'Human error' led to addresses being placed in wrong field when sending survey to victims over standard of service

The arrest of four Sun journalists threatens to open a fresh phase of the scandal surrounding News International

On Saturday morning, the police arrested four journalists who have worked for Rupert Murdoch. For a while, it looked as though these were yet more arrests of people related to the News of the World but then it became clear that this was something much more significant.

This may be the moment when the scandal that closed the NoW finally started to pose a potential threat to at least one of Murdoch’s three other UK newspaper titles: the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times.

The four men arrested on Saturday are not linked to the NoW. They come from the Sun, from the top of the tree – the current head of news and his crime editor, the former managing editor and deputy editor.

Nothing is certain. No one has been convicted of anything. The four who were arrested on Saturday – like the 25 others before them – have not even been charged with any offence. But behind the scenes, something very significant has changed at News International.

Under enormous legal and political pressure, Murdoch has ordered that the police be given everything they need. Whereas Scotland Yard began their inquiry a year ago with nothing much more than the heap of scruffy paperwork seized from the NoW’s private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, Murdoch’s Management and Standards Committee has now handed them what may be the largest cache of evidence ever gathered by a police operation in this country, including the material that led to Saturday’s arrests. …

The role of the former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks is expected to come under fresh scrutiny after four of the paper's current and former journalists were arrested on Saturday in connection with an investigation into corrupt payments to police.

Detectives with Operation Elveden, the Metropolitan Police's investigation into illegal payments to officers, raided the Sun's offices in Wapping, east London, morning after receiving information from News Corp, the parent company of News International, which owns the paper. A serving police officer in the Met's Territorial Policing command was also arrested at his place of work and questioned at a police station.

In a statement, News Corp said: "Metropolitan Police Service officers from Operation Elveden arrested four current and former employees from the Sun newspaper. Searches have also taken place at the homes and offices of those arrested. News Corporation made a commitment last summer that unacceptable news gathering practices by individuals in the past would not be repeated."

It is understood that staff and management at the Sun had no warning of the operation. The four Sun journalists arrested were Mike Sullivan, the paper's crime editor; the former managing editor, Graham Dudman; an executive editor, Fergus Shanahan; and Chris Pharo, a news desk executive. They all worked under Brooks, who edited the Sun from January 2003 to September 2009, when she became chief executive of News International. ...

Google is under fire for plans to collect data on individual users across all of its websites and merge the information into a single profile that can be used to alter the person's search results and target them with advertising and services.

Users will have no way to opt out of being tracked across the board when the search company unifies its privacy policy and terms of service for all its online offerings, including search, Gmail and Google+. The move is being criticised by privacy advocates and could attract greater scrutiny from anti-trust regulators.

"If you're signed in, we may combine information you've provided from one service with information from other services," Google's director of privacy, product and engineering, Alma Whitten, wrote in a blogpost.

After the new policy comes into effect, user information from most Google products – such as YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google+ and Android mobile – will be treated as a single trove of data, which the company could use for targeted advertising or other revenue-raising purposes.

An article in the Washington Post raised concerns about details of people's private meetings, health, politics and finances becoming part of their digital dossier kept by Google. Confidential discussions via Gmail of a meeting location might be transferred to Google Maps without the user's consent, for example. ...

Despite the repetition of denials, an accumulation of horror stories of tabloid practices has emerged

"Oh no I didn't!" "Oh yes you did!" As good as any Christmas pantomime, the Leveson inquiry into tabloid morals may well have been intended, as its critics allege, to distract attention from the prime minister's own ill-advised links with Rupert Murdoch.

But nevertheless, in the first month of what is due to be a long London run in courtroom 73 at the Royal Courts of Justice, Leveson mostly succeeded in laying on a gripping show. There have been 63 live performers so far.

This is despite the absence for legal reasons of key testimony, including from the News of the World executive responsible for hacking the phone of the murdered Milly Dowler.

Piers Morgan, one-time Mirror editor, proved one of the more theatrical of the oh-no-I-didn't brigade. He gave curt and sulky answers, and tried to blame Sir Paul McCartney's ex-wife for a voicemail tape he himself once boasted of hearing. Morgan also lashed out at the Guardian's reporters who unearthed the present scandal, calling them the sanctimonious "bishops of Fleet Street".

His fellow editor Colin Myler, who presided over four years of cover-up at the late News of the World, did at least have the grace to blurt out "I apologise" when accused of deceiving the Press Complaints Commission.

But the overall picture Myler sought to paint was of a saintly process of reform, worthy of any bishop, in which the sinners had long been swept away, and he no longer tolerated misbehaviour.

When he made this claim, "Oh yes you did!" might have been heard at the back of the hall. For he was at once contradicted by a large ex-policeman, Derek Webb.

Nicknamed, rather improbably, the Silent Shadow, Webb's job at the News of the World was to follow people about, the hearing was told. When it became too hot to employ him as a private detective, he explained on oath, he was simply told to get a National Union of Journalists card. This happened under the supposedly reforming editorship of Myler.

The inquiry's lawyers asked Webb whether anything changed at all at the NoW after the new broom succeeded the disgraced former editor Andy Coulson. Webb replied succinctly: "Nothing." ...

The names of several News of the World journalists who ordered a private detective to hack into mobile phones belonging to six public figures will not be publicly disclosed after Scotland Yard intervened to prevent their publication.

The names were passed to Steve Coogan on Friday by Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who worked for the paper, in compliance with a high court order the actor obtained earlier this year.

The names are critical to the phone-hacking investigation because they could show how far the practice was widespread at the paper, which was closed down by Rupert Murdoch last month, despite consistent denials from its owner News Group Newspapers. Coogan is one of several celebrities suing the paper for breach of privacy.

The high court order instructed Mulcaire to reveal who at the paper asked him to illegally intercept messages left on mobile belonging to former model Elle Macpherson, publicist Max Clifford and four others.

Mulcaire, who was employed exclusively by the News of the World, was also told to reveal who at the paper ordered him to target Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor, his colleague Jo Armstrong and football agent Sky Andrew.

He was refused leave to appeal against the order earlier this month and handed over the names on Friday, the deadline set by the high court for making the information available.

Law firm Schillings was contacted by Mulcaire's solicitor Sarah Webb of Payne Hicks Beach on Friday and asked not to make the names public. Webb said: "The issues of confidentiality are of concern to the Metropolitan police and we asked Coogan's solicitors not to disclose the information until the Met could consider the matter." ...

Fresh evidence has emerged of other voice messages allegedly hacked from the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's by the News of the World.

A report suggested that the former Sunday tabloid newspaper had details of more voicemails left on her mobile phone than originally thought.

The Wall Street Journal said it had obtained earlier print editions of the newspaper from 2002, which made reference to more messages on the missing teenager's phone.

It states that it undertook a review of the News International-owned newspaper and found that early versions on one day contained detailed quotes from three voicemails.

In the final edition, the article only contained one passing reference to a single voicemail.

On 14 April 2002, the News of the World published a story in its final edition about a woman allegedly pretending to be Milly who had applied for a job with a recruitment agency. It suggested that the hoaxer had given the agency Milly's real mobile number, which it used to contact her when a vacancy arose, leaving a message on her voicemail six days after she went missing.

The newspaper later informed the police about the voicemail that it is alleged to have intercepted.

However, the Wall Street Journal has now said that it has obtained earlier editions of the newspaper from the same day, which include an article that makes reference to two further messages left on the phone. ...

A police detective has been arrested on suspicion of leaking details about Scotland Yard's phone-hacking investigation.

The man has not been charged but he has been suspended by the Metropolitan police.

The Met also on Friday arrested a 35-year-old man, who Sky News named as former News of the World reporter Dan Evans, on suspicion of phone hacking. He has been released on police bail.

Evans was suspended by the paper more than a year ago after being named in a civil case against the now defunct tabloid's publisher, News International subsidiary News Group Newspapers, brought by interior designer Kelly Hoppen.

Sue Akers, the force's deputy assistant commissioner, who is leading the investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World, said: "I made very clear when I took on this investigation the need for operational and information security. It is hugely disappointing that this may not have been adhered to."

Akers added: "The MPS [Met] takes the unauthorised disclosure of information extremely seriously and has acted swiftly in making these arrests." ...

Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the centre of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, has been ordered by a court to reveal who instructed him to access the voicemails of model Elle Macpherson and five other public figures, including Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrat deputy leader.

Mulcaire is due to reveal these details by the end of next week in a move that will throw further light on the scale of phone hacking at the now defunct News International tabloid.

The Guardian has learned that Mulcaire has lost an attempt to appeal against a court order obliging him to identify who instructed him to hack the phones, something he has resisted since February.

Mulcaire, who was jailed in 2007 after pleading guilty to hacking the phones of members of the royal household for the NoW, has been forced into making the disclosure after legal action by Steve Coogan. In February, the actor's lawyers argued in court that if it were proved that the paper had instructed Mulcaire to hack into the phones of the six public figures, it would show that phone hacking was taking place on an industrial scale.

Mulcaire must now name names in relation to Macpherson, Hughes and four others: Max Clifford; the football agent Sky Andrew; Jo Armstrong, a legal adviser to the Professional Footballers Association; and Gordon Taylor, the former head of the PFA. At his trial in 2006 Mulcaire also admitted hacking the phones of five of the six names in Coogan's court order. ...

Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and their former editor Andy Coulson all face embarrassing new allegations of dishonesty and cover-up after the publication of an explosive letter written by the News of the World's disgraced royal correspondent, Clive Goodman.

In the letter, which was written four years ago but published only on Tuesday, Goodman claims that phone hacking was "widely discussed" at editorial meetings at the paper until Coulson himself banned further references to it; that Coulson offered to let him keep his job if he agreed not to implicate the paper in hacking when he came to court; and that his own hacking was carried out with "the full knowledge and support" of other senior journalists, whom he named.

The claims are acutely troubling for the prime minister, David Cameron, who hired Coulson as his media adviser on the basis that he knew nothing about phone hacking. And they confront Rupert and James Murdoch with the humiliating prospect of being recalled to parliament to justify the evidence which they gave last month on the aftermath of Goodman's allegations. In a separate letter, one of the Murdochs' own law firms claim that parts of that evidence were variously "hard to credit", "self-serving" and "inaccurate and misleading".

Goodman's claims also raise serious questions about Rupert Murdoch's close friend and adviser, Les Hinton, who was sent a copy of the letter but failed to pass it to police and who then led a cast of senior Murdoch personnel in telling parliament that they believed Coulson knew nothing about the interception of the voicemail of public figures and that Goodman was the only journalist involved.

The letters from Goodman and from the London law firm Harbottle & Lewis are among a cache of paperwork published by the Commons culture, media and sport select committee. One committee member, the Labour MP Tom Watson, said Goodman's letter was "absolutely devastating". He said: "Clive Goodman's letter is the most significant piece of evidence that has been revealed so far. It completely removes News International's defence. This is one of the largest cover-ups I have seen in my lifetime."

Goodman's letter is dated 2 March 2007, soon after he was released from a four-month prison sentence. It is addressed to News International's director of human resources, Daniel Cloke, and registers his appeal against the decision of Hinton, the company's then chairman, to sack him for gross misconduct after he admitted intercepting the voicemail of three members of the royal household. Goodman lists five grounds for his appeal.

He argues that the decision is perverse because he acted "with the full knowledge and support" of named senior journalists and that payments for the private investigator who assisted him, Glenn Mulcaire, were arranged by another senior journalist. The names of the journalists have been redacted from the published letter at the request of Scotland Yard, who are investigating the affair. ...

The Liberal Democrat MP, Simon Hughes, is to sue News International over phone hacking at the News of the World, he confirmed on Thursday.

Hughes told the Evening Standard: "It is important now that all those who were clearly the subject of criminal activity help to get to the bottom of what happened during this dark period in British journalism."

Hughes's decision to take legal action against Rupert Murdoch's Sunday tabloid, which was closed last month, is significant because the private investigator employed by the paper has already been convicted of targeting his mobile phone.

Glenn Mulcaire pleaded guilty to hacking into Hughes's messages, along with those left on mobiles belonging to seven other people, in 2006.

That means Mulcaire will be unable to resist complying with any court order Hughes obtains that requires the former investigator to say who asked him to intercept Hughes's messages.

In other cases currently going through the civil courts, Mulcaire's legal team has successfully appealed against such orders by arguing that he would be incriminating himself if he were to comply with them by admitting his guilt.

Mulcaire will not be able to mount the same argument when Hughes takes legal action, against News International subsidiary News Group Newspapers, because he pleaded guilty to hacking his phone five years ago.

That could lead to more News of the World journalists being named. Three of the original eight victims named in the 2006 legal action have already sued the paper's owner. ...

Leading lawyers feel client information may have been intercepted after their names were found in Glenn Mulcaire's file

Owen Bowcott
Monday 25 July 2011

Now it's the turn of lawyers and the legal process to be sucked into the phone-hacking vortex. The Law Society has even suggested justice itself is under threat, implying messages could have been intercepted with the intention of influencing court cases.

Several prominent solicitors fear their mobile phones have been hacked. Some have been formally informed of the risk by police after detectives discovered their numbers among a private investigator's notes.

Graham Shear, of Berwin Leighton Paisner who has represented celebrities such as Robbie Williams and Jude Law, is one of those who has lodged a claim against the News of the World for damages over breach of privacy.

"In January this year I was contacted by senior officers in Operation Weeting [the Metropolitan police inquiry into phone hacking]," Shear said. "They told me that, contrary to what had been said previously, a number of my clients were referred to in documents from [Glenn] Mulcaire's file. My name was among them."

If messages had been intercepted, he said, it would have been a breach of confidential relationship with clients.

The media lawyer Mark Stephens expressed similar anxieties. "I asked [Scotland Yard] if I'd been hacked - they came back to me in 90 minutes and said yes," he told Channel 4 News. "It confirmed my worst suspicions, that I was in Mulcaire's notebook. There is nothing I can do about it, but the important thing is to ascertain which client [was the target] so I can advise them. My concern is for them, not myself." ...

A leading tabloid journalist has joined those suing the News of the World for allegedly hacking into voicemails, reviving claims that the Rupert Murdoch-owned paper has been spying on its rivals to steal their stories.

According to the high court registry, Fleet Street veteran Dennis Rice has issued proceedings against the NoW and its private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire. Rice, who is now freelance, was the investigations editor at the Mail on Sunday (MoS) when Mulcaire was at the peak of his activity between 2005 and 2006.

A source familiar with Mulcaire's activities claims that, acting on orders from an NoW editorial executive, he intercepted voicemail messages from Rice and half a dozen other journalists at the MoS. They say that among other targets, the paper was keen to steal stories that Rice was filing from Germany, where England were playing in the World Cup in the summer of 2006, generating tabloid interest in the players' wives and girlfriends.

The same source said that by hacking into voicemails, Mulcaire obtained a password which would have allowed him to access the MoS internal computer system, potentially disclosing all of its email traffic and every story awaiting publication.

Some journalists who have worked for the NoW claim they were also attempting to penetrate the security of the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and the People.

If proved, the claim could break the alliance of silence which has seen most Fleet Street papers refuse to investigate the scandal. Rice's legal action is only the latest in a number of indications that the claim may be correct. ...

... Grant...described the closeness of successive governments to the Murdoch press as "repulsive" and claimed his films, such as Love Actually, did not rely on publicity in the tabloid press for their success.

"Only one actress spoke to a newspaper in publicising that film. The tabloid press is completely unnecessary in my industry," said Grant.

He added that a film's success was 97% down to a good film, 2% to publicity material such as a trailer and 1% publicity in the press. "Almost no one will talk to the tabloid press," he said.

"People who have a bit of success in life will do anything in the world to avoid talking to a tabloid newspaper."

Warming to his theme, Grant said: "So little do we need the tabloid press that if I won a big libel case against a tabloid I wouldn't [want money], I would want an assurance that they would never mention my name again.

"We don't need them. The sooner they go out of business the better. They rely almost entirely on stealing people's privacy. Those journalists might go back to proper journalism in six or 12 months. They might actually be grateful ... they might feel better about themselves."

He added: "Basically they have all gone down the easy route, especially in the digital age. They just steal someone's privacy and sell it for money." ...

The Metropolitan police has admitted that during the first four years of the phone-hacking affair it warned only 36 people they may have been targeted by the News of the World's private investigator Glenn Mulcaire.

Scotland Yard's latest inquiry, which was launched in January, is believed to be contacting up to 4,000 people whose names and personal details were found in Mulcaire's possession during the original police investigation in 2006.

The disclosure of the number – which Scotland Yard had previously insisted on keeping secret – exposes the Met to the complaint that it breached an agreement with the director of public prosecutions that it would warn all "potential victims" in the affair.

It will also revive criticism that it has consistently played down the scale of criminal activity commissioned by the News of the World.

Scotland Yard has previously repeatedly refused to disclose the number of victims it had warned, rejecting applications under the Freedom of Information Act on the grounds that releasing it would necessarily disclose the identities of those warned, and that this would breach their privacy.

However, in a sharp change of policy, the Met's acting deputy commissioner, John Yates, volunteered that during the 2006 inquiry police had warned 28 people they may have been victims; and that after the Guardian revived the affair in July 2009 they warned eight more.

In a letter to John Whittingdale, chairman of the culture, media and sport select committee, Yates – who was responsible for dealing with the hacking affair for nearly 20 months – gave no explanation for the failure to inform more than 36 potential victims. He said: "I have accepted that more could and should have been done in relation to those who may have been potential victims." ...

Millions of smartphone users and BT customers who use Wi-Fi wireless internet "hotspot" connections in public are vulnerable to fraud and identity theft, a Guardian investigation has established.

In tests conducted with volunteers – to avoid breaching telecommunications and computer misuse laws – security experts were able to gather usernames, passwords and messages from phones using Wi-Fi in public places.

In the case of the best-selling Apple iPhone 4 and other smartphone handsets, the information could be harvested without the users' knowledge and even when they were not actively surfing the web if the phone was turned on.

BT, the UK's biggest provider of such hotspots with five million of its "Openzone" connections in the UK in train stations, hotels and airports, admitted that it has known of the weakness for "years" and that it is working on a permanent fix. But it has no timetable for when it might be implemented.

Using a £49 piece of communications equipment and software freely available for download from the internet, the investigation established that crooks could set up bogus Wi-Fi "gateways" to which the latest generation of mobile phones would automatically connect. Once a connection is established, all the information passing through the gateway can be either be read directly or decrypted using software that will run on a laptop.

In another test, a fake Wi-Fi hotspot invited people to "pay" for internet access with their credit card – but required them to click a box to accept terms and conditions which clearly stated "you agree we can do anything we like with your credit card details and personal logins".

A number of people entered their details. The Guardian did not retain any users' details in the experiment.

Not only could the information be used to steal identities, hijack email accounts and commit fraud but also to gather information about individuals and company employees. With the information gained in our investigation, fraudsters could have bought goods online or sent multiple e-gift vouchers worth as much as £1,000 each to pre-set email addresses. It is believed that such vouchers are already being traded by crooks over the internet. ...

Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised.

The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program.

For some phones, there could be almost a year's worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple's iOS 4 update to the phone's operating system, released in June 2010.

"Apple has made it possible for almost anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you've been," said Pete Warden, one of the researchers.

Only the iPhone records the user's location in this way, say Warden and Alasdair Allan, the data scientists who discovered the file and are presenting their findings at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. "Alasdair has looked for similar tracking code in [Google's] Android phones and couldn't find any," said Warden. "We haven't come across any instances of other phone manufacturers doing this."

Simon Davies, director of the pressure group Privacy International, said: "This is a worrying discovery. Location is one of the most sensitive elements in anyone's life – just think where people go in the evening. The existence of that data creates a real threat to privacy. The absence of notice to users or any control option can only stem from an ignorance about privacy at the design stage."

Warden and Allan point out that the file is moved onto new devices when an old one is replaced: "Apple might have new features in mind that require a history of your location, but that's our specualtion. The fact that [the file] is transferred across [to a new iPhone or iPad] when you migrate is evidence that the data-gathering isn't accidental." But they said it does not seem to be transmitted to Apple itself. ...

... Successfully forging the belief that tabloid journalism is a worthwhile use of your brief time on this planet must require a mental leap beyond the reach of Galileo. This is one reason why so many tabloid stories are routinely peppered with lies – if their staff didn't continually flex their delusion muscles, a torrent of dark, awful self-awareness might rush into their heads like unforgiving black water pouring through the side of a stricken submarine, and they'd all slash their wrists open right there at their workstations. The newsroom hubbub would be regularly broken by the dispiriting thump of lifeless heads thunking on to desks. Each morning their bosses would have to clear all the spent corpses away with a bulldozer and hire a fresh team of soon-to-be-heartbroken lifewasters to replace the ones who couldn't make it, whose powers of self-deception simply weren't up to the job. Who couldn't cope with the knowledge that they were wasting their lives actively making the world worse.

And now – on top of all of these trials and indignities, on top of the harrowing leukaemia-of-the-soul their career choice inflicts upon them – now their job has got even harder. Because for a while, at least, wasting your life actively making the world worse was relatively easy. You could pay someone to root through someone's dustbins. Then, when the early mobiles arrived, you could get a £59 frequency scanner and sit outside a soap star's flat, surreptitiously recording their calls. And when phones went digital, there was the voicemail wheeze, which made life even easier. You could sit at your desk illegally invading the privacy of strangers just by pushing buttons.

