by Chase Clow & Z. S. Justus Recently the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) filed a lawsuit against the New York Police Department (NYPD) over its plan to use 3,000 surveillance cameras to help secure lower Manhattan against terrorist attacks. The NYCLU is chiefly concerned with the data the thousands of closed-circuit cameras captures. [...]

by Steven R. Corman Ars Technica reported yesterday on a letter sent by Congressman Brad Miller to the Inspector General of the Director of National Intelligence.  Miller, who is Chairman of a House subcommittee on technology oversight, sounded the alarm over a current initiative called “Railhead,” which is designed to upgrade the central database that [...]

by Nicholas Brody Wikipedia is becoming a major source of news and reference information for the American public. A Pew internet poll found that 36% of online adults consult Wikipedia. That number jumps to 50% for college-educated adults. Among educational and reference websites, Wikipedia is by far the most popular, owning a 24.33% share of [...]

By Bud Goodall Pardon my rant. I say that in advance but without apology. Today’s New York Times article about the United States Senate vote to approve President Bush’s plan to grant legal protection to telephone companies for cooperating with illegal wiretaps on American citizens as well as to expand existing government spy powers on [...]

by Steven R. Corman The Daily Princetonian reports an interview with computer scientist Jennifer Rexford who claims that more wiretapping can actually help the Bad Guys and make us less safe. How? By providing a system for them to hack: They can tap into an infrastructure the government essentially built for them. It is a [...]

Picking up on a MEMRI dispatch, Computerworld ran a story on a software package designed to help al Qaeda operatives put strong encryption on their files and messages sent over the Internet. The new encryption tool is called Mujahideen Secrets 2 and appears to be an updated version of easier-to-crack software that was released early [...]

by Steven R. Corman At a government workshop some time ago I head someone describe a new tool that was described as the “voice of Allah.” This was said to be a device that would operate at a distance and would deliver a message that only a single person could hear. The story was that [...]