The accessing of private passport-based travel data of all three Presidential candidates by contractors working for the State Department has finally galvanized Capitol Hill to address the issue of privacy–something we’ve been begging them to do for years. Ron Wyden sums it up succinctly:

“The Government Accountability Office has been warning about this problem for a decade. And it seems to me in this administration, there’s been pretty much a culture of disregard for privacy, and that’s part of the problem,” he said.

Wyden may have been referring to a 2006 report from the GAO documenting the lack of oversight in sharing Social Security Numbers with contractors working for various federal agencies, including the IRS and the FBI, as well as within the private sector. It is but one of many reports the investigative agency has issued documenting the serious vulnerabilities our government’s mad drive to outsource its functions to the private sector has wrought–but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Full Story »

Last month the Associated Press cast a harsh light on a dark secret of many big public industries–that workers have far too much access to personal data of customers, and misuse and abuse it accordingly

Vast computer databases give curious employees the ability to look up sensitive information on people with the click of a mouse. The WE Energies database includes credit and banking information, payment histories, Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and energy usage. In some cases, it even includes income and medical information. Experts say some companies do little to stop such abuses even though they could lead to identity theft, stalking and other privacy invasions. And companies that uncover violations can keep them quiet because in many cases it is not illegal to snoop, only to use the data for crimes. Full Story »

Maybe you once cared for a drug addict? What led them there, what keeps them there? Not your problem. And you believe in all that “tough love” shit; you know that they must make the decision to come clean and live responsibly.

But you also believe that you can make that journey easier for them by showing them how an addiction-free life can be, and by offering them the advantages that make it worth going cold to achieve.

At some point, though, maybe you get an inkling that the process isn’t working. Maybe it’s after they’ve come out of rehab once too often, only to go on a binge again, that you start thinking that the effort isn’t worth the stress.

Countries are like that too.

Full Story »

It’s official–the three-month writer’s strike has come to an end, with 92.5% of the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) voting to get back to work after an agreement was struck between the WGA and the major studios that would (in theory) guarantee writers a larger percentage of revenue from shows broadcast or sold over the Internet–the chief sticking point that led to the strike in the first place. Full Story »

I just wanted to follow up on Brian’s awesome post detailing Sony BMG’s plans to sell DRM-free music through Amazon as part of a Super Bowl promotion by making a few additional points: Full Story »

With the war in Iraq, the faltering economy, and health care dominating the issues front for the candidates, it’s no wonder technology issues have largely been back-burnered in the mainstream political debate. But that doesn’t make them any less relevant or important–or less requiring of coverage.

CNet’s Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache sent 10 technology-oriented questions to the candidates, discussing net neutrality, Internet taxation, REAL ID, wiretapping, and other issues, and CNet has published the answers as part of their Technology Voter’s Guide. After the jump, we’ll take a closer look at who answered (and who didn’t), and what they said. Full Story »

Welcome back to day 2 of the S&R Year in Review. Today we tackle some of 2007’s big moments in news and current events.

The Invasion and Occupation of Iraq Surpasses the American Civil War in Duration: The United States’ involvement in World War I lasted only 19 months and World War II lasted 44 months for the United States, even though the war itself was nearly six years long. The occupation of Iraq (aka the Iraq War) outlasted World War II in November of 2006, making the duration of U.S. involvement in Iraq the third longest foreign occupation in U.S. history. The American Civil War lasted 48 months, and the Iraq occupation surpassed that duration on March 20, 2007. This makes the Iraq occupation the third longest running period of continuous conflict in U.S. history, behind only the Vietnam War and its sister conflict in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Full Story »

Some products are so critical to life and living that their absence would cause tremendous harm to society. One such line of products are pharmaceutical medications aimed at combating the diseases that fall predominantly on the poor.

Oxfam – a non-governmental organisation dedicated to “finding lasting solutions to poverty and injustice” – has released a report, “Investing for Life” in which they claim to have identified the source of injustice and illness amongst the world’s poor. It is the world’s large pharmaceutical firms.

Oxfam claims that, by enforcing their intellectual property rights and charging high prices for their products, Big Pharma is undermining everyone’s universal “right” to health. Full Story »

“Corporate America ought to be darned worried. If you are a major corporation with very sensitive technology, you have been targeted. Somebody is spying on you right now.” Todd Davis, FBI supervisor in Sacramento

There’s been a great deal of debate lately about spying - FISA and domestic spying issues, for example - and now the news that Blackwater is augmenting its army, navy and air force with its own CIA. While I’m routinely bemused by the conclusions we seem to reach (we’re about to approve a new Attorney General who doesn’t think waterboarding is torture, remember), I do welcome these kinds of discussions. The world of information and intelligence has been changing dramatically for years and our policy deliberations haven’t kept pace. It’s critical to think about what we know, how we know it, what we do with it, and the implications of not knowing it, because despite the fact that they’ve been awfully cavalier about the Constitution, our conservative friends are generally right in noting that there are bad guys in the world. In the end, the question really boils down to how can we best deal with the bogeys without becoming bad guys ourselves.

There’s one area that we aren’t talking about, though, and it’s a topic we ought to be very concerned with: corporate espionage. Full Story »

The big news in the tech world this past week was Google’s unveiling of OpenSocial, a set of programming tools that will enable members of multiple social networks to share files and information across the different platforms, and for developers to create programs that work equally well on LinkedIn as they do on Friendster. Noticeably absent from the alliance supporting OpenSocial were the two 800-pound gorillas of the social networking world, MySpace and Facebook…well, at least for a day or so. It was barely 24 hours later that MySpace announced it would join the OpenSocial coalition, leaving the tech press breathlessly wondering what Facebook’s next move would be, and whether this represents another step in Google’s plan to dominate all of the space/time continuum.

In reading through all of this, and hearing comments from Sam about it, I wanted to cut through the hype and address what this really means for people on social networks and the companies that power them. Let’s go point by point: Full Story »

If you publish your photos online, you’re understandably giving up some amount of control over those photos. Everyone and their uncle can copy and modify the photos, and while you have some amount of copyright protection, that protection is limited. But some online photo companies are moving beyond that and are claiming rights to your copyrighted photos in their terms of service even if you never publish the photos online. Photobucket does it (section 3 of their TOS), but so does another company: Google. Full Story »