But now, having abused all those tricks, like they abused their talent – not for any noble cause, but to find out which girlband member snogged which boyband member – those easy games are up. And it couldn't have come at a worse time: with plummeting sales, the need for sensational stories is higher than ever. All of which means all those people wasting their lives actively making the world worse will now have to expend colossal effort in order to do so: like prisoners forced at gunpoint to dig their own graves – but with a rubber shovel.

There is no fate more tragic. Pity them. Pity them hard.

The News of the World reacted to the unexpected arrest of one of its most senior reporters by clearing his desk.

Despite the paper having promised that it would co-operate fully with police inquiries, executives descended on the desk of former news editor James Weatherup moments after learning of his arrest. Under the eyes of their legal team, they bagged up notebooks, papers and recording machines and removed them "via our lawyers", a firm whose identity the publisher refused to confirm.

A few hours later, the police arrived and took the bags to Scotland Yard.

The unexpected arrest of Weatherup, one of the most senior journalists at the News of the World, at his home leaves little room for doubt that the new police team investigating the phone-hacking scandal is determined to succeed where its much-criticised predecessors failed.

It was three weeks ago that the News of the World dumped a vast archive of data at Scotland Yard's door – a trove that has turbo-charged the Met investigation.

The data, which comprises millions of emails from everyone at the newspaper – and which the NoW previously claimed had been lost – could implicate the paper in more instances of malpractice than have been previously suggested.

There are 8,000 emails relating to Sienna Miller alone. An examination of their contents could reveal that many more public figures were also targeted by the newspaper, in addition to the 24 who are already bringing legal actions, including football agent Sky Andrew and the former culture secretary, Tessa Jowell. ...

Girl, 6, frisked by security at US airport
The parents of a young child have called for changes to airport security procedures after their six-year-old daughter was body-searched at New Orleans airport.
14 Apr 2011

Selena Drexel said her daughter Anna was confused and began crying after the pat-down.

"When it was over and the camera was off, she got very weepy," she said. "She was apologetic: 'I'm sorry Mommy, I don't know what I did wrong, I don't know why they're mad at me'."

Mrs Drexel said searches were inappropriate for children because they are usually told not to let adults touch them in sensitive areas.

Airport screeners would not tell her why they were frisking her six-year-old daughter, she added.

Security officials said the officer followed proper procedures but that the security agency was reviewing its screening policies.

Detectives investigating illegal news-gathering at the News of the World are planning to question Rebekah Brooks, the paper's former editor who is now Rupert Murdoch's chief executive in the UK, according to police sources.

The revelation came on the day that Brooks denied to MPs that she had "knowledge of any specific cases" of police officers being paid for information by any newspaper – despite having told MPs eight years ago that her journalists had paid officers in the past.

It is understood that Brooks now faces questioning from Operation Weeting, Scotland Yard's third attempt to investigate the interception of voicemail messages by News of the World journalists. At the same time, the Guardian has established that during an earlier inquiry Scotland Yard was so concerned by allegations that the paper was paying bribes to serving officers and other key workers that it tapped Brooks's telephone. Police found no evidence that she had committed any offence.

The tapping of her phone was carried out with a Home Office warrant early in 2004 as part of an inquiry by Scotland Yard's anti-corruption command into allegations that the News of the World was bribing serving officers, buying confidential data from the police national computer and making regular cash payments of up to £1,000 a week to employees of phone companies who were selling information from the accounts of public figures.

The paper's then assistant editor (news), Greg Miskiw, is believed to have been arrested and questioned. Four men were convicted of selling information from the police computer to the News of the World and other papers. But neither Brooks, Miskiw nor anyone else from Fleet Street was charged. ...

Sir Gus O'Donnell, the cabinet secretary, blocked an attempt by Gordon Brown before the general election to hold a judicial inquiry into allegations that the News of the World had hacked into the phones of cabinet ministers and other high-profile figures. ...

Rupert Murdoch used his political influence and contacts at the highest levels to try to get Labour MPs and peers to back away from investigations into phone hacking at the News of the World, a former minister in Gordon Brown's government has told the Observer.

The ex-minister, who does not want to be named, says he is aware of evidence that Murdoch, the chairman of News Corporation, relayed messages to Brown last year via a third party, urging him to help take the political heat out of the row, which he felt was in danger of damaging his company.

Brown, who stepped down as prime minister after last May's general election defeat for Labour, has refused to comment on the claim, but has not denied it. It is believed that contacts were made before he left No 10. The minister said: "What I know is that Murdoch got in touch with a good friend who then got in touch with Brown. The intention was to get him to cool things down. That is what I was told."

Brown, who became increasingly concerned at allegations of phone hacking and asked the police to investigate, had claimed that he was a victim of hacking when chancellor. He made Murdoch's views known to a select few in the Labour party.

In January, it was revealed Brown had written at least one letter to the Metropolitan police over concerns that his phone was targeted when he was still at the Treasury.

Suggestions that Murdoch involved Tony Blair in a chain of phone calls that led to Brown have been denied by the former prime minister. A spokesman for Blair said the claim was "categorically untrue", adding "no such calls ever took place". The allegation will, however, add to concerns about the influence Murdoch wielded over key political figures at Westminster and in Downing Street.

It will also raise further questions over the decision by David Cameron to appoint Andy Coulson, a former NoW editor who resigned over phone hacking, as his director of communications. ...

News of the World phone hacking victims get apology from Murdoch

Confession that practice was rife is likely to cost News International millions of pounds in compensation

The actor Leslie Ash has spoken out for the first time against the Metropolitan police for failing to investigate claims that a private investigator working for the News of the World had hacked into her mobile phone, even though the force had held evidence since 2006 that he had targeted her along with her husband and two children.

Ash, a former star of Men Behaving Badly, told the Guardian: "I feel I've really been let down. I can't understand their behaviour at all." Ash and her husband, the former footballer Lee Chapman, are suing the News of the World for breach of privacy after the Met confirmed in January that in a 2006 raid on the investigator Glenn Mulcaire, it had seized notepads in which he had recorded their mobile phone numbers and those of their two sons.

Despite holding that information, which Ash said includes phone numbers for her GP, bank and a teacher at her sons' school, Scotland Yard failed to tell her that she was a target.

"The police were actually withholding evidence," she said. "I've been brought up to trust the police. It's not a good time for the police at the moment."

Ash became a regular in the headlines as soon as she appeared in the hit laddish comedy Men Behaving Badly, but tabloid pressure reached its peak when cosmetic surgery left her with inflamed lips in 2003 and when she contracted a form of MRSA in hospital the following year.

Her family feared she would die. Now Ash says that messages left on mobile phones belonging to her and her children at that time were used by newspapers. ...

The former news editor and current chief reporter from the News of the World have been arrested on suspicion of unlawfully intercepting mobile phone voicemail messages.

Ian Edmondson and Neville Thurlbeck had voluntarily presented themselves at different London police stations this morning and were arrested. It was expected their homes would be searched by officers at midday.

Scotland Yard has confirmed that two men, aged 50 and 42, "were arrested this morning after attending separate police stations in south-west London by appointment".

"They remain in custody for questioning after being arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, contrary to Section 1(1) Criminal Law Act 1977, and unlawful interception of voicemail messages, contrary to Section 1 Ripa [Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act] 2000," the briefing added.

"The Operation Weeting team is conducting the new investigation into phone hacking. It would be inappropriate to discuss any further details regarding this case at this time." ...

No surveillance without oversight
Given the FBI's record of fallibility – and without genuine safeguards for citizens – this $1bn biometrics project is alarming

Jay Stanley
Wednesday 30 March 2011

The FBI recently announced that its Next Generation Identification System (NGIS) has "reached its initial operating capacity". This vast new biometrics project, for which Lockheed Martin won a $1bn contract in 2008, encompasses not only fingerprints but also, possibly, such biometrics as iris scans, face recognition, bodily scars, marks and tattoos.

Such a system raises a number of concerns from a civil liberties perspective. Many types of biometrics are of particular concern because they allow individuals to be tracked secretly and at a distance. For instance, facial recognition may allow a person to be tracked by various CCTV cameras across a city. Worse, in the future, this may be automated and done by computers.

The FBI is rushing ahead with this system in a larger context that is very troubling. Since 9/11, we've repeatedly seen the government throw together new identity and tracking systems without building in the necessary protections to make sure innocent people aren't caught up in them. A good example is aviation watchlists. Countless travelers have found themselves trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare – improperly listed as suspected terrorists, hassled, arrested or worse, and with no way to clear their names in the eyes of the government's secretive security bureaucracies. The problem is not just errors and mistaken identification, or the lack of due process or rigorous procedures for keeping the lists accurate, but also the possibility that government bureaucrats have used a "when in doubt, thrown a name on the list" approach.

We don't want to see the NGIS operate that way. Unfortunately, the FBI's record does not inspire confidence. In 2003, the bureau exempted its main criminal database, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), from a requirement under the Privacy Act that agencies maintain records with "such accuracy, relevance, timeliness and completeness as is reasonably necessary to assure fairness to the individual". Some people have experienced the reality of this, such as a Maryland woman named Amy Studnitz who was fired from her job after an NCIC background check erroneously reported that she had a criminal record (even after the error was discovered, she was not rehired).

The experience of Oregon attorney Brandon Mayfield is also a cautionary tale. Considered a suspect in the 2004 bombing of a Madrid train due to a faulty fingerprint match, the FBI spied on Mayfield without a warrant, broke into his home several times and arrested him under the "material witness" statute. The FBI also investigated 19 other individuals whose fingerprints, like Mayfield's, were deemed similar to those found on evidence in Madrid.

Finally, the FBI's giant biometric project is taking place in a context where the United States – almost alone in the industrialised world – has no strong, overarching privacy laws, and no robust, independent institutions to enforce such laws. In another country where such institutions existed to protect people from error and abuse, this kind of programme might be cause for less concern. But rather than building such institutions, the US government has instead been granting sweeping new powers to our security agencies, and dismantling the checks and balances that are needed to ensure those powers are not misused. ...

The News of the World has revealed that its computers have retained an archive of potentially damning emails, which hitherto it had claimed had been lost.

The millions of emails, amounting to half a terabyte of data, could expose executives and reporters involved in hacking the voicemail of public figures, including former deputy prime minister John Prescott, actor Sienna Miller, and former culture secretary Tessa Jowell.

The archived data is likely to include email exchanges between the most senior executives, including former editor Andy Coulson, who resigned as David Cameron's media adviser in January, as well as three former news editors – Ian Edmondson, Greg Miskiw, and Neville Thurlbeck – implicated in the affair by paperwork seized from Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who was on the News of the World's books. Edmondson was sacked in January. Miskiw and Thurlbeck were interviewed by police last autumn. No charge has been brought against any of them. Coulson and the three former news editors have all denied all involvement in criminal activity.

MPs on the home affairs select committee are likely on Tuesday to ask about the emails to John Yates, acting deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan police, when they question him over allegations he misled parliament in evidence he gave about the number of hacking victims originally identified by Scotland Yard. Yates told the committee six months ago the Met had only identified "10 to 12" individuals in a 2006 inquiry because the Crown Prosecution Service advised it to adopt a narrow legal definition of what constituted an offence. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, has said that prosecuting counsel never adopted this narrow definition.

Several News of the World journalists have since been linked with phone hacking after victims began legal battles, raising questions about why Scotland Yard failed to conduct a more comprehensive inquiry. Only one reporter, former royal editor Clive Goodman, was convicted of a crime along with Mulcaire. Both men were sentenced to jail terms in January 2007. ...

The extraordinary public clash between the Metropolitan police and the director of public prosecutions during which each side has implied that the other has misled parliament continued with controversial claims before a Commons committee.

The quarrel continued as new claims were made that private investigators working for newspapers may have targeted the families of Milly Dowler, the Surrey schoolgirl who was abducted and murdered in March 2002, and of Holly Chapman, one of the two 10-year-old girls murdered by Ian Huntley in Soham in August 2002.

The Met-DPP clash continued at a special session of the Commons culture, media and sport committee, where Scotland Yard's acting deputy commissioner, John Yates, conceded for the first time that the original 2006 inquiry into phone hacking at the News of the World should have done more, and that police had failed to do enough for victims of hacking.

Asked if he accepted that the affair had seriously damaged the reputation of the Metropolitan police, he said: "I would certainly say that it has been very challenging for us. We are working extremely hard to put that right."

But it was his evidence on the legal advice provided by the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, that was most controversial. The immediate focus of the dispute is an arcane point of law.

Its underlying significance is the light it may shed on the question of whether Scotland Yard has tried to hide the truth about the number of people whose phones were hacked by journalists and private investigators working for the NoW.

In his evidence, Yates listed a series of occasions on which prosecutors had advised police that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa) made it an offence to intercept voicemail only if the message had not already been heard by its intended recipient.

He said this advice had been given repeatedly during the original inquiry in 2006: "It permeated every aspect of the investigative strategy." It was on this basis, Yates added, that he had previously told parliament that police had found only 10 to 12 victims of the hacking, even though the emerging evidence now suggests there were many more.

Yates's evidence directly clashes with a written submission from Starmer last October to the home affairs select committee. Starmer said the question of how to interpret Ripa had not arisen during the original inquiry.

Prosecutors had attached no significance to the point in preparing charges or presenting the facts, he said. "It is evident that the prosecution's approach to Ripa had no bearing on the charges brought against the defendants or the legal proceedings generally," he wrote. ...

The growing number of public figures suing the News of the World won a major high court victory when a judge said Scotland Yard must hand over a mass of phone-hacking evidence that has never before been disclosed.

The ruling by Justice Geoffrey Vos, who was appointed this week to handle the 14 phone-hacking cases currently going through the courts, means the Metropolitan police will be forced to pass reams of documents seized from Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who worked for the News of the World, to lawyers acting for the politicians, celebrities and football figures who are suing the paper. They include Sienna Miller, Paul Gascoigne, Steve Coogan and the former culture secretary Tessa Jowell.

Vos ruled on Friday that the Met must give unredacted documents – including Mulcaire's emails, address and contacts books, and phone bills – to another hacking victim, the football agent Sky Andrew. The decision sets a precedent for the other hacking cases and has far-reaching implications for the NoW, police and other litigants. It will lead to a flood of hacking documents being released to other claimants, all of whom are seeking copies of papers seized by police in a 2006 raid on Mulcaire's home. ...

The European Union is to enshrine a "right to be forgotten online" to ensure that, among other things, prospective employers cannot find old Facebook party photos of someone wearing nothing but a lampshade.

In a speech to the European parliament, the EU justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, warned companies such as Facebook that: "A US-based social network company that has millions of active users in Europe needs to comply with EU rules."

In a package of proposals to be unveiled before the summer, the commissioner intends to force Facebook and other social networking sites to make high standards of data privacy the default setting and give control over data back to the user.

"I want to explicitly clarify that people shall have the right – and not only the possibility – to withdraw their consent to data processing," Reding said. "The burden of proof should be on data controllers – those who process your personal data. They must prove that they need to keep the data, rather than individuals having to prove that collecting their data is not necessary."

Under the proposals, national privacy watchdogs will be endowed with powers to investigate and launch legal proceedings against companies with services that target EU consumers.

Reding's spokesman, Matthew Newman, said: "A year ago she issued Facebook a warning because the privacy settings changed for the worse and now she's legislating to put flesh on those bones."

Facebook profiles have been accessible by default since January last year. Users have to opt in to ensure that their photographs and other information can be viewed only by friends.

Newman said companies "can't think they're exempt just because they have their servers in California or do their data processing in Bangalore. If they're targeting EU citizens, they will have to comply with the rules."

Privacy settings are often so complex that a typical user does not know how to use them, Reding's staff say. The new legislation will ensure privacy is inbuilt and not tacked on later as an added extra. The rules will also outlaw the surreptitious gathering of data without the user explicitly giving permission.

Newman said that the laws would make the EU the first jurisdiction to deliver a "right to be forgotten". ...

The News of the World phone-hacking scandal is set to reach a new peak of embarrassment for the paper and for Scotland Yard with the naming of the sixth and most senior journalist yet to be implicated in illegal news-gathering.

A BBC Panorama programme claims that Alex Marunchak, formerly the paper's senior executive editor, commissioned a specialist snooper who illegally intercepted email messages from a target's computer and faxed copies of them to Marunchak's News of the World office.

The embarrassment is heightened by the fact that the target was a former British army intelligence officer who had served in Northern Ireland and was in possession of secrets which were deemed so sensitive that they had been suppressed by a court order.

Rupert Murdoch's News International, which owns the News of the World, has claimed repeatedly that only one of its journalists – the former royal correspondent, Clive Goodman – was involved in illegal news-gathering. When Goodman was jailed in January 2007, Scotland Yard chose not to interview any other journalist or executive on the paper.

And Panorama reports that the illegal interception of emails happened in July 2006, when the prime minister's former media adviser Andy Coulson was editing the paper. ...

The money came pouring in. Jonathan Rees worked from a dingy office in south London. He lived in a cramped flat upstairs. He was divorced, overweight and foul-mouthed but his business was golden: he traded information. His sources may have been corrupt. His actions may have been illegal. But the money kept coming – from one golden source in particular. As Rees himself put it: "No one pays like the News of the World do."

There was only one problem with Rees's lucrative business. He had caught the eye of Scotland Yard's anti-corruption command who strongly suspected that he was paying bribes to various serving officers and, with great care and some skill, they had managed to place a covert listening device inside his office.

It was that bug which recorded him gloating about the pay he received from the News of the World. It also recorded the vivid detail of an empire of corruption, run with casual ease by Rees and his business partner, Sid Fillery – and liberally greased with cash from the News of the World and other Fleet Street titles. The News of the World alone was paying him more than £150,000 a year.

The listening device was placed in Rees's office in mid-April 1999. It did its job for only six months. In that short time, it provided one highly revealing chapter in a long tale of promiscuous criminality. Further chapters were provided by three other private investigators, all of whom worked separately for the News of the World, all of whom finally ended up in court, all of whom were publicly linked with illegal news-gathering.

Over the following years, the Guardian published a lengthy exposé of Rees's involvement with corrupt police and the procurement of confidential information for the News of the World; the Sunday tabloid's assistant editor is believed to have been arrested and accused of paying bribes to police and other key workers, although he was never charged; the paper was named in a London court as the paymaster for the purchase of information from the police national computer; Rees was jailed for a conspiracy to frame an innocent woman and then accused of conspiracy to murder.

And yet the man who became the prime minister's media adviser, Andy Coulson, has always maintained in evidence to parliament and on oath in court that he knew nothing of any illegal activity during the seven years he spent at the top of the News of the World. The entire story unfolded without ever catching his eye. In the same way, the prime minister and his deputy were happy to appoint Coulson last May to oversee the communication between the British government and its people, even though they were already fully aware of all the essential facts.

It begins with the bug....

A man cleared of murder can be named as a private investigator with links to corrupt police officers who earned £150,000 a year from the News of the World for supplying illegally obtained information on people in the public eye.

Jonathan Rees was acquitted of the murder of his former business partner, Daniel Morgan, who was found in a south London car park in 1987 with an axe in the back of his head. The case collapsed after 18 months of legal argument, during which it has been impossible for media to write about Rees's Fleet Street connections.

The ending of the trial means it is now possible for the first time to tell how Rees went to prison in December 2000 after a period of earning six-figure sums from the News of the World.

Rees, who had worked for the paper for seven years, was jailed for planting cocaine on a woman in order to discredit her during divorce proceedings. After his release from prison Rees, who had been bugged for six months by Scotland Yard because of his links with corrupt police officers, was rehired by the News of the World, which was being edited by Andy Coulson.

The revelations call into question David Cameron's judgment in choosing Coulson as director of communications at 10 Downing Street in May 2010. Both he and the deputy prime minister had been warned in March 2010 about Coulson's responsibility for rehiring Rees after his prison sentence.

Nick Clegg had been informed in detail about Jonathan Rees's murder charge, his prison sentence and his involvement with police corruption – and that he and three other private investigators had committed crimes for the News of the World while Coulson was deputy editor or editor.

In September 2002 the Guardian published a lengthy exposé of Rees's involvement with police corruption and illegal newsgathering. But since April 2008 the press have been prevented from revealing Rees's connections with the News of the World, or placing it in the context of News International's denials about any knowledge of illegal activity on behalf of the company. ...

Nick Davies, the Guardian journalist who revealed the News of the World had made a series of legal payments to hide the full extent of the phone-hacking scandal, wrote to the paper's former editor Andy Coulson on 23 February last year.

He put a series of allegations to Coulson, who was then head of the communications for the Conservative party. At the time of Davies' letter, the Guardian could not reveal the full extent of the phone-hacking affair because one of the private investigators who had worked for the paper was facing a murder charge.

The email containing the charges was sent two months before the general election. Both David Cameron and Nick Clegg – later to be prime minister and deputy prime minister – knew about the allegations. Despite that, Cameron appointed Coulson as his director of communications in Downing Street in May 2010. Coulson resigned in January this year. ...

