From 50,000 Feet

If you’re in the US, you can no longer look at wikileaks.org, the wiki site where whistleblowers could post leaked documents, after a California court ruled in favor of a Swiss bank accused of money-laundering. The court ruled in spite of the fact that Wikileaks did not attend the hearing due to […]

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Interception of private personal and financial data should be treated like a release of nuclear waste, says Cory Doctorow in the Guardian.  Referring to the loss of private tax data for 25 million British residents, Doctorow asks, “will the leaked government data ever actually vanish?”
Our capacity to store, copy and distribute information is ascending a […]

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They say your face is your fortune. But recent reports suggest your face could be your misfortune, too — if you are prone to facial expressions that your typical terrorist makes.
The Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) has dispatched a squad of specially-trained microfacial expression analysts to U.S. airports to monitor passengers’ brief, subtle […]

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Silicon Valley’s hometown paper is the San Jose Mercury-News, and columnist/blogger Dean Takahashi is its top tech news reporter. Late last week, he published his tech predictions for 2008. His first guess is creepy.
Threats to our civil liberties will increase from two directions. The government will seek more authority to spy on […]

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A huge fiasco in England — Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs office (HMRC) mishandled and then lost two CDs containing private tax data on 25 million UK families. Alastair Revell, who blogs for IT Director, says this:
Apparently, the CDs were sent by internal mail without being registered or recorded in any way. It was […]

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