to me.

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Administration Secretly Tapping Your Bank Records

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The Bush administration, relying on a presidential declaration of emergency, has secretly been tapping into a vast global database of confidential financial transactions for nearly five years, according to U.S. government and industry officials.

Initiated shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, the surveillance program has used a broad new interpretation of the Treasury Department's administrative powers to bypass traditional banking privacy protections. It has swept in large volumes of international money transfers, including many made by U.S. citizens and residents, in an effort to track the locations, identities and activities of suspected terrorists.

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Washington D.C. Employee Data Stolen

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A laptop containing the Social Security numbers and other personal data of 13,000 District of Columbia employees and retirees has been stolen, officials said.

The computer was stolen Monday from the Washington home of an employee of ING U.S. Financial Services, which administers the district's retirement plan.

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Support Our Troops--Lose Their Info

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Let's say that you're one of the brave soldiers who have served your country honorably, earning yourself the right to a few veteran's benefits for your service. What's one way your Veteran's Administration can thank you?

Why, lose the personal information of as many as 26.5 million of you, of course. Names, birth dates, social security numbers...exactly what you'd need to steal the identity of a hardworking veteran with decent credit. Hey, who wants to open a credit card on Private Johnson's account?

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Wired Goes Public With AT&T Documents on Spying

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Here's a snippet of the information AT&T and the US Government are desperately trying to supress:

In 2003 AT&T built "secret rooms" hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.

The cat's out of the bag. Wired has made a pre-emptive move for "freedom" by publicly releasing the documents showing details on wiretapping and more.

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Why Qwest Told the NSA to Piss Off

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Verizon Communications Inc., and BellSouth Corp. began sharing records of tens of millions of their customers' phone calls with the NSA shortly after the 2001 terror attacks, according to USA Today. But when the NSA came calling, former Qwest Communications CEO Joseph Nacchio broke ranks with fellow former Bell companies and didn't sell out his customers...

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Study Reveals Even Sponsored Links May Contain Spyware

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A recent study by McAffee company, Siteadvisor.com has revealed some interesting data: that virtually all the search engine results contain links to sites that install adware and subversive programs. Ok, that's nothing new, but some search engines are "cleaner" than others.

However, what's most shocking is that the results indicated that sponsored (paid advertisement) links were two-to-four times more likely to lead to spyware than "organic" (non-sponsored) results. This is especially true for certain common keyword searches like "free screensavers" and "download music." (My mantra has always been, anything that calls itself "free" should immediately be under great suspicion)

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