Once upon a time, when Apple was mainly a computer manufacturer, people used to liken it to BMW. That was because it made expensive, nicely designed products for a niche market made up of affluent, design-conscious customers who also served as enthusiastic – nay fanatical – evangelists for the brand. It was seen as innovative and quirky but not part of the industry's mainstream, which was dominated by Microsoft and the companies making the PCs that ran Windows software. This view of Apple was summed up by Jack Tramiel, the boss of Commodore, when Steve Jobs first showed him the Macintosh computer. "Very nice, Steve," growled Tramiel. "I guess you'll sell it in boutiques."

That was a long time ago. Now, with a market capitalisation of just over $331bn, Apple is the second most valuable company in the world – bigger than Microsoft ($220bn), Oracle ($167bn) or Google ($196bn). The quirky little computer company has grown into a giant. But not necessarily a giant of the Big Friendly variety, as the world's magazine publishers have recently discovered and as the music and software industries have known for some time. For Apple now controls the commanding heights of the online content business and it looks like doing the same to the mobile phone business. At the moment, it looks as though nobody has a good idea of how to stop it.

Every year, Fortune magazine polls a sample of US CEOs asking for their opinions of their competitors. The results for 2011 have just been released and they show that Apple is the "most admired" company in America. This is the sixth year in a row that it has held that title.

The reasons are obvious. On the product side, Apple creates beautifully designed, highly functional and user-friendly devices that delight customers and provide fat profit margins; it has a corporate culture that reliably delivers these products by specified dates; it's much more innovative than any of its competitors; and it has a unique mastery of both hardware and software.

On the strategic side, the company has displayed a deep understanding of technology and a shrewd appreciation of potential devices and services for which people will pay over the odds. Most CEOs would kill to run a company that possessed a quarter of these competencies. Apple appears to have them all. Its current dominance is built on three big ideas. The first is that design really matters. It's not something you can outsource to a design consultancy – which is what most companies do – and design is as much about ease of use as it is about aesthetics. The second insight was that the maelstrom of illicit music downloading triggered by Napster couldn't last and that the first company to offer a simple way of legally purchasing music (and, later, other kinds of content) online would clean up. And third – and most important – there was the insight that mobile phones are really just hand-held computers that happen to make voice calls and that it's the computing bit that really matters.

Most of the media commentary about Apple attributes all of these insights to Steve Jobs, the company's charismatic co-founder, on the grounds that Apple's renaissance began when he returned to the company in 1996.

This may well be true, though it seems unlikely that such a comprehensive corporate recovery could be the work of a single individual, no matter how charismatic. What's more plausible is that Apple's corporate culture took on some of the characteristics of its CEO's personality, much as Microsoft was once a corporate extension of Bill Gates, with all that implied in terms of aggression and drive.

Whatever the explanation, the fact is that Apple now has a dominant position in several key businesses (content distribution and mobile computing) and is having a seriously disruptive impact on the mobile phone industry. In particular, its iTunes Store gives it control of the tollgate through which billions of paid-for music tracks and albums, videos and apps cascade down to millions of customers worldwide. It levies a commission on everything that passes through that gate. And every Apple mobile device sold can only be activated by hooking up to the gate.

This gives Apple unparalleled power....

So many messages are being examined by Scotland Yard's phone-hacking inquiry that it is difficult to identify every mention of a celebrity's name among "hundreds of intercepts", lawyers for the police have claimed.

The proliferation of legal actions generated by complaints against the News of the World is also in danger of congesting the courts with "parallel claims", the judge hearing applications for disclosure in three cases has implied.

Official recognition of the scale of the problem came as three more alleged victims of the practice of hacking into voicemail messages sought high court orders granting them access to documents that may substantiate claims for damages. Lawyers for Paul Gascoigne, George Galloway and Mick McGuire, former deputy chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, were granted permission to see relevant sections of transcripts.

The notebooks are among material seized by the Metropolitan police from the convicted private investigator Glenn Mulcaire who was employed by the newspaper.

Gascoigne and McGuire's applications were supported by Newsgroup Newspapers, owners of the News of the World, because, the court heard, the company "wishes to show it was not involved in the interception of information" relating to them.

Explaining the need for efficient case management, Mr Justice Vos told the court: "There have been numerous parallel applications with different counsel and solicitors ... raising identical or nearly identical points". He wanted to avoid duplication, he said.

At least 14 cases were already before the courts, agreed Jeremy Reed, counsel for Gascoigne and McGuire. There is speculation there will be many more, he added.

Lawyers for Gascoigne requested that any intercepted messages "about him or concerning him" should be included in the disclosure order because private information about his medical treatment had been obtained by hacking into other people's phones.

Edwin Buckett, representing the Met, said that would mean the police "having to listen to every transcript to see if Mr Gascoigne is mentioned". There are "hundreds of intercepts", he said. "It makes it so wide, it's difficult to comply with."

The judge ordered the police to hand over anything in the transcripts that was "about or concerning" Paul Gascoigne.

The names of more journalists may appear after the judge ordered that ''redactions'' – the blanked-out sections in the transcripts handed to the claimants – should not hide the names of employees of the News of the World.

The three claimants were also granted access to information on breaches of privacy gathered by the Information Commissioner's Office during its Operation Motorman inquiry into the matter. ...

Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the centre of the News of the World phone-hacking case, passed phone intercept information to several individuals working on the tabloid's news desk, the high court heard today.

The private eye – who was on a £100,000-a-year contract with the News of the World – was quoted in court documents as saying that he dealt with so many people on the news desk at the tabloid that he cannot recall precisely who received certain items of information.

Mulcaire's admission, if true, was "devastating" to the News of the World's long-held insistence that phone hacking was the work of a "lone, rotten journalist", Jeremy Reed QC told the court.

Reed was representing Sky Andrew, a football agent who is suing the paper's immediate parent, News Group Newspapers (NGN) for breach of privacy over phone hacking.

Mulcaire was jailed for six months in 2007 for hacking into phones belonging to staff at Buckingham Palace, along with the News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman.

However, in that trial the court also heard that Mulcaire hacked into the phones of high profile individuals such as publicist Max Clifford and supermodel Elle Macpherson, as well as Andrew.

Earlier this year, Mulcaire also said in court documents that he had been instructed by Ian Edmondson, the assistant editor (news) at the tabloid, to intercept Andrew's voicemails. Edmondson was initially suspended, and has now been sacked.

Today's case saw lawyers for Andrew lodge a claim against the Metropolitan police, seeking greater access to heavily redacted documents released by the force to his legal team. ...

A "treasure trove" of information could be accessed on actor Steve Coogan's mobile phone at a time when journalists at the News of the World were instructing a private investigator to hack into it, the high court was told today.

Coogan's counsel, Jeremy Reed, said his witness statement showed: "He conducts business by voicemail messages. He tends to let messages stack up ... There is essentially a treasure trove of commercial information on his voicemail at any one time."

Coogan is suing News of the World publisher News Group, part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, and former private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who worked for the paper.

Lawyers for Coogan and former Sky Sports presenter Andy Gray, who is also suing, were in court for a pre-trial hearing. They are trying to force Mulcaire to name the News of the World executives who ordered him to hack into phones.

"The News of the World entertainment section is likely to be extremely interested in what Mr Coogan ... or some other actor or director seeks to charge when they are working for Baby Cow," Reed said, referring to the TV production company co-owned by the comedian.

Scotland Yard has written to Coogan to confirm that the actor's mobile number, voicemail pin, password and other account details were found in Mulcaire's notebooks, which were seized in a police raid on his home in 2006.

Gray has been handed redacted copies of Mulcaire's notes, which allegedly show he was targeted by the investigator, along with billing information showing his mobile voicemail number was called about a dozen times from landlines registered to Mulcaire in a six-month period.

The court was reminded that copies of Mulcaire's notes also showed the private investigator wrote "Greg" on the left-hand side of the page. Reed said that was a reference to Greg Miskiw, a former News of the World investigations editor. ...

Hundreds of thousands of innocent people are to have their DNA profiles deleted from the national police database under the coalition's flagship civil liberties legislation published on Friday.

The protection of freedoms bill will also regulate the use of CCTV by the police and local authorities for the first time to ensure they are used "proportionately and appropriately".

Home Office ministers said the legislation was not intended to reduce the estimated 4 million CCTV cameras in use.

The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said it was landmark legislation that would restore hard-won civil liberties and result in an "unprecedented rolling back of the state".

The 146-page bill includes the reform of counter-terrorism legislation, including stop and search powers, the scaling back of local authority surveillance and the vetting and barring criminal record checks system, the end of fingerprinting of children in schools without parental consent, and the repeal of powers to hold serious fraud trials without a jury.

It also contains some quirky proposals such as relaxing matrimonial laws to allow people to marry outside the hours of 8am to 6pm and repealing the right of police officers to enter your home to search for German enemy property. The change in the marriage hours stems from suggestions on the government's Your Freedom website and is likely to trigger a mini-boom in evening wedding venues. ...

The reopened police investigation into phone hacking by News of the World journalists has identified a number of new potential victims, including Lord Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, the Guardian has learned.

Just a fortnight after reopening their inquiry, in the wake of an 18-month campaign by the Guardian, police said a re-examination of the evidence they had held for years, but failed to fully investigate, combined with new evidence from the Sunday tabloid, had thrown up an "important and immediate new line of inquiry". The new investigation, they said, had already established "reasonable evidence" that up to 20 people, mainly prominent public figures, were targeted by the paper.

The development represents Scotland Yard finally beginning to take the lid off the phone-hacking scandal. More than five years after they first started to investigate the illegal interception of voicemail messages by a private investigator working for the News of the World, the Met announced that its new inquiry would:

• Review all the decisions made by their two previous inquiries.

• Contact thousands of public figures who have never been told that their personal details were recorded by the private investigator.

• Warn some public figures that they had previously been misled when they asked the Yard for information.

Police had been dismissive of Prescott's suspicions that he had been targeted, but the head of the new investigation, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, saw Prescott on Wednesday. He was told that invoices recovered by police showed he was targeted by Glenn Mulcaire, the private eye used by the NoW, who was an expert in phone hacking. They also have notes made by Mulcaire about Prescott, who as deputy prime minister was in possession of highly sensitive information. After his briefing by the police chief, Prescott told the Guardian that previous police investigations had been "completely inadequate".

The new evidence is understood to show that Prescott was targeted in April 2006, the month he admitted to having an affair with his diary secretary Tracey Temple. In a statement Prescott told the Guardian: "I can confirm that at her request I met Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers today. She informed me that significant new evidence relating to phone hacking and myself had been discovered and that they were investigating it. I think this proves my long-held belief that the original Met police investigation into Mulcaire and News International was completely inadequate and failed to follow all the evidence. I now look forward to the Met police finally uncovering the truth." ...

Andy Coulson was aware that phone hacking was taking place at Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire and "told others to do it", a former executive at the News of the World told MPs.

In written evidence given to the home affairs select committee and published for the first time today, Paul McMullan, a former features executive and investigative journalist at the title, said former editor Coulson "knew a lot of people" used the technique when Coulson worked at sister paper the Sun. He joined the News of the World in 2003, where he worked alongside McMullan for 18 months.

McMullan said: "As he sat a few feet from me in the [News of the World] newsroom he probably heard me doing it, laughing about it … and told others to do it".

Coulson, who last month quit as David Cameron's director of communications, worked at the Sun for more than a decade before joining the News of the World.

"Andy Coulson knew a lot of people did it at the Sun on his Bizarre [showbiz] column and after that at the NOTW," McMullan claimed.

McMullan, who is now a pub landlord, also described a flourishing trade in private information at the News of the World, which he said was regularly supplied with details of celebrities' medical records and mobile phone pin numbers.

"People who worked for Vodaphone [sic] etc would sometimes ring up the newsdesk offering to sell numbers and codes of stars' phones," he said, "as indeed people at the tax office, people in doctors' receptions."

In separate evidence also published today, Vodafone told the committee: "A small minority of customers were targeted by unscrupulous individuals."

The company said it had passed all evidence to the police during their 2006 investigation into phone hacking carried out by former News of the World journalist Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire.

McMullan told the Guardian last year that Coulson must have been well aware the practice was "pretty widespread".

Coulson has continued to deny this. ...

David Cameron yesterday marked a break with the era of Andy Coulson by appointing a senior BBC TV news editor with no links to the Murdoch empire as the new No 10 communications director.

Craig Oliver, who made his name revamping the News at Ten and who ran the BBC's general election coverage last year, will be paid £140,000 a year and will act as a political special adviser.

The recruitment of a senior BBC figure shows that Cameron and George Osborne, who met Oliver over the weekend, recognise that they need to place some distance between Downing Street and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Coulson announced his resignation on 21 January after concluding that the swirl of allegations about illegal phone hacking from his time as News of the World editor had made his job impossible. Coulson has always denied knowledge of any wrongdoing.

Downing Street said that No 10's relations with News Corp had nothing to with the decision to hire a BBC executive. One source said: "Craig was simply the best candidate."

Fears of offending the Murdoch empire were highlighted yesterday when Tom Baldwin, Oliver's Labour counterpart, asked members of the shadow cabinet to show restraint on phone hacking and not to attack one newspaper group "out of spite".

In an email sent on his behalf, which was leaked to the New Statesman, Baldwin also called on shadow ministers not to link allegations of phone hacking with questions about News Corp's bid to take control of BSkyB.

The email said: "On phone hacking … this is not just an issue about News International. Almost every media organisation in the country may end up becoming embroiled in these allegations … We must guard against anything which appears to be attacking a particular newspaper group out of spite."

Further evidence that hacking was used regularly by the News of the World emerged yesterday when new details of the case brought by Nicola Philips, the publicist who is suing the newspaper, were published. Philips alleges the tabloid obtained a story about an affair between actor Ralph Fiennes and a Romanian singer by hacking into her mobile phone. ...

Two out of three people believe the prime minister showed poor judgment in employing Andy Coulson as his Downing Street director of communications.

In an opinion poll carried out by ComRes for the Independent newspaper, 66% said they thought David Cameron should not have hired Coulson knowing he had resigned as editor of the News of the World over the phone-hacking scandal.

Coulson quit his role in the government 10 days ago after repeated inquiries into his knowledge of phone hacking at the News of the World, saying the affair limited his ability to devote himself to his job.

Nine out of 10 of those polled believe it is wrong for journalists to hack into the private telephone voicemail messages of celebrities and politicians.

The poll also showed that 67% thought the allegations of telephone hacking meant the newspaper industry should no longer regulate itself.

ComRes polled 1,002 adults over the weekend between the 28-30 January.

Last night, giving the Hugh Cudlipp memorial lecture in London, the editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber, warned that Britain's newspapers risked political "retribution" in the form of statutory regulation following the phone hacking scandal. He accused Rupert Murdoch's News International – publishers of the NoW – of failing to pursue a policy of "own up rather than cover up", and he criticised the bulk of the industry for failing to "take the issue seriously" because their titles may also have been implicated in the illegal practice.

In a trenchant lecture, he described "the phone hacking scandal" as a "watershed - not just for News International but also for tabloid journalism" arguing that a 2006 report by the Information Commissioner suggested that 305 journalists from a range of titles used the services of a private investigator. ...

The convictions of 20 environmental campaigners involved in a protest at Britain's second largest coal-fired power station are to be reviewed less than two weeks after they were sentenced.

The urgent investigation by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) into the safety of the convictions was welcomed by one of the activists, Ben Stewart, a Greenpeace employee who branded the trial a miscarriage of justice.

The CPS decision follows revelations in the Guardian about the role of PC Mark Kennedy, allegedly at the centre of a £250,000-a-year undercover operationwithin the climate change movement. Under the name Mark Stone the former Metropolitan police officer infiltrated environmental groups across Europe.

The demonstrators were convicted of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass at the coal-fired Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire. ...

Scotland Yard reopened its investigation into phone hacking today – four years after the only convictions in the case – after the News of the World passed on "significant new information" alleged to implicate one of the paper's top executives in the practice.

Shortly afterwards the paper announced that it had sacked its assistant editor (news), Ian Edmondson. This came hard on the heels of the arrival in London of its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, said to be in town to deal with both the phone-hacking scandal that has engulfed the paper and his corporation's bid to take complete control of BSkyB.

The sacking, and the new police investigation, come after 18 months of Guardian reports into allegations of widespread phone hacking at the News of the World.

Until shortly before Christmas the paper had always alleged that only one rogue reporter and a private investigator were involved in the practice, and the police had repeatedly insisted that there was no evidence available to link any other News Corporation employees with hacking.

Tonight a source close to the new police investigation said the latest evidence passed to the Metropolitan police so far amounted to only a small number of emails, although detectives believe there may be many more.

"It's hard to believe these are the only ones. There may be a shedload of shit still to come," said one source. ...

The international row over undercover police officer Mark Kennedy escalated tonight after the full scope of his activities were revealed in a secret sitting at the German parliament.

Germany's federal police chief, Jörg Ziercke, was forced to admit to MPs at the Bundestag that not only had Kennedy had a long-term lover in Berlin – in direct violation of a law forbidding police officers to have sexual relationships while undercover – but that he had been invited to Germany by the authorities to infiltrate the anti-fascist movement.

Ziercke also revealed that Kennedy, the Metropolitan police officer at the centre of a controversy over the infiltration of peaceful environmental groups across Europe, worked for three German states during at least five visits to the country between 2004 and 2009.

He said the agent committed at least two crimes, but the cases against him were dropped at the behest of German authorities who knew Kennedy's true identity.

Kennedy first broke the law during protests at Heiligendamm, the town near Rostock where the G8 meetings took place in 2007. He later committed arson, Der Spiegel said, during a demonstration in Berlin at which he set fire to containers.

The revelations are published today in Der Spiegel, which says Kennedy's involvement in criminal activity during his time in Germany highlights concerns that he was working as an agent provocateur and not just an observer of the activists.

In addition, the newspaper says, the fact that investigations into both crimes were shelved suggests police authorities wielded an unacceptable influence over the country's judicial process. ...

Alastair Campbell has written to the Metropolitan police to say he suspects his phone was hacked by the News of the World while he was advising Tony Blair's government.

As the Commons home affairs select committee announced it is to publish a list of victims of alleged phone hacking, Blair's former communications director said his lawyers had contacted the Met with details of a specific incident.

Campbell believes his phone was hacked shortly after he left Downing Street in 2003 when he advised a senior member of Blair's cabinet. A News of the World photographer was waiting outside Campbell's house when the minister arrived for a meeting which had been arranged in mobile phone calls and text messages without reference to civil servants.

Campbell said: "Phone hacking is more widespread than people realise and was carried out by many more newspapers.

"That is why it is not being pursued by most of the press. Just as John Prescott has been pursuing it, I intend to get to the bottom of it."

The intervention by Campbell came as Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the home affairs select committee, said he would be publishing a list of people whose phones were allegedly hacked. ...

News Corporation refused to say today what Rupert Murdoch's son James was told about evidence of phone hacking by News of the World journalists when he signed off a £700,000 settlement with the football chief Gordon Taylor.

The company declined to comment on any of a set of questions asked by the Guardian about which board members were made aware of the fact that the practice of phone hacking extended beyond the former royal editor Clive Goodman, and the reasons for payouts to Taylor and the public relations specialist Max Clifford.

News Corp also refused to reply to further questions about what was discussed at a social meeting between David Cameron, James Murdoch and its UK chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, over the Christmas period.

Rupert Murdoch today spent the day at News International's Wapping offices in east London, where he had lunch in the company canteen with his son, Brooks, Dominic Mohan, the editor of the Sun, and James Harding, the editor of the Times.

There has so far been no explanation as to why James Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corp's operations in Europe and Asia, decided to sign off the payment to Taylor. One friend of Rupert Murdoch's younger son said he had failed to appreciate the significance of the hacking allegations until recently. ...

Following the resignation of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as David Cameron's media man, the voicemail hacking scandal has snowballed to include other newspapers.

Mark Lewis, a lawyer who has already brought one damages claim against the NoW for phone hacking, told the Observer last night that he is now representing four people who believe their voicemail was tapped by journalists.

And Lewis, who acted for Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers' Association in his previous case, said none of the four had been the victims of News Group newspapers. (News Group is a Murdoch company which controls the NoW.)

He told the paper: "Lots of people were doing it. It was such a widespread practice, this was almost kids' playtime.

"Although it is a crime, people were regarding it as though it was driving at 35mph in a 30mph zone, that you just sort of do it and hope you don't get caught."

The allegation that the practice spread beyond the NoW will surely be a welcome one for Rupert Murdoch.

The latest intrigue over Coulson's behaviour at one of his papers could not have come at a worse time for the Australian mogul. Murdoch's News Corp, the parent company of News Group, is still hoping to avoid having its bid to take full control of BSkyB brought before the Competition Commission. ...

Criticisms of the police handling of the phone-hacking scandal intensified tonight after a senior minister accused Scotland Yard of failing to properly investigate the allegations, while it emerged that Gordon Brown has asked police to establish whether he had been a victim.

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat energy secretary, cast doubt on News International's claims that hacking was the work of a "rogue reporter". He criticised the initial handling of the allegations by the police and accused them of reacting to his calls for a full inquiry last year by "scurrying back to Scotland Yard" and dismissing the idea in an afternoon.

"It seemed to me clear that the number of people that were being hacked clearly was not consistent with it being one rogue reporter who happened to be the royal correspondent. Why would the royal correspondent be interested in hacking the voicemails of Simon Hughes, my colleague who is a Liberal Democrat MP, for example?" he told the BBC's Daily Politics.

"We know the police were not keen on the subject because when I called for a very clear review of this, the police scurried back into Scotland Yard, spent less than a day reviewing it and popped out again in time for the six o'clock news to say they had discovered no further evidence."

Asked whether he thought the police had been deterred from carrying out a full investigation after their failure to make charges in Labour's "cash for honours" scandal, he said: "I certainly think that may well have played a part of it because obviously they had been through a very thorough investigation there and they got nowhere, so they may have decided that messing with the political process was something that they didn't want to bother doing." He quickly added: "I really don't know, I mean you'll have to ask a police officer that."

Huhne's intervention is a guarantee that the row over phone hacking won't disappear with Andy Coulson's resignation as director of communications from Downing Street last week. The former editor of the News of the World stepped down claiming that the continued controversy over phone hacking was making it difficult for him to do his job. ...

Britain's tabloid newspapers are now facing a major crisis after being drawn into the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

Twenty-four hours after Andy Coulson, the prime minister's communications chief and former News of the World editor, was forced to resign, a lawyer confirmed other newspapers were facing legal claims.

Mark Lewis, who acted for Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers' Association in a damages claim against the NoW, confirmed to the Observer that he was now representing four people who believe they were targeted by other newspapers.

Lewis said that none of the four had been hacked by News Group Newspapers, owner of the News of the World and the Sun. "Lots of people were doing it," Lewis said. "It was such a widespread practice."

He added that he had been preparing the cases since Christmas. "We are at an initial stage in our investigations made with police forces and phone companies. But we believe there is a prima facie case that information has been obtained unlawfully.

"This was almost kids' playtime. It was such a widespread practice. Although it is a crime, people were regarding it as though it was driving at 35mph in a 30mph zone, that you just sort of do it and hope you don't get caught."

Speculation about further law suits, and the prospect of fresh evidence in the form of emails and audio tapes stretching back over years, has heaped pressure on News Group over the past few weeks. It emerged earlier this month that News of the World executive Ian Edmondson had been suspended as a result of claims in a case brought by actress Sienna Miller. ...

Andy Coulson resigns – as it happened

Andy Coulson, David Cameron's director of communications, has quit in the wake of the latest phone-hacking revelations

5.15pm: Here's a summary of events tonight.
Live blog: recap

The intensification of the phone-hacking scandal, a story that refuses to go away, has forced Andy Coulson into a second resignation. Coulson quit as director of communications at Downing Street, blaming "continued coverage" of the phone-hacking scandal which forced him from the editorship of the News of the World. He said: "When the spokesman needs a spokesman, it's time to move on." (It was later revealed that the satirist Armando Iannucci first used this line last September.)

Coulson's resignation has once again raised questions over the judgment of David Cameron, who knew of the controversy surrounding his editorship of the News of the World. Cameron said of Coulson: "He has been a brilliant member of my team and has thrown himself at the job with skill and dedication."

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, attempted to turn the focus onto Cameron. Miliband said: "I think it raises real questions about David Cameron's judgment that he hung on to Andy Coulson for so long."

It is understood that Coulson told Cameron of his decision on Wednesday night. Some commentators have questioned the decision to announce his departure today – as Tony Blair was giving evidence to the Iraq war inquiry, but Downing Street denied the timing was deliberate.

The MP who triggered the latest Commons inquiry into phone hacking called on the police to conduct a thorough investigation. Chris Bryant, a Labour MP, said: "I hope now finally that the police will be able to conduct the full, transparent, and thorough inquiry into phone hacking that we are still waiting for and that the murky truth will come to light."

4.56pm: Coulson has been shown on the news channels leaving Downing Street. As the flashbulbs popped, Coulson strode off, saying nothing. I'll resist the temptation to sugggest that, as the sun sets over London, he looked as if he was slunking away into the shadows. I'll just confine myself to noting that Adam Boulton, Sky's political editor, reckons that he won't be back at No 10 before he leaves his job in a few weeks. I guess he'll just be working from home, then.

4.48pm: My colleague Mark Sweney has been trawling through the archives to see what key figures said about phone hacking in the past. My favourite is the one from Rebekah Brooks, who preceded Coulson as editor of the News of the World. On 10 July 2009, Brooks, who was then chief executive of News International, said:

"The Guardian coverage, we believe, has substantially and likely deliberately misled the British public." ...

... 11.51am: This is the full statement issued by Andy Coulson today:

I can today confirm that I've resigned as Downing Street director of communications. It's been a privilege and an honour to work for David Cameron for three-and-a-half years.

I'm extremely proud of the part I've played in helping him reach No 10 and during the coalition's first nine months.

Nothing is more important than the Government's task of getting this country back on its feet.

Unfortunately, continued coverage of events connected to my old job at the News of the World has made it difficult for me to give the 110% needed in this role.

I stand by what I've said about those events but when the spokesman needs a spokesman, it's time to move on.

I'll leave within the next few weeks and will do so wishing the Prime Minister, his family, and his brilliant and dedicated team the very best for what I'm sure will be a long and successful future in Government.

11.51am: Here's the full statement from David Cameron:

I am very sorry that Andy Coulson has decided to resign as my Director of Communications, although I understand that the continuing pressures on him and his family mean that he feels compelled to do so. Andy has told me that the focus on him was impeding his ability to do his job and was starting to prove a distraction for the Government.

During his time working for me, Andy has carried out his role with complete professionalism. He has been a brilliant member of my team and has thrown himself at the job with skill and dedication. He can be extremely proud of the role he has played, including for the last eight months in Government.

I wish Andy all the very best for his future, which I am certain will be a successful one.

11.48am: This is the second time Coulson has lost a high-profile job over the phone-hacking scandal. He quit as editor of the News of the World in January 2007 when Clive Goodman was jailed. Until now, the prime minister, David Cameron, had maintained Coulson "deserved a second chance". ...

The government will respond today to revelations that police spent millions of pounds running a network of undercover spies in the environmental protest movement.

Home Office minister Nick Herbert will be questioned by MPs about Mark Kennedy, who spent seven years living as an activist. Kennedy claims he has been "hung out to dry" by his handlers, makes numerous criticisms of the operation and admits to sexual relations with activists.

He also alleges that secret surveillance tapes would have exonerated six activists accused of breaking into a power station. He accuses senior officers of suppressing the tapes, a move that could have resulted in a serious miscarriage of justice.

Herbert, who has responsibility for policing, will appear before the home affairs select committee to answer questions on police financing. Members of the committee, including the Labour chair, Keith Vaz, are planning to question him over Kennedy. A programme to plant spies in the protest movement is now estimated to have cost £15m over the last decade.

Kennedy denies claims by activists that he was an agent provocateur in protests, including the attempt to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in 2009. He insists all of his activities were scrutinised and "sanctioned" by his superiors. ...

...it was some years before I heard he had been an informer. I was left feeling rather grubby, and rueing my taste in men. Yet I never thought that he had specifically targeted me, or that anything I said had been of particular use to his police handlers.

A far greater betrayal came in the form of Joy Harnden, another spy in my organisation, the End Conscription Campaign. We weren't particularly close but I remember being impressed by her dedication and intimate knowledge of the workings of the apartheid state. (Odd that.) I recall one conversation when she pumped me for personal information about a housemate who had recently been released from police detention. I should have noticed something was amiss, but I admired Joy and was pleased to spend time with her.

I later learned that she was a lieutenant in the security police and was responsible for the death of at least one ANC comrade. It still makes me feel sick. She changed her name and lived in Scotland for a while, and sometimes I fantasise about tracking her down and confronting her.

But it didn't cross my mind to take legal action against the police over any of this. After all, it was South Africa in the 1980s and we were trying to overthrow the state. We expected it. But it's not what I would expect if I was protesting against climate change in Britain today.

News Corporation's defence that phone hacking at the News of the World was the work of a single "rogue reporter" was on the verge of collapse tonight after Glenn Mulcaire, the private detective at the centre of the case, said the paper's head of news commissioned him to access voicemail messages.

Mulcaire is understood to have submitted a statement to the high court this afternoon confirming that Ian Edmondson, the paper's assistant editor (news) asked him to hack into voicemail messages left on a mobile phone belonging to Sky Andrew, a football agent. Andrew is suing the paper for breach of privacy.

It is also understood that Mulcaire said in the court statement that several other executives at the News of the World were aware that phone hacking was taking place, although he does not name them.

A spokesman for the News of the World said: "This is a serious allegation that will form part of our internal investigation."

Edmondson was suspended by the paper before Christmas after he was named in court documents in a separate case against the News of the World brought by the actor Sienna Miller.

His computer has been impounded as part of the paper's internal investigation and the company is trawling through his emails. He is expected to be questioned after colleagues have been interviewed.

Mulcaire's decision to name Edmondson helps to explains why News Group acted so quickly to suspend him. ...

Twenty environmental activists are seeking to overturn recent criminal convictions in the wake of the Guardian's revelations about a network of undercover police officers embedded deep in the movement.

Lawyers for the group claim that a failure to disclose the role of covert police operative Mark Kennedy during their trial may have led to a miscarriage of justice and have written to the Crown Prosecution Service demanding details of his role.

Six other activists walked free from court earlier this week after their lawyer, Mike Schwarz, demanded details of the part played by Kennedy in planning the environmental protest they took part in at Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, near Nottingham, in 2009.

However, last month, in a separate trial, the 20 green campaigners were convicted of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass during the same protest, after failing to convince a jury that their actions were designed to prevent immediate harm to human life and property from climate change.

"The police allowed this trial, unlike the later one, to run all the way to conviction," said Schwarz, whose firm, Bindmans, represents both groups of protesters. "In the light of events last week, this must be seen as a potential miscarriage of justice."

Revelations of PC Kennedy's activities by the Guardian this week have triggered a crisis in undercover policing. He is alleged to have played a central role in organising a proposal to break into the power station.

Kennedy used the fake identity "Mark Stone" to live for seven years in the protest movement, infiltrating activist groups in 22 countries. He had sexual relationships with a number of women. He also revealed the identity of another undercover officer to fellow activists, leading to a security operation this week as police tried to ensure all their undercover officers were safe.

An investigation into the collapse of the trial of the six activists is expected to be launched shortly by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The body is also considering widening its inquiry to take into account whether or not Kennedy acted as an agent provocateur during his years undercover. A further review into the wider undercover operation and those organising it may also follow. ...

... The woman who said she had had a sexual relationship with Kennedy now lives abroad and wants to be known only by her first name, Anna. She said she had sex more than 20 times with the undercover officer about five years ago, including at his house in Nottingham, when she was aged just 21. They met at protests around Europe, and it seemed clear to her that Kennedy was "seeing other women" around the same time. "I'm not sure personally if I would be willing to take part in an inquiry that touched on our sexual relationship," she said. "If the Met knew that this was going on, then obviously they should reveal this. There should be an inquiry into whether this is legal."

Kennedy, who joined the police in about 1994, is known to have had a wife and children before going undercover. There have also been unconfirmed reports that Kennedy had a long-term relationship with a woman in Nottingham while posing as an activist.

Questions over the ethics of the Kennedy operation have already been raised in Germany, where the MP Andrej Hunko has tabled questions asking whether authorities authorised the undercover officer to have "sexual relationships" in the country.

A Guardian investigation revealed on Monday that Kennedy had used a fake passport to travel to 22 different countries while posing as a campaigner, earning the trust of activists and feeding back intelligence to his commanders. ...

Glenn Mulcaire, the former private investigator jailed for intercepting voicemails on phones used by aides to Princes William and Harry at the behest of the News of the World, has run up a legal bill of hundreds of thousands of pounds as he battles a string of ongoing phone-hacking lawsuits.

The expensive defence, estimated to be in excess of £500,000, has triggered speculation that the costs are being paid by the publishers of the tabloid newspaper, whose controlling shareholder, Rupert Murdoch, has said he would take "immediate action" against anybody found to be caught hacking again.

Mulcaire's costs are likely to rise quickly as a string of actions from more public figures suing both him and the newspaper are expected to follow in the next few weeks, adding to the pressure on a south Londoner described as unemployed and receiving jobseeker's allowance in a court judgment in February of last year.

Mulcaire's legal team refuses to say who is paying his bills. When Sarah Webb, his lawyer, was asked if it was known whether News International – owners of News Group Newspapers, the publisher of NotW – was paying his fees, she replied: "No, we don't know that." News International declined to comment. ...

The Metropolitan police today faced calls for an independent review of its investigation into the News of the World phone-hacking scandal as the former home secretary Alan Johnson called for an independent inquiry and Ed Balls branded the affair as increasingly "murky".

MPs on the cross-party Commons culture select committee, who will discuss the scandal next week after the announcement that a senior News of the World executive had been suspended, said the latest development raised fresh questions about alleged collusion between the police and News International. ...

A senior News of the World executive has been suspended by the paper following a "serious allegation" that he was involved with phone hacking when the paper was edited by Andy Coulson, now the prime minister's director of communications.

It was revealed today that Ian Edmondson, the title's assistant editor, was "suspended from active duties" before Christmas, shortly after the Guardian obtained court documents which apparently showed that he had asked private investigator Glenn Mulcaire to hack into phones belonging to Sienna Miller and her staff in 2005.

The News of the World confirmed in a statement today that Edmondson had been suspended. It said it had launched an internal investigation into the claims and that "appropriate action" would be taken if they were found to be true.

The paper's former royal editor Clive Goodman was jailed along with Mulcaire in January 2007 after the two men were found guilty of illegally intercepting phone messages left on mobile phones belonging to members of the royal household. Coulson resigned when the men were sentenced, but he has always insisted that Goodman acted alone and that he and other executives knew nothing about their activities.

If it is proved Edmondson also used Mulcaire's services it would destroy the paper's carefully constructed public defence that Goodman was a rogue reporter. His suspension puts fresh pressure on Coulson, who has consistently maintained that he was unaware of any hacking while editor of the paper between 2003 and 2007. Edmondson was hired by Coulson and was part of the former editor's inner circle.

It also raises embarrassing questions for the Metropolitan police, who failed to interview any News of the World executive during the Goodman/Mulcaire investigation despite the fact that the name "Ian" appears on a number of documents seized from Mulcaire. ...

A growing pilot and passenger revolt over full-body scans and what many consider intrusive pat-downs couldn't have come at a worse time for the nation's air travel system.

Thanksgiving, the busiest travel time of the year, is less than two weeks away.

Grassroots groups are urging travelers to either not fly or to protest by opting out of the full-body scanners and undergo time-consuming pat-downs instead.

Such concerns prompted a meeting Friday of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano with leaders of travel industry groups.

Napolitano met with the U.S.Travel Association and 20 travel companies "to underscore the Department's continued commitment to partnering with the nation's travel and tourism industry to facilitate the flow of trade and travel while maintaining high security standards to protect the American people," the department said in a statement.

Federal officials have increased security in the wake of plots attributed to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Industry leaders are worried about the grassroots backlash to Transportation Security Administration security procedures. Some pilots, passengers and flight attendants have chosen to opt out of the revealing scans.

More of the units are arriving at airports, with 1,000 expected to be in place by the end of 2011.

"While the meeting with Secretary Napolitano was informative, it was not entirely reassuring," the U.S. Travel Association said in a statement.

"We certainly understand the challenges that DHS confronts, but the question remains, 'where do we draw the line'? Our country desperately needs a long-term vision for aviation security screening, rather than an endless reaction to yesterday's threat," the statement said. "At the same time, fundamental American values must be protected."

The travel industry is concerned that consumers may decide not to take a plane to Aunt Gertrude's for the holiday.

"We have received hundreds of e-mails and phone calls from travelers vowing to stop flying," Geoff Freeman, an executive vice president of the U.S. Travel Association, told Reuters.

A 2008 survey found that air travelers "avoided" 41 million trips because they believed the air travel system was either "broken" or in need of "moderate correction," the U.S. Travel Association said. The decisions cost airlines $9.4 billion, the survey said.

One online group, "National Opt Out Day" calls for a day of protest against the scanners on Wednesday, November 24, the busiest travel day of the year.

Another group argues the TSA should remove the scanners from all airports. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a non-profit privacy advocacy group, is taking legal action, saying the TSA should be required to conduct a public rule-making to evaluate the privacy, security and health risks caused by the body scanners.

Pilots' unions for US Airways and American Airlines are urging their members to avoid full-body scanning at airport security checkpoints, citing health risks and concerns about intrusiveness and security officer behavior.

"Pilots should NOT submit to AIT (Advanced Imaging Technology) screening," wrote Capt. Mike Cleary, president of the U.S. Airline Pilots Association, in a letter to members this week. USAPA represents more than 5,000 US Airways pilots.

"Based on currently available medical information, USAPA has determined that frequent exposure to TSA-operated scanner devices may subject pilots to significant health risks," Cleary wrote.

Napolitano told industry leaders that biometric identification, such as retinal scanning and thorough background checks will expedite the screening of 80,000 passengers who participate in "trusted traveler" programs, the department said.

But the chorus against the security measures is getting louder.

The website "We Won't Fly" urgers travelers to "Act now. Travel with Dignity."

"We are opposed to the full-body backscatter X-ray airport scanners on grounds of health and privacy. We do not consent to strip searches, virtual or otherwise. We do not wish to be guinea pigs for new, and possibly dangerous, technology. We are not criminals. We are your customers. We will not beg the government anymore. We will simply stop flying until the porno-scanners are history," the site says.

"National Opt Out Day," organized by Brian Sodegren, encourages solidarity on November 24, amid the crush of Thanksgiving travelers.

"It's the day ordinary citizens stand up for their rights, stand up for liberty, and protest the federal government's desire to virtually strip us naked or submit to an "enhanced pat-down" that touches people's breasts and genitals. You should never have to explain to your children, 'Remember that no stranger can touch or see your private area, unless it's a government employee, then it's OK.' "

According to the group, passengers who say "I opt out" when told to go through body scanners are submitted to a pat-down.

"Be sure to have your pat-down by TSA in full public -- do not go to the back room when asked. Every citizen must see for themselves how the government treats law-abiding citizens," the website says. ...

F.C.C. Investigates Google Street View
By EDWARD WYATT
Published: November 10, 2010

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission said Wednesday that it was investigating whether Google had violated laws when it collected Wi-Fi data as part of its Street View photo project.

News of the F.C.C. investigation came just two weeks after the Federal Trade Commission halted its own inquiry into the Google project without taking action.

“Last month, Google disclosed that its Street View cars collected passwords, e-mails and other personal information wirelessly from unsuspecting people across the country,” Michele Ellison, chief of the F.C.C’s enforcement bureau, said Wednesday in a statement.

Street View is a project that Google began in 2007 to add street-level pictures to its mapping service. The images are collected by cars that use cameras to capture 360-degree views and link the images with GPS data. The project has expanded across the United States and into at least 30 other countries.

More recently the cars were also recording information about Wi-Fi networks in nearby homes and businesses, data that can be used to help mobile devices determine their locations. But Google went beyond noting the existence of such networks and recorded information that was being sent over them.

Google first disclosed, on its corporate blog, its interception of such data in May and said it was inadvertent. But in October it said on the blog that it had collected more information about Internet users than it had first thought, including, in some cases, entire e-mails and passwords.

“In light of their public disclosure, we can now confirm that the Enforcement Bureau is looking into whether these actions violate the Communications Act,” Ms. Ellison said. “As the agency charged with overseeing the public airwaves, we are committed to ensuring that the consumers affected by this breach of privacy receive a full and fair accounting.” ...

David Cameron faced renewed pressure over his decision to retain Andy Coulson as his communications chief last night after the former tabloid editor was questioned by police over allegations of phone-hacking at the News of the World.

Labour raised the stakes when the party's deputy leader, Harriet Harman, said it was now time for the prime minister to take a detailed interest in the controversy, rather than brushing aside claims about one of his closest aides.

Downing Street confirmed that Coulson attended a meeting with Metropolitan police officers voluntarily on Thursday and was interviewed as a witness. He was not cautioned or arrested.

Stoking a row that Cameron is desperate to close down, Harman said there were now questions to be answered. "The continued presence of Andy Coulson as director of communications at No 10 when question marks hang over him casts doubt over David Cameron's judgment," said Harman. "It is time he took this matter seriously."

Coulson was editor of the News of the World when its royal reporter, Clive Goodman, was jailed for conspiracy to access phone messages involving Princes William and Harry, but Coulson has always insisted he did not know about or authorise illegal activity.

A Metropolitan police inquiry was revived earlier this year following an investigation by the New York Times which alleged that the practice was more widespread at the Sunday paper than previously admitted.

A Downing Street spokesman said yesterday: "Andy Coulson voluntarily attended a meeting with Metropolitan police officers on Thursday morning at a solicitor's office in London. Mr Coulson – who first offered to meet the police two months ago – was interviewed as a witness and was not cautioned or arrested."

Scotland Yard said in a statement: "We do not discuss persons interviewed as potential witnesses." ...

Individuals would be able to get redress against internet companies such as Google or Facebook if they feel they have invaded their privacy, under a code of internet conduct being proposed by the culture minister, Ed Vaizey.

The code would be an updated and more concise version of the code for privacy online which is used by the Information Commissioner's Office, whom Vaizey is understood to be meeting today to push his proposal.

Vaizey, the Conservative MP for Wantage and Didcot, last week likened this prospective mediation service to the Press Complaints Commission, which works to resolve complaints by members of the public about information published in the UK press.

"One wants at least to attempt to give consumers some opportunity to have a dialogue with internet companies, as they would be able to do if a newspaper had inadvertently published that information," he said. "There is huge scope for self-regulation."

Vaizey is understood to be meeting with the UK information commissioner (ICO) today to suggest a refreshed code of conduct to be signed up to by internet businesses such as Google and Facebook.

The minister wants businesses to sign up to an updated and more concise version of the ICO's code of conduct, and then display that in a prominent place on their home page with a link to the code. It has been described by one well-placed observer as "the first step towards a proper internet bill of rights". ...




How very civilized. Must be time to move to Europe.

Eric Schmidt: Google boss backtracks over Street View move gaffe
Eric Schmidt, the Google chief executive, has backtracked on claims that people could "move" if they did not want their house appearing on the controversial Street View service.
By Andrew Hough
27 Oct 2010

The boss of the internet search engine was forced to clarify his remarks, admitting he had "clearly misspoke" during the interview with CNN last week.

In the interview with the broadcaster's "Parker Spitzer" programme, Mr Schmidt spoke of the criticism levelled at his company amid a row over its privacy stance.

He told the programme: "Street View, we drive exactly once. So, you can just move, right?"

Despite the comments being cut from the final programme, the quote leaked onto the internet, further fuelling criticism of the company and its stance to privacy.

The company was then forced to issue a statement, in which Mr Schmidt backtracked on the comments.

"As you can see from the unedited interview, my comments were made during a fairly long back and forth on privacy," he said in his statement issued via the company.

"I clearly misspoke. If you are worried about Street View and want your house removed please contact Google and we will remove it.”

A Google spokesman later said users could click on the "Report a problem" link on Street View, where they could ask for an image to be removed from the service.

Some US reports speculated that Google had asked for the comment to be edited out, a claim denied by the company and CNN.

"Producers routinely make editorial decisions about what sound bites to include in their shows," a CNN spokesman said. "In this case, the clip was posted on cnn.com and disseminated to other media outlets and was widely available."

The gaffe, one of several from Mr Schmidt in recent times, comes amid a new row over privacy on Google's Street View service.

At the weekend The Sunday Telegraph disclosed that computer passwords and entire emails from households across Britain have been copied by Google, in a major privacy breach.

The company has admitted it downloaded personal data from wireless networks when its fleet of vehicles drove down residential roads taking photographs for its controversial Street View project.

Millions of internet users have potentially been affected.

Earlier this month, he told the Washington Ideas Forum: "We know where you are, we know where you've been, we can more or less know what you're thinking about."




"Don't be evil," huh?

Facebook pages very much public, even when set as private
Privacy theatre
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
25th October 2010

Facebook settings that are supposed to cloak user profiles can easily be bypassed to reveal the friends, pictures, and other attributes of users who have configured their accounts to be private.

The inability to keep profile pages private would seem to contradict Facebook's promise that "The settings you choose control which people and applications can see your information." In fact, profiles configured to be private remain viewable when manually browsing through the pages of users who are friends.

“My problem with this issue is actually how I found the bug,” said Justin E. Dian, a software developer who brought the setting bypass to the attention of The Register. “People I didn't want requesting me as friends kept somehow finding me and requesting friendship. I keep my Facebook security settings pretty much as tight as possible and I soon realized this is how they were finding me.”

The privacy settings were put in place following outcries that Facebook accounts spilled users' birthdates, friends, home towns, current location, and other information that could jeopardize their privacy. The new settings made it possible to share specific details with the world at large, a user's Facebook friends, friends of friends, or no one at all.

A Facebook spokesman said certain information, including the URL to the user's profile page, the user's picture, sex, and networks remain public no matter what settings are chosen. [Ed. Note: Italics mine.]

“You can make it harder for people to find your profile in searches, but people may still be able to get to it in other ways (e.g., if they know your vanity URL or navigate there through a friend list or News Feed story),” the spokesman said. “The basic information that allows friends to find and connect with people is available to everyone and has no privacy settings.”

The spokesman didn't respond to repeated questions asking whether Facebook had plans to change the settings so the information was no longer public.

Profiles that have been designated as private are viewable when browsing a list of friends that includes the profile. These lists can be made available to the world at large, or to friends or friends of friends of the user. The lists include the profiles of all of the user's friends, even when they've told Facebook to keep information — including their friends — private.

The arrangement means that it's impossible to keep a Facebook profile completely private if it includes even a single friend whose friend list is accessible to others.

Dian said it probably wouldn't be hard to create a script that browses and records all of a user's friends of friends and then recursively browses and records each friend's friends who have lists set to be viewable by everyone or friends of friends. Search-engine spiders build detailed repositories of links in much the same fashion.

“Doing this, you could quickly create a very large database of people and have, at the least, the following information on all of these people, no matter their security settings: name, profile picture, networks and sex,” Dian said. “So in essence, while Facebook offers you security settings to only be searchable by your friends, it would be very easy for someone you are not friends with to have access to the previous information.”

Interestingly, using a name search to identify someone's friends won't list profiles that have been set to be private. But the same profiles continue to show up when you manually view the friends list. That means Facebook is technically correct that private profiles aren't searchable, even though they are in many cases easily found. ®

Facebook gets poked in latest privacy gaffe
'No personal details were used. But we're changing our tech anyway... bitch'
By Kelly Fiveash
Posted in ID, 18th October 2010

Facebook’s privacy rules aren’t as watertight as the company would have its users believe, after the Wall Street Journal uncovered that some of the social network’s most popular apps have siphoned off personal information to ad firms and internet tracking outfits.

According to the report, many Facebook apps have transmitted identifiable details about individual users to around 25 companies, in effect breaking the terms laid down by the Mark Zuckerberg-run website.

The privacy breach, which gives advertising and internet tracking firms access to people’s names, affects a huge number of Facebook app users.

Worse still, the newspaper found that users whose profiles have rigorous privacy settings have also had their details exposed.

It said that the 10 most popular Facebook apps, including Farmville and Texas HoldEm Poker, were transmitting users’ IDs to external firms.

Game Network Inc’s Farmville was found to also be transmitting personal details about a user’s Facebook "friends" to advertisers and internet tracking companies.

Facebook, which claims to have around 500 million users of its service, told the WSJ that the social network would bring in new tech to close the breach.

One company, RapLeaf Inc, was found to have linked Facebook ID details taken from apps to its own database of internet users, which it sells on to companies.

RapLeaf insisted that the transmission of data hadn’t been intentional.

“We didn’t do it on purpose,” the company’s biz development veep Joel Jewitt told the newspaper.

The Register asked Facebook to comment on the story. It gave us this statement:

As part of our work to provide people with control over their information, we've learned that the design and operation of the Internet doesn't always provide the greatest control that is technically possible.

"For example, in the Spring, it was brought to our attention that Facebook user IDs may be inadvertently included in the URL referrer sent to advertisers.

Here, WSJ has uncovered the same issue on Facebook Platform, where a Facebook user ID may be inadvertently shared by a user's internet browser or by an application delivering content to a user.

While knowledge of user ID does not permit access to anyone's private information on Facebook, we plan to introduce new technical systems that will dramatically limit the sharing of User ID's [sic].

This is an even more complicated technical challenge than the similar issue we successfully addressed last spring, but one that we are committed to addressing. Our technical systems have always been complemented by strong policy enforcement, and we will continue to rely on both to keep people in control of their information.

It is important to note that there is no evidence that any personal information was misused or even collected as a result of this issue. In fact, all of the companies questioned about this issue said publicly that they did not use the user IDs or did not use them to obtain personal info.

Which leaves us wondering whether Facebook may have been aware of the flaw in its technology prior to the WSJ report, but just hadn't got around to closing the door on that particular privacy leak yet.

Note also that Facebook has tried to distance itself from any implication that personal information could have been used by any one of the 25 companies to which the apps transmitted the data.

The company put out a separate statement to its third-party developers that was part finger-wagging, and partly an assertion that the press had exaggerated the implications of sharing a UID.

In effect, the company is trying to downplay the whole sorry affair. The only trouble is that by admitting it needs to fix its technology to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future, Facebook just got poked. And not in a good way. ®

Street View spies a €2.4m fine
Spanish Data Protection Agency thinks Google would look nice in a lawsuit
By Lester Haines
19th October 2010

The Spanish Agencia de Protección de Datos (Data Protection Agency) is demanding Street View be brought to book over its clandestine Wi-Fi slurping activities.

The agency has requested a Madrid judge consider whether Google is guilty of two counts of "collecting and storing data without the owner's consent", and two counts of "recording protected data without legal permission and without the owner's agreement".

The agency said that it believes data on the location of Wi-Fi networks, along with the identification of their owners, and personal data including names and surnames, users names and or passwords was captured by Google. Read more here.

The offences each carry a maximum fine of €300,506 and €601,012 respectively. Google also stands accused of illegally transferring the data to the United States, and could be looking at a total hit of €2,404,048 - if the court decides to impose the maximum sanction.

Google handed over the offending data to the authorities back in July, El País notes. The Data Protection Agency's director, Artemi Rallo, quantified it as 13 gigabytes, equivalent to "6,590 copies of Don Quixote".*

In August, Spain's snappily-titled Asociación para la Prevención y Estudio de Delitos, Abusos y Negligencias en Informática y Comunicaciones Avanzadas (Association for the Prevention and Investigation of Crime, Abuse and Malpractice in Information Technology and Advanced Communications), hit Google with a similar legal action.

The case is still pending, with Google's legal representative in Spain expected in court to answer the charges.

A Google spokesman said back in August: "We're working in every country with the authorities and legal bodies to answer any questions they may have. Our final aim is to delete the data according to our legal obligations and in consultation with the relevant authorities." ®
Bootnote

*An agreeable new data standard, we're sure you'll agree.

David Cameron defends Andy Coulson – but says no one is 'unsackable'
PM praises director of communications after fresh allegations by Channel 4 film over phone hacking at News of the World
Nicholas Watt
Tuesday 5 October 2010

David Cameron said last night that nobody on his team is unsackable, as he faced questions about his communications director, Andy Coulson.

In a Channel 4 News interview, the prime minister defended Coulson, who is facing allegations that he knew about illegal phone hacking during his time as editor of the News of the World.

Asked by Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow whether Coulson was unsackable, Cameron said: "No one is unsackable. But … we haven't had one single complaint about how he has done his job, or indeed about how the Downing Street press office has done its job. That is quite a contrast from the years of [Labour's director of communications] Alastair Campbell and [special adviser] Damian McBride and all the rest of them."

Cameron faced renewed questions about the phone hacking scandal after new allegations that Coulson personally listened to the intercepted voicemail messages of public figures. The allegations were aired on the Channel 4 Dispatches programme on Monday night.

Former Labour minister Tom Watson, MP for West Bromwich East, said the new allegations made against Coulson were "new, far-reaching and warrant investigation". He wrote to Cameron calling for a statement to parliament, after an unnamed former News International executive was quoted.

Coulson resigned as editor of the News of the World after Clive Goodman, the paper's former royal editor, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator paid by the newspaper, were jailed for illegal phone hacking.

Coulson, who resigned on the basis that he took "ultimate" responsibility for their actions, has consistently denied any knowledge of the phone hacking. ...

Phone-hacking scandal: Andy Coulson 'listened to intercepted messages'
Anonymous source tells Channel Four David Cameron's media adviser would ask for recordings to be played for him at News of the World
Nick Davies
Sunday 3 October 2010

The prime minister's media adviser, Andy Coulson, personally listened to the intercepted voicemail messages of public figures when he edited the News of the World, a senior journalist who worked alongside him has said.

Coulson has always denied knowing about any illegal activity by the journalists who worked for him, but an unidentified former executive from the paper told Channel Four Dispatches that Coulson not only knew his reporters were using intercepted voicemail but was also personally involved.

"Sometimes, they would say: 'We've got a recording' and Andy would say: 'OK, bring it into my office and play it to me' or 'Bring me, email me a transcript of it'," the journalist said.

The claim, due to be broadcast tomorrow night, goes beyond earlier statements by Coulson's former colleagues.

Sean Hoare, a showbusiness reporter, told the New York Times Coulson had "actively encouraged" him to intercept voicemail.

Paul McMullan, who handled investigations, told the Guardian illegal activity was so widespread in the newsroom that Coulson must have known about it. Coulson has denied all the claims.

Channel Four's anonymous witness, whose words are spoken by an actor in the programme, says: "Andy was a very good editor.

"He was very conscientious and he wouldn't let stories pass unless he was sure they were correct ... so, if the evidence that a reporter had was a recorded phone message, that would be what Andy would know about.

"So you'd have to say: 'Yes, there's a recorded message.' You go and either play it to him or show him a transcript of it, in order to satisfy him that you weren't going to get sued, that it wasn't made up."

In evidence to a House of Commons select committee last year, Coulson said he could not remember any instance of voicemail being intercepted during his six years at the paper.

He resigned in January 2007 after the tabloid's royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, was jailed for listening to the voicemails of three members of the royal household. "I am absolutely sure that Clive's case was a very unfortunate rogue case," he told the committee.

Channel Four's witness said: "It was fairly common – not so common that everybody was doing it. That wasn't the case at all. But the people who did know how to do it would do it regularly." ...

... Brian Paddick, a former deputy assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard who is also taking the police to court, suggested that his former colleagues' decision to cut short their original investigation may have been influenced by their links with the News of the World.

"That relationship was well worth protecting ... when you have something as big as this, where you're talking about potentially a large investigation involving illegal activity, you can see how potentially pressure could have been brought to bear," he said. ...

The police watchdog believed as far back as a year ago that it should carry out an independent review of the Metropolitan police's handling of the investigation into the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, the Guardian understands.

Senior figures at Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary decided last summer that there was sufficient public interest in the matter for it to investigate the handling of the case by the Met. The inspectorate eventually decided against undertaking a review because it did not have sufficient resources at the time.

The disclosure of the inspectorate's concerns may increase pressure on the Met, which is facing the threat of a series of legal actions over an allegedly slow response in alerting public figures and celebrities that they may have been targeted by a private investigator employed by the News of the World.

Lord Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, is the most senior political figure seeking a judicial review of the police action. Prescott, whose name was found on papers seized from the office of private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, is demanding damages from Scotland Yard for initially failing to inform him about the documents.

The inspectorate's interest in the case may raise questions about senior figures in the Home Office. The Guardian disclosed last month that Stephen Rimmer, the Home Office director general for crime and policing, had warned last summer that Scotland Yard would "deeply resent" a review of its investigation by the inspectorate. Senior officials at the inspectorate conducted their preliminary inquiry last summer after fresh allegations about the phone-hacking scandal were published by the Guardian in July 2009.

The paper reported that News Group Newspapers paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal the repeated involvement of journalists in illegal methods to obtain stories. ...

U.S. Tries to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Published: September 27, 2010

WASHINGTON — Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.

James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” — including its decentralized design.

“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”

But law enforcement officials contend that imposing such a mandate is reasonable and necessary to prevent the erosion of their investigative powers.

“We’re talking about lawfully authorized intercepts,” said Valerie E. Caproni, general counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “We’re not talking expanding authority. We’re talking about preserving our ability to execute our existing authority in order to protect the public safety and national security.”

Investigators have been concerned for years that changing communications technology could damage their ability to conduct surveillance. In recent months, officials from the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the National Security Agency, the White House and other agencies have been meeting to develop a proposed solution.

There is not yet agreement on important elements, like how to word statutory language defining who counts as a communications service provider, according to several officials familiar with the deliberations.

But they want it to apply broadly, including to companies that operate from servers abroad, like Research in Motion, the Canadian maker of BlackBerry devices. In recent months, that company has come into conflict with the governments of Dubai and India over their inability to conduct surveillance of messages sent via its encrypted service.

In the United States, phone and broadband networks are already required to have interception capabilities, under a 1994 law called the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act. It aimed to ensure that government surveillance abilities would remain intact during the evolution from a copper-wire phone system to digital networks and cellphones. ...

U.S. seeks ways to wiretap the Internet
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 28, 2010

The Obama administration is planning to seek legislation that would require social networking companies and voice-over-Internet service providers to adapt their technology so law enforcement agents can monitor users' communications during criminal and terrorism investigations.

The proposal arises out of a concern that technology and social customs have outpaced the law and that authorities lack the means to monitor new methods of communication, administration officials said. But the initiative has also revived a more than 15-year-old debate over the proper balance between national security and personal privacy as well as what industry can reasonably be asked to do without stifling innovation.

"This is about lawfully authorized intercepts," said Valerie E. Caproni, FBI general counsel. "This is not about expanding authority, but about preserving the ability to carry out existing authorities in order to protect the national security and public safety."

The idea, which has been percolating for at least two years, is still in the discussion stages among federal bodies, including the FBI, the Justice Department and the National Security Council. Congressional and administration officials said no draft language or clear timeline exists. The administration's plans were first reported by the New York Times.

At issue is a 1994 telecommunications law called the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, which requires phone and broadband companies to build interception capabilities into their networks for law enforcement. An agent must have a court order based on probable cause to gain access to a provider's network.

Social networking companies such as Facebook and Twitter are not covered under CALEA. Their technologies were not built to provide law enforcement with real-time access to content.

Law enforcement agencies would also like firms that offer encrypted communications to be able to provide them with decrypted "clear text," as well as design a service to allow interception of peer-to-peer communications, such as Skype.

"If you're in an ongoing situation, where we had hostages and the suspects are communicating with one another calling out their plan or next move, you'd want real-time access," said one federal law enforcement official who was not authorized to speak for attribution. ...

Administration Internet-wiretap proposals forget history
By Rob Pegoraro | September 27, 2010

Any headline that uses the phrase "wiretap the Internet" is likely to make people on the Internet cranky. When this wiretapping scheme comes from an administration that already has an iffy record on digital-rights issues, there's good reason to be angry about it.

Today's news comes from the New York Times, which reported that the Obama administration wants to require "all services that enable communications-- including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct 'peer to peer' messaging like Skype" to make their services compatible with government wiretap orders, decrypting their user's encrypted messages if necessary.

The NYT piece, by Charlie Savage, says the administration plans to submit legislation imposing these requirements next year.

One plank in this proposal, as I understand it, merely looks unrealistic. That's the idea to extend the mandates already applied to Internet providers and Internet-calling services by a 1994 law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. That law requires them to make their services compatible with wiretap requests; the administration would like to put operators of other communications sites and services, from Facebook to peer-to-peer messaging services, under the same requirement.

But where CALEA focuses on companies with fixed facilities and U.S. addresses, this expanded authority would have to cover services based overseas and open-source applications with no physical location at all. Good luck with that.

Part two of this idea seems not only unrealistic but outright foolish--the unworkable concept of requiring encrypted services to retain the ability to decrypt messages. The authors of this proposal seem to have forgotten the dubious history of Clinton administration's ill-fated "Clipper chip" scheme for mandatory unlocking of scrambled messages. One reason why Clipper sank was the widespread availability of such open-source encryption tools as Pretty Good Privacy, which anybody could use instead of Clipper-compliant hardware or software. No new law will undo those developments.

As unwise as these proposals seem on their own, they seem even worse in the context of this Obama administration's actions. It's defended the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping under a dubious "state secrets" doctrine (fortunately, it lost). It continues to assert the right to search the laptops of citizens returning from overseas without any suspicion of wrongdoing. It's proposed to compel Web sites to turn over more information about their users to the FBI without a court order. ...

Feds eye plan to make Internet snooping easier
Internet services will be required to help with data interception, report says
By Jaikumar Vijayan
September 27, 2010 03:24 PM ET

Computerworld - The Obama Administration is reportedly considering a statute that would make it easier for federal authorities to intercept communications over services such as Facebook, Skype and BlackBerry -- an idea that's stoking anxiety within the privacy community.

The measure would force Internet companies that provide communications services to add in capabilities allowing federal authorities to intercept any messages on their networks, and to unscramble encrypted ones, the New York Times reported today.

The idea is being driven by law enforcement authorities worried that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is being eroded as more communications take place online rather than by phone.

A bill outlining the requirements could go to lawmakers sometime next year, the Times said. ...

U.S. Looking to Ease Internet Wiretap Laws, Report Says
By: Larry Seltzer
* 09.27.2010

The Obama administration is reportedly prepping new Internet regulations that would allow online service providers to comply with wiretap orders.

These new regulations could include sites like Facebook, mobile providers like Research in Motion, and software like Skype "to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order," according to a report in The New York Times. "The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages."

The Obama administration would reportedly submit the new regulations in the form of a bill next year.

Voice communications services and broadband networks are already required to provide such assistance under a 1994 law called the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act. That law does not apply to data communications services and this effort attempts to hold them to the same standard. ...

... Kamkar showed just how simple stalking can be. The first step is to lure the victim to click the attacker's link. Once the victim lands on the baited website, Kamkar showed how to trick and manipulate Google into revealing her location.

After she visited the malicious site, he could impersonate her by making his PC seem like her PC requesting the information. Using JavaScript to remotely scan for her router type and her MAC address, he then utilized Google Street View data to discover the location of her router. He was accurate within 30 feet.

According to Dan Goodin, "If JavaScript is unpalatable for some reason, there are other ways to do this. A few things have to happen for the attack to work. First, the router needs to be set to use the default administrative password, or it needs to be a model that doesn't require credentials to access its system information page. And the router's MAC address must already have been recorded by Google's ubiquitous fleet of Street View cars, which roam the earth snapping pictures and sniffing select Wi-Fi data."

This hack might be used for stalking or for targeting and attacking specific individuals. From proof-of-concept to his 'How I Met Your Girlfriend' presentation, Kamkar shows how easily a person could meet a guy, find out about his girlfriend, social engineer her to click a link, track her down, knock on her door, deliver pizza and beer. Discovering, meeting, and then stealing your girlfriend out from under you might be one of the less harmful scenarios.

"This is geo-location gone terrible," Samy Kamkar said during his presentation. "Privacy is dead, people. I'm sorry."

I contacted Samy and asked him what he advised for people who are concerned about privacy and security. In other words, what does he do to protect his privacy? Samy replied via email, "To better protect yourself, make sure you're using up to date firmware on your router, that you've changed any default passwords on your router or firewall, and if possible, use additional software such as NoScript to protect your browser from malicious code." ...

And so the Press Complaints Commission sits there, not as King Canute failing to turn back the tide of voicemail hacking, but as the embodiment of all three monkeys, seeing nothing, saying nothing, and doing nothing.

The News of the World now assures us it has "zero tolerance" of phone hacking. Bill Akass, the managing editor, says that if the latest case is proven, the perpetrator will be dismissed for "gross misconduct without compensation". That is an improvement on the position adopted after the convictions of Clive Goodman (the former royal correspondent) and Glenn Mulcaire (a private investigator). Both were paid off, and to this day both remain silent.

After the phone hacking story broke, the PCC, the regulator of the press financed by the press, did nothing.

It continues to do nothing while making noises that "phone message hacking is deplorable". The excuses for doing nothing are varied but the outcome is the same. ...

John Prescott furious over unrevealed link to phone-hacking scandal
Documents held by Metropolitan police suggest News of the World targeted former deputy prime minister
Toby Helm and Jamie Doward
4 September 2010

John Prescott tonight demanded the Metropolitan police reopen its investigation into the News of the World phone-hacking scandal as the Observer revealed that Scotland Yard holds News International documents suggesting that he was a target when deputy prime minister.

Two invoices held by the Met mention Prescott by name. They appear to show that News International, owner of the NoW, paid Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the heart of the scandal, for his help on stories relating to the deputy PM. Lord Prescott spoke of his anger that the information, spelled out in a letter from the Yard's legal services directorate, emerged only after he was given a series of personal reassurances by detectives at the highest level that there was "no evidence" his phone may have been hacked.

The invoices are both dated May 2006, at a time when Prescott was the subject of intense media scrutiny following revelations that he had had an affair with his secretary, Tracey Temple. There is also a piece of paper obtained from Mulcaire on which the name "John Prescott" is written. The only other legible word on this document is "Hull".

The name "Prescott" appears on two "self-billing tax invoices" from News International Supply Company Ltd to Mulcaire's company, Nine Consultancy.

The Yard's letter, obtained by the Observer, states: "One appears to be for a single payment of £250 on 7/5/2006 labelled 'Story: other Prescott Assist -txt.' The second, also for £250, on 21/5/2006 contains the words 'Story: Other Prescott Assist -txt urgent'."

The legal services directorate adds: "We do not know what this means or what it is referring to."

In a statement to the Observer, Prescott said he formed the impression that the police were more intent on withholding information relating directly to him. "I have been far from satisfied with the Metropolitan police's procedure in dealing with my requests to uncover the truth about this case," he said. ...

News of the World faces fresh phone hacking charge

• Calls for judicial inquiry after reporter is suspended
• Latest phone hacking allegation dates from earlier this year
• Four targets poised to sue police over failure to warn them

Nick Davies, Vikram Dodd and Nicholas Watt
Thursday 2 September 2010

The government tonight came under pressure to set up a judicial inquiry into the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World after the paper confirmed that it has suspended a journalist while it investigates new allegations of the unlawful interception of voicemail.

The prime minister's media adviser, Andy Coulson, has denied a report in the New York Times which claimed he freely discussed the use of unlawful news-gathering techniques when he was editing the paper and "actively encouraged" a named reporter to engage in illegal interception of voicemail messages. Coulson has always denied knowing of any illegal activity by his journalists.

Scotland Yard, too, found itself in the firing line after the New York Times quoted unnamed detectives alleging they had cut short their investigation because of their close relationship with the News of the World. A group of four public figures, including former deputy prime minister John Prescott, is poised to sue police over a failure to warn them they had been targeted by the private investigator at the centre of the scandal, Glenn Mulcaire.

The Guardian has learned that the Metropolitan police commissioner at the time of the original investigation, Sir Ian Blair, was among those whose names were found in material seized from Mulcaire, raising questions about whether officers who were directly involved in the investigation had discovered that they, too, had been targets of the newspaper. It is understood Blair was assured at the time that his phone had not been hacked.

The former Labour minister Tom Watson today called on the government to set up an inquiry into the relationship between Scotland Yard and Rupert Murdoch's News Group, which publishes the News of the World. In a letter which was addressed to the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, in the absence of the prime minister, who is on paternity leave, Watson wrote: "The testimony given to the New York Times is that the police did not share all the relevant information with the Crown Prosecution Service, and that, if they had done, the CPS would have reached a different conclusion. These are clear grounds for a judicial inquiry.

"I think that information should be made available to the people concerned." ...

Fucking disgusting.

ID cards scheme to be scrapped within 100 days
Bill abolishing ID cards and national identity register will be first piece of legislation introduced to parliament by the new government, says Theresa May
Alan Travis, home affairs editor
Thursday 27 May 2010

The £4.5bn national identity card scheme is to be scrapped within 100 days, the home secretary, Theresa May, announced today.

The 15,000 identity cards already issued are to be cancelled without any refund of the £30 fee to holders within a month of the legislation reaching the statute book.

Abolishing the cards and associated register will be the first piece of legislation introduced to parliament by the new government. May said the identity documents bill will invalidate all existing cards.

The role of the identity commissioner, created in an effort to prevent data blunders and leaks, will be abolished.

The government said the move will save £86m over four years and avoid £800m in costs over the next 10 years that would have been raised by increased charges. An allied decision to cancel the next generation of biometric fingerprint passports will save a further £134m over four years. Savings to the public under the whole package will total £1bn.

The publication of the identity documents bill today marks the end of an eight-year Whitehall struggle over compulsory identity cards since they were first floated by the then-home secretary David Blunkett in the aftermath of 9/11.

More than 5.4m combined passport and identity cards were due to be issued when the scheme was started in earnest next year. This was projected to rise to 10m ID cards/passports being issued ever year from 2016 onwards. ...

Wider European Scrutiny of Google on Privacy
By KEVIN J. O'BRIEN
Published: May 21, 2010

BERLIN — In a sign that Europe is taking an increasingly unified line on Internet privacy, six European countries have joined Germany in asking Google to preserve data it improperly collected from unsecured wireless networks as part of Street View, its photo-mapping service, the company said Friday.

The growing number of requests by the European countries, and Hong Kong, raised the possibility that Google might be required to disclose for the first time exactly what its employees collected in 33 countries while compiling Street View. And that in turn increased the likelihood that Google, the world’s largest search engine company, could face fines or other penalties.

The company said Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland had asked it to retain the data collected from their citizens. Google has described the data as fragments of Web pages and e-mail messages recorded by its roving fleet of specially equipped vehicles.

In a statement, Google said that it had received the multiple requests to retain the Wi-Fi data and that privacy officials in Denmark and Austria, by contrast, had joined Ireland, in asking the search engine to destroy data collected in their countries.

Google did not say in its statement whether it was prepared go a step further and turn over the data it had collected to individual regulators.

Peter Church, a privacy lawyer at Linklaters in London, said it was likely that the countries asking Google to refrain from destroying their data would eventually seek to inspect the data themselves.

“I would imagine that they would want to have a look at this information,” Mr. Church said. “Was Google just looking at the headers of the Wi-Fi information or were they looking at the content? I would imagine that the authorities in these jurisdictions will now look at the information. They will want to know whether or not it was tiny snippets of information, as Google has said, or something more.”

Hana Stepankova, a spokeswoman for the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection, confirmed that her office was investigating. She said it was too early to say whether regulators would ask to see the Czech data.

“In a country like the Czech Republic, which has had a history of secret surveillance before 1989, people are still very sensitive about anyone trying to listen in to their private business,” Ms. Stepankova said. ...

Why are we quitting?

For us it comes down to two things: fair choices and best intentions. In our view, Facebook doesn't do a good job in either department. Facebook gives you choices about how to manage your data, but they aren't fair choices, and while the onus is on the individual to manage these choices, Facebook makes it damn difficult for the average user to understand or manage this. We also don't think Facebook has much respect for you or your data, especially in the context of the future.

For a lot of people, quitting Facebook revolves around privacy. This is a legitimate concern, but we also think the privacy issue is just the symptom of a larger set of issues. The cumulative effects of what Facebook does now will not play out well in the future, and we care deeply about the future of the web as an open, safe and human place. We just can't see Facebook's current direction being aligned with any positive future for the web, so we're leaving. ...



They have a counter set up on the page, and as of this posting, 12614 people said they'd quit.

Facebook scrambles to close hole exposing private data
Gives attacker almost as much control as user
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
19th May 2010

Facebook engineers are finishing a patch for a critical vulnerability that exposed user birthdays and other sensitive data even when they were designated as private, a security researcher said Wednesday.

The bug could be exploited by prompting a user to click on a link while logged into the social networking site, said M.J. Keith, a senior security analyst with Alert Logic, a provider of cloud-based intrusion detection systems. Attackers could then read, delete, or alter a victim's profile page, including pictures and data that are set to be viewed only by trusted friends.

"I would assume that every single Facebook user [could] have [had] their Facebook page defaced or have exposed things about them," Keith told El Reg. The bug "gives the attacker almost as much control as the user."

At time of writing, much of the CSRF (cross-site request forgery) bug appeared to have been patched, Keith said. However, as noted earlier by IDG News, attackers still could exploit the flaw to control a user's "like" functions, which are used to endorse ads and other types of content.

Facebook representatives didn't respond to an email asking about the status of the bug fix. ...

Google is facing continuing fallout in the U.S. and abroad from its recent admission that its Street View cars inadvertently collected "payload" data from WiFi networks.

On Wednesday, two lawmakers asked the Federal Trade Commission to state whether it is investigating Google for gathering WiFi users' data. And earlier this week, residents of Oregon and Washington filed a potential class-action lawsuit against the company for allegedly violating their privacy. In Germany, the authorities are demanding that Google turn over the information it gathered so they can investigate the extent of the company's data collection.

A Google spokesperson said only: "We are working with the relevant authorities to answer their questions and concerns."

The firestorm started late last week, when Google said in a blog post that its Street View cars in Europe and the U.S. not only collected information about networks and their addresses, but also gathered the data transmitted over WiFi networks. The company said it collected the payload data by mistake, has never used the data, and will destroy it. But privacy advocates and regulators are calling for a full investigation. ...

Google Street View whacked by German prosecutors, Czech data watchdog
Wi-Fi slurping spycars scrutinised in Europe
By Kelly Fiveash
19th May 2010

Google came under increased fire in Europe yesterday, after German prosecutors and the Czech data protection agency launched separate investigations into the company’s interception of private Wi-Fi data.

Last week Google contradicted previous assurances it had made about its world-roving Street View cars by admitting the ad broker has been collecting information sent over open Wi-Fi networks.

In effect, Mountain View may have hoovered up emails and other private information if the Google cars travelled over Wi-Fi networks while one of its vehicles was in range. The firm had previously claimed that no payload data was ever intercepted.

Hamburg prosecutors said they had received a complaint against unnamed Google workers over the “unauthorised interception of data”, and confirmed that an investigation - that could take about a fortnight to determine if the allegations warrant a full-blown probe - was underway.

"We have launched a probe to see if there is a reasonable suspicion," the prosecutor’s spokesman Wilhelm Möllers told the Financial Times. ...

Sergey Brin: 'We screwed up' on Street View Wi-Fi grab
US lawmakers call for probe
By Cade Metz in San Francisco
19th May 2010

Google co-founder Sergey Brin says the company "screwed up" when it equipped its world-roving Street View cars with software code that spent three years capturing personal data from open Wi-Fi networks.

"Let me just say: We screwed up," Brin told a room full of reporters this afternoon at the company's annual developer conference in San Francisco. "I'm not going to make excuses about this."

In a blog post on Friday, Google announced that contrary to previous assurances by the company, its Street View cars had been capturing payload data from open Wi-Fi networks as they sped around the globe snapping digital photos. Just a month earlier the company had said the cars were collecting only SSIDs and MAC addresses form Wi-Fi networks.

The Friday post said that the company's mobile team included payload-capturing code in the cars' software despite the fact that the project leaders "did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data." It called this "a mistake".

The company also said that it would delete the data and that it would no longer collect any Wi-Fi data via the cars.

Today, Brin was asked if Google was putting safeguards in place to ensure this doesn't happen again. "We do actually have a lot of controls in place, but obviously they didn't prevent this error from occurring," he answered. "And therefore, we are putting more controls in place and we're asking an external third party to work with us on this is as well.

"Trust is very important to us. And we're going to do everything we can to preserve it." ...

Are users ‘dumb fucks’ for trusting data to Facebook?
Embarrassing conversation comes back to haunt embattled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
By Tim Edwards
LAST UPDATED 2:28 PM, MAY 14, 2010

A row over Facebook's casual attitude towards the privacy of its 400 million users is threatening to snowball into a full-blown crisis as high-profile members start closing their accounts.

Facebook seems to deem the situation serious enough to have called an 'all hands' meeting of its staff yesterday to address concerns over data protection.

The situation was inflamed when Silicon Alley Insider posted an old instant messaging conversation between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a friend in which the then 19-year-old Harvard student called users of his newly founded website 'dumb fucks'.

During the conversation, Zuckerberg writes: "Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS."

When the friend asks him how he got the information, Zuckerberg replies: "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."

Facebook responded to the publication of the 'dumb fucks' message, saying: "The privacy and security of our users' information is of paramount importance to us. We're not going to debate claims from anonymous sources or dated allegations that attempt to characterise Mark's and Facebook's views towards privacy."

The IM exchange may well be put down to college-boy bravado, but it chimes with Facebook's generally cavalier attitude to privacy since its inception. Most applications on Facebook require users to allow access to their personal information and that of their friends. It is possible to refuse, but those that do cannot then play games like Farmville or Mafia Wars with their Facebook friends. ...

Facebook Friends' Names Leak Into Search Engine Results
by Laurie Sullivan
17 May 2010

Facebook members have begun to realize that the ramifications of not opting-in to privacy controls that lock down information in profiles may go well beyond their control. The old adage that every action has consequences appears to have surfaced in Google search engine results.

Some people who chose not to opt-in to Facebook privacy settings have found their name in search results on google.com; and listed beneath, the names of a few of their Facebook friends. There's one problem. Unfortunately, Facebook members who choose to keep their profiles public, rather than opt-in to privacy settings, take their friends who want to remain private into the open, too. They do it unknowingly and unwillingly.

Take Nichola Stott, for example. The co-founder of TheMediaFlow -- who specializes in search, social media and online monetization -- admits to not setting up Facebook privacy walls, but believes the issue focuses more around having to opt-in to a variety of confusing privacy settings that many may not understand. Although she chooses to keep her profile open, some of her friends -- such as business partner Stephen Adds -- do not.

Adds -- TheMediaFlow co-founder and director of strategy and monetization -- initiated Facebook privacy options, but as a friend of Nichola, he also gets pulled into the fray. Do a search on "Stephen Adds" and friends appear under his name in the search engine results page (SERP).

Stott calls it counterintuitive regardless of what Facebook Terms and Conditions or manually controlled privacy settings may permit. It makes her feel "unnerved, but not surprised," she says, "I knew it was coming."

It appears that the list of friends in search engine queries have begun to surface most recently on Google.co.uk, Stott says. Facebook acknowledged MediaPost's request for comment, but has not responded with an official statement. ...

Site automates search of embarrassing Facebook posts
Want to know who's throwing a sickie?
By John Leyden
17th May 2010 02:53 GMT

A new site illustrates the privacy perils of users who leave their public updates searchable outside of Facebook.

FacebookSearch allows interested parties to search for status updates containing potentially embarrassing information such as "playing hooky", "stupid boss", or "control urges" simply by clicking on a link. The site also offers customised searches of freely viewable status updates. Search results return the name and profile picture of those making potentially embarrassing comments.

The site neatly illustrates the privacy perils of making status updates and wall posts viewable in much the same way PleaseRobMe previously illustrated how location updates through services such as FourSquare might potentially help out burglars.

FacebookSearch automates a type of security shortcoming first noticed by a commentard on Slashdot. The Facebook Graph site allows users to search for posts containing the word sex, or any other search term the curious might choose to select.

A spokeswoman for Facebook explained: "This is the search feature of the Graph API, documented here (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api#search.)"

The same search is possible directly on Facebook. ...

Facebook loses friends as privacy campaign grows
Type 'How do I ...' into the search engine and one of the first suggestions it comes up with continues: '... delete my Facebook account?'
Peter Walker
Friday 14 May 2010

It's a fitting congruity that the simplest way to gauge Facebook's current woes comes via that other unchallenged behemoth of the internet, Google. Type "How do I ..." into the search engine and one of the first suggestions it comes up with continues: "... delete my Facebook account?" Today it was the ninth top-ranked search term, bringing more than 18m results. ...

...this week Facebook has experienced perhaps the closest thing to a crisis in its brief history, with reports of an emergency staff meeting at its California headquarters about privacy issues.

Criticism has been mounting since a revamp of the site in December meant users' profiles became publicly accessible by default. Retreating back into anonymity also became an increasingly tortuous process, with profiles now featuring 50 separate privacy settings and 170 options. This was followed in March by more changes, including plans to automatically share users' information with outside websites.

While this has the potential to hugely boost Facebook's revenues through targeted marketing, it has angered campaigners, including the American Civil Liberties Union. This month EU data protection officials wrote to Facebook, calling the privacy changes "unacceptable".

But what seems to have worried the company are calls for Facebook users to wipe their accounts. "Facebook is officially 'out', as in uncool," was the verdict of another California tech pioneer, Jason Calacanis, chief executive of the question-and-answer website Mahalo, calling for a boycott of the "not trustworthy" site.

In a telling echo of Facebook's origin, in April four New York University students started a web appeal for $10,000 (£7,000) to finance a summer holiday creating an open-source alternative to Facebook, called Diaspora. Within a fortnight they had $100,000. ...

... Elliot Schrage, Facebook's vice-president of communications, concedes that the privacy changes have been handled badly. He said: "The most important thing for our business is trust. People trust Facebook with their most personal information – the photographs of their family, how they're feeling, the things they care about. What distresses me most is when people believe our changes are born from malevolence or sneakiness. It's our failure that people don't understand what we're doing with the data. That's a mistake in communications." ...

Not every woman who's played softball and/or wears their hair short is gay, you narrow-minded pillocks.

I could hit softballs as far as the guys hit baseballs, but I was still interested in boys instead of my female teammates.

Incident spurs call for school use review
A city School Committee member says she's 'appalled' at how GOP guests treated a classroom.

By Kelley Bouchard kbouchard@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

PORTLAND - One School Committee member, saying she's "appalled" by the behavior of some of the Republicans who used a room at King Middle School last weekend, wants to protect the city's public schools from future harm.

Sarah Thompson said she plans to raise the issue when the committee meets on May 19. She has asked Superintendent Jim Morse to contact City Manager Joe Gray so the committee will have a clear understanding of policies and legalities related to the rental and public use of school buildings.

"We allowed them to use the space and I'm appalled that they would go through a teacher's things, let alone remove something from a classroom," Thompson said Wednesday. "We want the public to use school spaces, but they need to respect that it's a school and understand that they should leave it the way they find it."

The Republican State Convention was held at the Portland Exposition Building, which is on Park Avenue, near the middle school. Party members from Knox County caucused in a classroom used by eighth-grade social studies teacher Paul Clifford.

When Clifford returned to school on Monday, he found that a favorite poster about the U.S. labor movement had been taken and replaced with a bumper sticker that read, "Working People Vote Republican."

Later, Clifford learned that his classroom had been searched. Republicans who had attended the convention called Principal Mike McCarthy to complain about "anti-American" things they saw there, including a closed box containing copies of the U.S. Constitution that were published by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Maine Republican Party leaders have issued a written apology to King students and teachers.

"King Middle School was kind enough to allow the (party) to use their facilities and we are deeply concerned about the lack of respect shown to the faculty," wrote Executive Director Christie-Lee McNally. ...


Ta much, dear Anneliese

Facebook Privacy Instructions
2010-05-04

Recent changes by Facebook fundamentally change the relationship between the user and the social networking site. Previously, users had the ability to determine what information they chose to share and what information they wanted to keep private. Recent policy changes are altering that relationship and there is little guidance on what social networking sites can and cannot do and what disclosures are necessary to users.

Basically, Facebook now shares your personal information with third parties (Microsoft, Yelp, and Pandora so far) automatically. If you don’t want Facebook to share your information you need to opt-out of the “Instant Personalization Program”

You can complete the whole process in a few minutes using the links below and your browser’s ‘back’ button. Here is how:

1. First, log into Facebook in a new window or tab.
2. Next, go to the “Instant Personalization” page (under Account/Privacy Settings/Applications and Websites) and uncheck the “allow” box.
3. To prevent the third parties from accessing your information through your friends who have not opted out, you need to visit Pandora, Microsoft, and Yelp and click on the “Block Application” link in the upper left corner of the page.
4. Finally, check Facebook’s “Help Center” frequently to see an up-to-date list of applications that need to be individually blocked to maintain your privacy.

... The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group, has criticised the changes, alleging that they reduce control of an individual’s personal information and fail to offer an easy “opt-out” preference.

Four US senators wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, last week to take issue with some of the changes.

Candid Wueest, from the internet security firm Symantec, said: “For any organisation, whether you are a social networking site or not, privacy breaches are worrying.

“Unfortunately, this isn’t the first privacy breach of its kind to plague a social networking site. Other high-profile sites have also been affected with similar problems.

“Privacy settings lead people to be a little freer in the content they share on social networking sites, as it enables users to have control over who can see the content posted.

“It is therefore important that all social networking sites regularly review the policies in which the privacy settings sit.”

David Cameron's close adviser, Andy Coulson, tonight came under fresh attack after the disclosure of new evidence of the News of the World's role in the illegal interception of the royal household's voicemail messages during his time as editor.

The evidence is in the outline for a book planned by the private investigator at the centre of the affair, Glenn Mulcaire. The outline was written before Mulcaire signed a deal with the paper which stopped the book's publication and gagged him from speaking about the scandal.

The outline directly contradicts the News of the World's claim that Mulcaire broke the law without the paper's knowledge or consent. It describes an unnamed editorial executive at the News of the World commissioning Mulcaire to intercept the royal messages and claims that the paper pressed him to continue with the interceptions when he tried to stop.

It also refers to an unnamed person approaching him to "change his story", although it does not say whether this was an employee of the News of the World. Coulson has insisted that he does not remember any of his journalists being involved in breaking the law.

Labour's business secretary, Peter Mandelson, said: "The idea that as editor of the News of the World Andy Coulson was not aware of this activity beggars belief. If the election in less than a week goes the Tories' way, we would see this man taking on a major role in the British government. People should think long and hard before considering voting Conservative."

The Lib Dems' home affairs spokesman, Chris Huhne, said: "Coulson is in this up to his neck and it is shocking that Cameron continues to employ someone with his history of presiding over skulduggery. It was always an astonishing lapse of judgment to hire someone who was either complicit in criminal activity or the most incompetent editor in Fleet Street's modern history." ...

A pair of security researchers has discovered a number of new attack vectors that give them the ability to not only locate any GSM mobile handset anywhere in the world, but also find the name of the subscriber associated with virtually any cellular phone number, raising serious privacy and security concerns for customers of all of the major mobile providers.

The research, which Don Bailey of iSec Partners and idndependent security researcher Nick DePetrillo will present at the SOURCE conference in Boston today, builds upon earlier work on geolocation of GSM handsets and exposes a number of fundamental weaknesses in the architecture of mobile providers' networks. However, these are not software or hardware vulnerabilities that can be patched or mitigated with workarounds. Rather, they are features and functionality built into the networks and back-end systems that Bailey and DePetrillo have found ways to abuse in order to discover information that most cell users assume is private and known only to the cell provider.

"I haven't seen anything out there anywhere on this. Who owns a cell number isn't private," DePetrillo said. "If you go through entire number ranges and blocks, you'll get numbers for celebrities, executives, anyone. You can then track them easily using the geolocation information."

At the heart of the work the pair did is their ability to access the caller ID database mobile providers use to match the names of subscribers to mobile numbers. This is the same database that contains the subscriber information for landlines, but most mobile users don't realize that their data is entered into this repository, Bailey said. ...


Ta much, dear MSiegel

The Indian Government is to answer accusations today that it tapped ministers’ phones, including one involved in a growing money-laundering scandal surrounding the Indian Premier League cricket tournament.

As tens of millions tuned in to watch the IPL final last night, opposition parties were threatening to disrupt Parliament unless Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister, responded personally to allegations in a magazine last week that the State had eavesdropped on ministers’ calls. “This is turning out to be the biggest scandal,” said Rajiv Pratap Rudy, a spokesman for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party. “Why is the Government silent? We will not accept anybody’s answer except the Prime Minister,” he said.

Lalit Modi, the flamboyant chairman of the IPL, was suspended late last night pending a ruling by the tournament’s governing council that could decide whether he remains in charge of the $4.13 billion (£2.69 billion) franchise he created three years ago.

The Government began an investigation into Mr Modi and the IPL last week after allegations of tax evasion, money laundering, kickbacks, match fixing and illegal betting in cricket’s most lucrative competition. ...

The Tories' chief spin doctor, Andy Coulson, faces more awkward questions about a phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World during his time as editor. The Observer understands that a leading football agent has launched a legal action alleging that his phone was hacked by private investigators working with the newspaper's journalists while Coulson was in charge.

More than 10 MPs and at least one former football star, ex-England midfielder Paul Gascoigne, are also in discussions with lawyers looking to bring similar cases against the newspaper's owner, News Group Newspapers (NGN), part of Rupert Murdoch's empire. The pending legal action will severely embarrass Coulson who, as director of communications and planning for the Conservative party, will wield significant influence if it comes to power after the election.

Sky Andrew, who represents Arsenal defender Sol Campbell and has acted on behalf of former Liverpool player Jermaine Pennant and Tottenham striker Jermain Defoe, issued proceedings last week. Andrew's move comes just weeks after the newspaper agreed to pay more than £1m to PR agent Max Clifford, who dropped an action in which he alleged that his voicemail messages had been intercepted.

A similar case involving Gordon Taylor, the former chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, was settled out of court in 2008 with a £700,000 payout.

Labour has been quick to use Coulson's past to embarrass David Cameron. Last week Lord Mandelson, Labour's election strategist, blamed Coulson for a "dirty tricks" campaign waged in some newspapers against the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg.

"This is pure Andy Coulson-style News of the World territory turned into political form," Mandelson said. "It is cheap and rather squalid. If a Tory campaign is subcontracted to someone like Andy Coulson, it is no surprise that things like this are going to appear on the front pages of our newspapers." ...

Google engineering gaggle flees Facebook
'When I complain about privacy, I use Google Buzz'
By Cade Metz in San Francisco
23rd April 2010

A gaggle of Google engineers have expressed their displeasure with Facebook's latest effort to share your data with third-party sites, and many have gone so far as to deactivate their accounts.

This includes the Delphic Oracle of the SEO world, Matt Cutts, who announced his Facebook deactivation with a post to Twitter. Cutts didn't say why he deactivated, but the move came just hours after Facebook introduced an "instant personalization" thingy that automatically feeds your Facebook profile data to certain third-party sites when you - or your Facebook "friends" - pay a visit.

"When you and your friends visit an instantly personalized site, the partner can use your public Facebook information, which includes your name, profile picture, gender, and connections," Facebook says. Facebook displays a banner across the top of the website when this happens, but the onus is on the user to opt-out. And we all know that the average user isn't exactly aware of what's going on. ...

April 23, 2010
How Facebook is putting its users last
by Molly Wood

It's almost become a joke: Facebook makes a change to its privacy settings that opts you in to a bunch of scary stuff, the entire Internet flips out about it, it rolls back the change, and then a few months or years later, it makes the same or a very similar update, opting you in to it again. It would be funny, if it weren't getting so damned insulting.

Here's the latest. In the wake of its F8 conference the other day, Facebook rolled out a slew of changes aimed at transforming the Web into one giant conduit for Facebook data collection. And, as usual, the lofty discussions of a more "semantically aware" Web are based on the assumption that the Facebook-ized Web in question has access to most of the personal data of, hopefully, everyone in the world.

Let's be clear: I hold few illusions that Facebook's business strategy has ever been about anything other than building up a huge user base and then selling ads to those users. And obviously, the more targeted the ads, the easier it is to get people interested in them. But as the opportunities for data mining and targeting grow, Facebook faces a growing problem: how to get the data, if the users won't share it.

Facebook has created an unprecedented web (if you will) of connected users, with connections to other users who are more than willing to specify, in great detail, their interests, hobbies, and buying habits. The only problem? Those pesky private profiles.

Users tend to want to protect that data, at least a little bit, and at least some of it has to be "public," if it's to be used for the kind of behavioral targeting and, ultimately, ad targeting that really brings in the big bucks. And that is really the only explanation left for why Facebook has now gotten so shrilly insistent on you publicizing virtually every facet of your life. It's not about the user anymore, people (if it ever was).

Among other things, Facebook this week announced new "personalization" changes--the stickiest of them being Instant Personalization, which shares all your publicly available information (name, profile picture, gender, and "Connections," another new way for you to publicize all the things you're interested in) with, right now, three partner sites: Yelp, Pandora, and Docs.com. It's sticky because, as with most of Facebook's annoying new features, it's opt-out. ...

Facebook is about to get a lot more personal and dig deeper into you and your friends' likes, dislikes, and what you do online. This week at a Facebook developers conference called F8, the company pulled the curtain back on some very cool and soon to be available features.

What follows is an overview of what those new features are and how these features will impact your privacy. First, I'll start with five new Facebook features debuted this week. ...

Facebook's notable announcements this week range from a holistic vision of a seamless, semantically-enabled Web of human relationships, to a simple "Like" button, which will soon be omnipresent on the Internet. The moves are ambitious, giving even fast-moving rivals like Twitter reason to worry. Still, the simple fact that gets lost in the rush towards ubiquitous social connectivity is that Facebook users still don't know what they are sharing, with whom, or why it matters. In short: Facebook remains a privacy minefield. ...

... The allegations came to light in a lawsuit filed by the family of Blake Robbins, which argues that the LANrev software illegally invaded his privacy. The family first learned of the surveillance in November when an assistant principal confronted the 15-year-old high school sophomore with a picture of him that was taken by the tracking software.

The image, Robbins has said, showed him with a handful of Mike and Ike candies that the principal had mistaken for illegal pills.

Robbins' $1,000 laptop was not believed to be missing, so the theft-tracking software never should have been activated, his attorney has argued.

School officials told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the software was turned on because Robbins' family had failed to pay a $55 insurance fee to cover the laptop, so he was not authorized to take it home. They also say there is no evidence to indicate school employees used any of the images inappropriately.

Still, the district acknowledged that the software has been activated 42 times since September and an undisclosed number of times the previous year. They have yet to say how many students were photographed or monitored.

According to documents filed by the Robbins' attorney on Thursday, more than 400 images were secretly snapped of Blake, some while he was sleeping or partially undressed.

"Thousands of webcam pictures and screenshots have been taken of numerous other students in their homes, many of which never reported their laptops lost or missing," the filing added.

The motion went on to recite the email exchange between two district employees who administered the laptops.

Viewing the images was like watching "a little LMSD soap opera," one of them said, referring to the initials of the school district.

"I know, I love it!" technology coordinator Carol Cafiero replied.

Lawyers for Harriton High School sophomore Blake Robbins are claiming that the teenager's school district has used built-in tracking software on students' laptops to take "thousands" of unauthorized images, "including pictures of Blake partially undressed and of Blake sleeping."

The motion, filed April 15 by Michael and Holly Robbins, is the latest salvo in a class-action lawsuit filed against the Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, PA earlier this year. The issue of remote laptop surveillance came to light after school administrators accused Robbins of "improper behavior in his home," based on a photograph that was taken through the school's remote-monitoring software, LANrev.

Around 2,300 students across two schools in the district have received $1,000 Macintosh laptops for use with said software preinstalled and, as allegedly confirmed by one of Harriton's assistant principals, it can be remotely activated at any time, for any reason.

According to the lawsuit, "By virtue of the fact that the Webcam can be remotely activated at any time by the School District, the Webcam will capture anything happening in the room in which the laptop computer is located, regardless of whether the student is sitting at the computer and using it." Consequently, the suit is accusing the school district of violating various federal and state statutes against surveillance and wiretapping, including the federal Electronics Communications Privacy Act. ...

Lawyers for Harriton High School sophomore Blake Robbins are claiming that the teenager's school district has used built-in tracking software on students' laptops to take "thousands" of unauthorized images, "including pictures of Blake partially undressed and of Blake sleeping."

The motion, filed April 15 by Michael and Holly Robbins, is the latest salvo in a class-action lawsuit filed against the Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, PA earlier this year. The issue of remote laptop surveillance came to light after school administrators accused Robbins of "improper behavior in his home," based on a photograph that was taken through the school's remote-monitoring software, LANrev.

Around 2,300 students across two schools in the district have received $1,000 Macintosh laptops for use with said software preinstalled and, as allegedly confirmed by one of Harriton's assistant principals, it can be remotely activated at any time, for any reason.

According to the lawsuit, "By virtue of the fact that the Webcam can be remotely activated at any time by the School District, the Webcam will capture anything happening in the room in which the laptop computer is located, regardless of whether the student is sitting at the computer and using it." Consequently, the suit is accusing the school district of violating various federal and state statutes against surveillance and wiretapping, including the federal Electronics Communications Privacy Act. ...

A new motion in the Lower Merion School School District Webcam-spying case has presented extraordinary suggestions as to the frequency and intimate nature of the photographs allegedly taken remotely by the cameras on school-issued laptops.

On Thursday, lawyers for 15-year-old Blake Robbins and his family claimed that thousands of images were taken by the laptop Webcams. Included in these were, according to the motion, "pictures of Blake partially undressed and of Blake sleeping." In addition, images of Web sites visited and snapshots of their instant messages were also allegedly captured.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, lawyers claim that each time the LANRev software took Webcam shots, it sent them back to school district servers, where employees found entertainment in "a little LMSD soap opera."

Two school district employees were placed on administrative leave in March, after the allegations surfaced, and the school agreed to immediately turn off the Webcams. ...

Gloating officials who spied on them said it was "like a soap opera", it is alleged. ...

Austrian takes pickaxe to Street View spymobile
Septuagenarian has hard line on privacy
By Lester Haines
9th April 2010

An Austrian old timer could be in a spot of bother with police after he chased a Street View spymobile with a pickaxe, the Austrian Times reports.

Google's Orwellian Opels have apparently come out of winter hibernation to continue their invasion of Austria. This didn't go down too well with 70-year-old Hermann Zach, who strongly objected to one prowling the streets of Steyregg earlier this week.

Zach explained: “I was working in the garden when I noticed this weird car on the road. I told the driver to make a move but he just didn’t listen. So I grabbed my pickaxe and ran after him." ...

Exclusive: Phone-tapping inquiry over John Terry affair
Vanessa Perroncel, in her first interview since news of her affair with ex-England captain emerged, reveals how her refusal to talk to the tabloids caused a prolonged campaign of vilification
Saturday 10 April 2010

An official inquiry has been launched into the suspected interception of voicemail messages around the tabloid newspaper story of the former England football captain John Terry and his alleged affair with a French model.

The inquiry, which is being led from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), will cause concern in Fleet Street, where newspapers and the Press Complaints Commission have insisted that this kind of illegal activity has been stamped out since the jailing of a News of the World reporter in January 2007.

The evidence focuses on the phone records of Vanessa Perroncel and of one of her close friends, Antonia Graham. Perroncel was accused by tabloids of having an affair with Terry.

One allegation involves the interception of a live telephone call between the two women, a more serious offence than listening to phone messages.

In her first interview since the story broke, published in the Guardian today, Perroncel, the former partner of the Manchester City and England footballer Wayne Bridge, says of her experience at the hands of the tabloid pack: "It is horrible. It is like a nightmare. Every day you think: 'What else are they going to say about me?' It is so intrusive and so false. Every day, so many lies – and then people making judgments because of the lies."

Her lawyers this week formally warned seven national newspapers that she is moving to sue them for breach of privacy over reports that claimed to expose her personal life, including her sexual relationships, her medical history, her finances and her wider family's personal problems. ...

... Perroncel says she refused to speak to journalists but that the quote is an accurate account of what she said – in a private phone call to Antonia Graham.

Perroncel told the Guardian: "Antonia did not sell that quotation. I know she does not do that. So how did they get it? There have been other times when the same thing has happened: a conversation with a friend ends up word for word in the paper." ...

Police who investigated the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World obtained previously undisclosed telephone records which showed a vast number of public figures had had their voicemail accessed – and then decided not to pursue the evidence, according to official papers seen by the Guardian.

The revelation – contained in paperwork from inside the Crown Prosecution Service – raises fundamental questions about the behaviour of Scotland Yard, which has claimed repeatedly that it found evidence of "only a handful" of people whose mobile phone messages had been intercepted by the News of the World's private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire.

The paperwork also reveals that police and prosecutors adopted a deliberate strategy to ringfence the evidence which they presented in court in order to suppress the names of particularly prominent victims, including members of the royal family. The existence of this strategy has been omitted from all public statements, including evidence made to the House of Commons media select committee.

In a further blow to the official version of events, the Guardian has discovered that although police and prosecutors named only eight victims in court, material seized by police from Mulcaire and the paper's royal reporter, Clive Goodman, contained 4,332 names or partial names of people in whom the two men had an interest, 2,978 numbers or partial numbers for mobile phones and 30 audio tapes which appear to contain an unspecified number of recordings of voicemail messages. ...

Microsoft teams with Google in name of privacy
Strange bedfellows back US law overhaul
By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco
30th March 2010

Search rivals Microsoft and Google have joined a coalition to simplify and clarify US law to protect the online privacy of netizens from government snooping.

The companies have teamed with more than 20 other technology providers and lobby groups from the right and left of US politics to update a US privacy law that's being applied to peoples' internet communications, but was written in 1986 - the year of big hair, Chernobyl, and the Challenger space-shuttle disaster, but most certainly not the web, email, or mobile phones.

They've joined the Digital Due Process coalition, brainchild of Center for Democracy and Technology vice president Jim Dempsey, to force a change to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA).

Microsoft, Google, and their colleagues have put their name to a set of four principles they hope will clean up EPCA and clarify the rules that govern things like the ability for the authorities to hover search queries, IP addresses, or users' mobile GPS locations.

While consumers might not be overly concerned about uploading skads of personal information to cloud-based services like Facebook or giving out their GPS location on the iPhone, the fear is they'll balk as concerns about what happens to their data find their way into the mainstream debate on privacy. ...

ECPA Reform: Why Now?

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) was a forward-looking statute when enacted in 1986. It specified standards for law enforcement access to electronic communications and associated data, affording important privacy protections to subscribers of emerging wireless and Internet technologies. Technology has advanced dramatically since 1986, and ECPA has been outpaced. The statute has not undergone a significant revision since it was enacted in 1986 - light years ago in Internet time.

As a result, ECPA is a patchwork of confusing standards that have been interpreted inconsistently by the courts, creating uncertainty for both service providers and law enforcement agencies. ECPA can no longer be applied in a clear and consistent way, and, consequently, the vast amount of personal information generated by today’s digital communication services may no longer be adequately protected. At the same time, ECPA must be flexible enough to allow law enforcement agencies and services providers to work effectively together to combat increasingly sophisticated cyber-criminals or sexual predators.

The time for an update to the ECPA is now. For more than a year, privacy advocates, legal scholars, and major Internet and communications service providers have been engaged in a dialogue to explore how the ECPA applies to new services and technologies. We have developed consensus around the notion of a core set of principles intended to simplify, clarify, and unify the ECPA standards; provide clearer privacy protections for subscribers taking into account changes in technology and usage patterns; and preserve the legal tools necessary for government agencies to enforce the laws and protect the public.

Changes in Technology Have Outpaced the Law

Justice Brandeis famously called privacy "the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by a free people." Of course, privacy must be balanced against other societal interests. Electronic communications and associated data can provide key evidence in the investigation of many crimes, and the assistance of service providers is often necessary to access such evidence. With respect to communications privacy and law enforcement investigations, the courts and Congress have sought to develop rules for government surveillance that balance three interests: the individual’s constitutional right to privacy, the government’s need for tools to conduct investigations, and the interest of service providers in clarity and customer trust. ...

Police accused of trespass after 'burgling' 50 homes... to show owners how insecure they are
By Luke Salkeld
30th March 2010

When it comes to fighting crime, a certain understanding of the criminal mind is essential.

But the police have been criticised for their attempts to prevent a spate of house thefts - by committing the burglaries themselves.

Officers have been entering private homes through open windows or unlocked doors, supposedly as a warning to residents about a lack of security. ...



Wow. Warrantless co pigs rooting round in peoples' homes, eh? Jolly good show, idiots.

Ta much, dear Edosan

Mountain View promises Google Analytics opt-out
Another privacy tool few will ever use
By Cade Metz in London
19th March 2010

Google is developing a browser plug-in that will let you opt-out of being tracked by Google Analytics, the traffic monitoring service now used by 71 per cent of the top domains on the interwebs.

In a blog post yesterday, Google Analytics product manager Amy Chang said that engineers are "finalizing" testing on the plug-in and that the company intends to make it globally available "in the coming weeks".

According to a study from the University of California, Berkeley, Google Analytics was used on 71 per cent of roughly 400,000 top domains as of March 2009. This same study showed that Google AdSense was used by over 35 per cent of the top domains and Google DoubleClick by over 26 per cent.

Taken together, Google-controlled web bugs were tracking users on 92 of the net's top 100 sites and about 88 per cent of almost 400,000 others.

Google already offers an opt-out plug-in for AdSense - which maintains your opt-out even if you clear cookies. AdSense now uses the same tracking cookie as DoubleClick and the two ad networks are sharing at least some data, but it's unclear how much. ...

More choice for users: browser-based opt-out for Google Analytics on the way

Thursday, March 18, 2010 | 11:22 AM

As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics....

David Cameron's communications director, Andy Coulson, will come under fresh pressure to defend his editorship of the News of the World and his knowledge about the illegal activities of his journalists amid new allegations about the paper's involvement with private detectives who broke the law.

The Guardian has learned that while Coulson was still editor of the tabloid, the newspaper employed a freelance private investigator even though he had been accused of corrupting police officers and had just been released from a seven-year prison sentence for blackmail.

The private eye was well known to the News of the World, having worked for the paper for several years before he was jailed, when Coulson was deputy editor. He was rehired when he was freed.

Evidence seen by the Guardian shows that Mr A, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was blagging bank accounts, bribing police officers, procuring confidential data from the DVLA and phone companies, and trading sensitive material from live police inquiries.

Coulson has always insisted he knew nothing about the illegal activity which took place in the News of the World newsroom, telling MPs last year: "I have never had any involvement in it at all."

Mr A cannot be named now because he is facing trial for a violent crime, but his details will emerge once he has been dealt with by the courts. Coulson tonight refused to say whether he was aware of Mr A's criminal background, or of his return to the paper following his prison term. He said: "I have nothing to add to the evidence I gave to the select committee." ...

Why Google Has Become Microsoft's Evil Twin
The backlash over Google Buzz reveals an even bigger problem: The people behind the people's search engine are deeply out of touch.
Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld
Feb 15, 2010

If you work at Google, your ears are surely burning right now. Google's introduction of its Buzz social media tool this week was possibly the most disastrous product debut in the company's 12-year history.

Almost immediately, Google Buzz got smacked around hard by the blogosphere and veteran journos for making it easy to access information -- like who you're in regular contact with -- that people may not have necessarily wanted the rest of the world to know.

What Google Buzz does is essentially mash up two similar but distinct services: Twitter and Facebook. Twitter is very open -- anyone can follow or send messages to anyone else -- but very limited in what people can find out about you. Facebook opens the kimono wider, but offers much more control over what strangers can see. If they don't have your OK, they can't see much (assuming you know how to use FB's privacy settings).

Google Buzz combined the openness of Twitter with the "whoo-hoo look at me!" aspects of Facebook. The result? A total face plant. ...

Viking frogmen chase Street View spymobile
Google enjoys a traditional Norwegian welcome
By Lester Haines
10th February 2010

Last weekend saw the launch of Google's privacy-busting Street View in Norway, and it didn't take long for locals to spot a traditional Viking welcome for the Great Satan of Mountain View's spymobile on the streets of Bergen:


Luckily for the Google operative, he was able to outrun the belligerent, rubber-clad locals and make good his escape...


Well done the Viking lads!

Metropolitan police assistant commissioner John Yates has been reprimanded by the culture select committee for what it claims was a failure to give more detailed evidence to MPs over the scale of hacking into private phone messages by former News International employees. The chairman of the culture committee, John Whittingdale, has written to Yates to deliver the reprimand.

Yates has angrily replied it had never been his intention to mislead the committee and he is most concerned that the committee believed that to be the case.

The Guardian revealed last week that a freedom of information request had disclosed that the police found News International had pin codes, which are used for accessing voicemail messages, belonging to 91 people. The phones had been accessed by the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who worked for the News of the World and the paper's royal correspondent, Clive Goodman.

Knowing that the information was about to be made public, a senior police officer wrote to the select committee to inform them late last month.

At the time of giving oral evidence to the committee in September, Yates gave no indication he knew of the scale of the hacking. ...

Dear MSiegel found this story, and posits the theory that The Stig is Col Sanders.

Film at eleven.

Screw you, fbi.

Use your brain.

HA HA HA HA HA HA Good fucking luck, mates.

Switzerland's head of federal data protection has told Google that his country is still not sufficiently blurry on the Great Satan of Mountain View's Street View service, despite the company agreeing to further obscure faces and number plates.

Hans-Peter Thür ordered Street View offline ealier this month because "many faces and car registration plates were clearly visible or were insufficiently obscured".

Google promised "significant improvement" in in the blurring, but Thür has now decreed that "there were many problem pictures that did not respect anonymity, particularly in private roads and gardens", as Swissinfo puts it.

Furthermore, Street View must also "pay particular attention to blurring such places as hospitals, schools and prisons". If it doesn't toe the line within 30 days, Thür says he may take the matter to the Swiss Federal Administrative Court. ...

A coalition of 10 U.S. privacy and consumer groups has called for new federal privacy protections for Web users, including a requirement that Web sites and advertising networks get opt-in permission from individuals within 24 hours of collecting personal data and tracking online habits.

The groups, including the Center for Digital Democracy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), want the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would bar Web sites and online advertising networks from collecting sensitive data such as information about health, finances, race and sexual orientation.

In a broad set of new recommendations for privacy regulations released Tuesday, the groups also called on the U.S. Congress to prohibit Web sites and ad networks from collecting behavioral information about children under age 18, whenever it's possible to distinguish the age of the Web user, and to require that online businesses inform consumers about the purpose of the information collection.

"The basic idea is ... we want consumers to be able to take advantage of all the new technologies without having the technologies take advantage of the consumers," said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum. "Right now, that balance is not there."

Many Web users are unaware of all the information that's being collected about them, especially by ad networks engaged in targeted or behavioral advertising, the groups said. The groups released recommendations to Congress just before lawmakers return to Washington, after August recess. Several lawmakers, particularly Representative Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, have talked about pushing for online privacy legislation late this year. ...

How private lives of famous were invaded
• Actors, MPs and union leaders among victims
• Investigators took data for news organisations
* Nick Davies
* Monday 31 August 2009

The Guardian today reveals the identities of scores of public figures whose confidential details were extracted from supposedly secure databases by a network of private investigators working for news organisations.

The victims include politicians, union leaders, a high court judge, sports personalities, showbusiness stars, journalists and thousands of members of the public.

Repeatedly breaking data protection laws, newspapers and magazines commissioned the network to obtain personal information from social security records, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, the police national computer, British Telecom and mobile phone companies.

They also conned hotels, banks, prisons, trade unions and the post office into handing over sensitive information.

The victims' identities are contained in paperwork which has been suppressed since it was seized six years ago from a Hampshire private investigator, Steve Whittamore, during an inquiry known as Operation Motorman, run by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

It has released a statistical summary of the Motorman paperwork but has refused repeatedly to reveal any of the content, with the result that the vast majority of the victims have never been warned that their privacy was compromised. ...

... “At any given time, someone might be filming you,” said Macomb County Sheriff Mark Hackel, whose department passed along to the feds a case against a man accused of spying on his neighbor’s 10-year-old daughter by hiding a camera in her bathroom.

“These things are very small and very inexpensive,” Hackel said. “And with the good comes the bad.” ...

Kent Police clamp down on tall photographers
New heights of absurdity (about 5'11")

The man in charge of the Met's CCTV unit has criticised the way police use surveillance and called for no more cameras to be installed.

Detective Chief Inspector Mike Neville said footage from cameras was often not used because forces do not have systems or staff to retrieve images. He added that serious crime that could be solved by CCTV was not, because of poorly targeted investment.

Comparing London to other parts of the country, he said: "Because we had CCTV first, we made all the mistakes. And the mistake was spend it on kit, don't spend it on people or processes and that's what's gone wrong. Unless there is a systematic way of gathering CCTV then it will continue not to be as effective as it could be."

Neville was responding to the findings of a Newsnight investigation, broadcast on Monday night.

He continued: "What I would say is we've got enough cameras, let's stop now, we don't want any more cameras. Let's invest that money that's available and use it for the training of people, and the processes to make sure whatever we've captured is effectively used." ...

... to underline Britain's status as the West's most monitored society, the BBC's Freedom of Information requests showed that authorities on the Shetland Islands have more CCTV cameras than the San Francisco Police Department.

News of the World phone hacking: CPS to undertake urgent review of evidence

• Metropolitan Police rules out new investigation
• News International: 'Confidentiality obligations' prevent comment on 'certain' Guardian allegations
• Andy Coulson may face Commons culture select committee
• David Cameron defends his communications chief
• Gordon Brown: 'This raises serious questions'

* James Robinson, Andrew Sparrow and Leigh Holmwood
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 9 July 2009

The Crown Prosecution Service today said it would undertake an urgent review of evidence in the News of the World phone hacking case, after the Metropolitan Police revealed it did not plan a further investigation of the allegations.

However, Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor, now the Tory communications chief, could be grilled by MPs for a Commons inquiry into the affair.

Keir Starmer QC, the director of public prosecutions, said he had ordered an "urgent examination" of material provided by the police in the News of the World case three years ago. He added that the process will take time but he hopes to make a further statement in coming days. ...

Just think: 2-3 thousand £million lawsuits. That'd take the wind outta ol' rupee's sails, what what?

rupee should know better than to fuck with rich people.

Idiot.

You know damn well he'd sue hell outta anyone who tapped/hacked his phone, FFS!!

... Chris Huhne, the Lib Dems' home affairs spokesman, said: "It is extraordinary that the leader of the opposition, who wants to be a prime minister, employs Andy Coulson, who at best was responsible for a newspaper that was out of control and at worst was personally [involved] with criminal activity. The exact parallel is surely with Damian McBride. If the prime minister was right to sack Damian McBride, should the leader of the opposition not sack Andy Coulson?"

Hanson told MPs that phone-hacking without authority was a criminal offence punishable with a fine or a prison sentence of up to two years.

Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, prompted laughter as he urged everyone in the house to give a "measured response" to the issues raised and leave it to the police to decide whether there was "any new information that warrants further action".

... "If you imagine there was something of real major importance, you could have a public interest defence. But breaking into Gwyneth Paltrow's voicemail after she's just had a baby is not in the public interest. I'm at a loss to know what the public interest might be."

He also said the police had to explain why they failed to tell top politicians that their phones had been hacked into.

Neil said the story raised serious questions for Scotland Yard, top prosecutors and for judges: "It's not just a media story, it raises serious questions about the police.

"The police learn that the deputy prime minister has had his mobile phone compromised and they don't tell him. I just don't understand that.

"The police investigation unearthed evidence of clear wrongdoing and the Crown Prosecution Service does nothing."

He added: "The court is faced with evidence of conspiracy and systemic illegal actions and agrees to seal the evidence. All that is completely wrong, I just don't understand it."

Speaking earlier, on the BBC's Newsnight programme: "This is our criminal justice system in the dock."

Neil also said News International may face legal action from those who were victims of the phone hacking, a so called class action: "News International could face a class action by people who want to mount a class action to unseal those documents. There could be the most almighty class action, you're talking about multimillion pound losses. That gets scary.

"If this was in the US, shares in News International would collapse tonight." ...



Shares in "news" international should collapse tonight!

Murdoch papers paid £1m to gag phone-hacking victims

• News of the World bugging led to £700,000 payout to PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor
• Sun editor Rebekah Wade and Conservative communications chief Andy Coulson – both ex-NoW editors – involved
• News International chairman Les Hinton told MPs reporter jailed for phone-hacking was one-off case

Nick Davies
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 8 July 2009

... The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures and to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

Today, the Guardian reveals details of the suppressed evidence which may open the door to hundreds more legal actions by victims of News Group, the Murdoch company that publishes the News of the World and the Sun, as well as provoking police inquiries into reporters who were involved and the senior executives responsible for them.

The evidence also poses difficult questions for:

• Conservative leader David Cameron's director of communications, Andy Coulson, who was deputy editor and then editor of the News of the World when, the suppressed evidence shows, journalists for whom he was responsible were engaging in hundreds of apparently illegal acts

• Murdoch executives who, albeit in good faith, have misled a parliamentary select committee, the Press Complaints Commission and the public

• The Metropolitan police, who did not alert all those whose phones were targeted, and the Crown Prosecution Service, which did not pursue all possible charges against News Group personnel

• The Press Complaints Commission, which claimed to have conducted an investigation but failed to uncover any evidence of illegal activity.

The suppressed legal cases are linked to the jailing in January 2007 of News of the World reporter Clive Goodman for hacking into the mobile phones of three royal staff, an offence under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. At the time, News International said it knew of no other journalist who was involved in hacking phones and that Goodman had been acting without their knowledge.

However, one senior source at the Metropolitan police told the Guardian that during the Goodman inquiry, officers had found evidence of News Group staff using private investigators who hacked into "thousands" of mobile phones. Another source with direct knowledge of the police findings put the figure at "two or three thousand" mobiles. They suggest that MPs from all three parties and cabinet ministers, including former deputy prime minister John Prescott and former culture secretary Tessa Jowell, were among the targets. News International has always maintained that it has no knowledge of phone hacking by anybody acting on its behalf.

A private investigator who had been working on contract for News Group, Glenn Mulcaire, was also jailed in January 2007. He admitted hacking into the phones of five other targets, including Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association. Among those phones Mulcaire hacked into were the Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, celebrity PR Max Clifford, model Elle MacPherson and football agent Sky Andrew. News Group denied all knowledge of the hacking, but Taylor last year sued them on the basis that they must have known about it. ...




Won't see this story at faux news, you betcha.

Phorm plunges as BT mothballs targeted ads service
• Move seen as a victory by online privacy campaigners
• Shares fall by 40% on latest setback for developer
Richard Wray
Monday 6 July 2009

Shares in Phorm, the Aim-listed technology firm, have plunged after it emerged that BT has quietly pulled plans to roll out its controversial advertising system, which tracks the internet habits of customers and has been attacked as online snooping by privacy campaigners.

BT was a key player in the development of Phorm's Webwise system, which uses information about which sites an internet user visits to target them with relevant advertising on subsequent pages. News that BT has in effect mothballed the technology sent shares in Phorm down 40% by lunchtime today.

"The news is disappointing," said James Wheatcroft, analyst at Evolution Securities. "The UK has been persistently difficult for Phorm and this remains the case. However, we retain our positive recommendation based on overseas development and deployment, in particular Korea. The fundamental Phorm proposition remains highly attractive." ...



Would that be North Korea, you snooping sonovabitch?

June 9, 2009
How we should keep an eye on the powers that are watching us
Advances in technology are putting the right to privacy under increasing threat. Practical measures are needed to protect ourselves
Nigel Shadbolt

"Privacy is dead - get over it!” So proclaimed Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, in 2000. It might appear that in an age of increased surveillance, with huge amounts of personal data floating around, he has a point. But privacy is a fundamental human right and we give it up at our peril.

Privacy is essential for the proper functioning of a liberal, democratic society. The right to privacy gives people a space for intimacy, independence of action and freedom of speech. Privacy is a public good and benefits society in the same way that clean air does. It is something we would do well to protect.

The problem is that technology enables the State, companies, all of us to collect and integrate more and more personal information. Every five years this capability increases tenfold. It has put an end to “practical obscurity” - you can no longer lose yourself in the crowd.

When science and technology move at these rates, government has a duty to anticipate the consequences of this loss of privacy. So the Government must commission some “big thinking”. For instance, years before much of the fertility technology actually existed, Baroness Warnock's committee described the framework needed to grapple with challenges of advances in human fertilisation and embryology. We need a Warnock report for privacy. ...

Lost medical records force urgent security review

Health department confirms 140 data breaches in the NHS, involving the records of tens of thousands of people
May 25, 2009

An urgent review of data security in the NHS has been ordered after the personal medical records of tens of thousands of people were lost by the health service.

A total of 140 security breaches were reported within the NHS between January and April this year, the Department of Health confirmed today.

These included computers containing medical records left in skips or stolen, and passwords taped on encrypted discs with sensitive information, according to The Independent newspaper.

Over the last six months, the information commissioner, Richard Thomas, has been forced to take action against 14 NHS bodies for breaching data regulations.

He has ordered an urgent review of data security in the health service, writing to the DoH to demand immediate improvements in the lax treatment of personal data within the NHS. ...



Sack the lot responsible, and send 'em to Antarctica.

Wearing Bermuda shorts.

Tear 'em down!

You know how liars never believe anyone else, and the untrustworthy trust no one? I'd be willing to wager a vast sum that those who are pushing for spying upon the masses are into some nasty schemes that need outing. If they think everyone else should be spied on, then they must be hiding some truly hideous secrets themselves.

WTF, UK?

You done got wrong, bitch.

MSU to limit student credit solicitations
Colleges under fire for selling contact data to Bank of America; U-M to continue practice.
Marisa Schultz
The Detroit News
February 9, 2009

Amid growing national scrutiny over credit card companies aggressively marketing to financially naive college students, Michigan State University will no longer provide student information to Bank of America to solicit undergraduates for credit cards.

Under a seven-year contract worth at least $8.4 million, MSU gives the bank contact lists of students, alumni, ticket holders and employees as well as permission to use university logos and set up promotional displays on campus. In return, the university makes $1 for each new account and 0.5 percent of all retail purchases, among other payments.

"You get bombarded as soon as you enroll as a freshman -- credit card offers, loan consolidation," said MSU senior Whitney Gronski, 21. "You are trying to establish credit, but maybe opening a credit card and maxing it out is not the best solution to that. It seems ridiculous to target us." ...

January 25, 2009
Loss of British Council staff data disk stings David Miliband
David Leppard

THE foreign secretary, David Miliband, faced embarrassment last night after it emerged that a computer disk containing confidential bank details of up to 2,000 public servants working for the British Council has been lost.

The council — the Foreign Office’s cultural arm — admitted that the disk, which held the names, National Insurance numbers, salary and bank account details of staff on its UK payroll, went missing while in transit last month.

The incident is the latest in a string of losses which has led to criticism of the government’s handling of sensitive data.

In November a memory stick holding data said to give access to tax and benefit records was lost in a pub car park, forcing officials to suspend the government’s gateway website.

After that loss, Gordon Brown promised that Whitehall rules on data handling would be toughened yet again.

However, it emerged this weekend that a month later the British Council’s data disk had been lost by TNT, the courier firm, in transit to its offices.

A spokesman for the council said the information — which was compressed and therefore difficult to read — was part of a monthly report from its payroll data supplier.

Although the British Council is at arm’s length from the Foreign Office, Miliband is still responsible for its oversight.

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman who uncovered the loss, said: “This is another instance in a long line of slapdash data protection by government departments.

“If Whitehall cannot look after its own data records . . . it should not be trusted with the personal information of every citizen as it wants with the identity card scheme.”


Amen. You took the words right out of my brain.

M'tags say it all, girls and boys.

FBI power in terror cases grows
Metro Detroiters worry it'll open door to profiling
BY NIRAJ WARIKOO
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
November 30, 2008

Beginning Monday, the FBI will get increased power to investigate suspected terrorists under revised administrative guidelines that some Muslim Americans and civil rights advocates in metro Detroit are concerned may target innocent people.

The new Justice Department guidelines will allow FBI agents, for the first time in terrorism-related cases, to use undercover sources to gather information in preliminary probes, interview people without identifying who they are and spy on suspects without first getting clear evidence of wrongdoing. ...

This is the joint that should be filing for bankruptcy, not Circuit City. Don't shop at the slime pit that is best buy, ever.

Sunday, 2 November 2008
Probe into data left in car park

An inquiry has been launched after a memory stick with user names and passwords for a key government computer system was found in a pub car park.

Subcontractor Atos Origin, which lost the stick, said there had been a "direct breach" of its procedures.

It said the matter was being taken "extremely seriously" but the integrity of the website, which was closed for a short time, had not been compromised.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the company would have "to explain itself".

'Strict rules'

The data breach is the latest in a series of embarrassing blunders regarding government information.

Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell issued an apology on Saturday after he left confidential ministerial correspondence on a train.

Mr Brown said Cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell was sending out fresh instructions to ministers over how sensitive data must be handled.

"There are very strict rules about information being outside buildings and these have to be followed," he said.

"This recent case with a private company, where information about individuals has been lost, makes me even more determined that we will root out this problem about leaving things around." ...




Idiots.

Exclusive: Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans
U.S. Officers' "Phone Sex" Intercepted; Senate Demanding Answers
By BRIAN ROSS, VIC WALTER, and ANNA SCHECTER
Oct. 9, 2008

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.
Intercept operators allege the NSA is listening to citizens' phone calls.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), called the allegations "extremely disturbing" and said the committee has begun its own examination.

"We have requested all relevant information from the Bush Administration," Rockefeller said Thursday. "The Committee will take whatever action is necessary." ...

... Kinne described the contents of the calls as "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

Top ISPs Deny Watching You Online
09.25.08
by Chloe Albanesius

Three top Internet service providers on Thursday denied using online behavioral advertising and called on all Internet companies to adhere to standards that require customers to opt in to the tracking of their online activities.

AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon denied keeping tabs on customers' Internet activity in order to service up more targeted online ads, but reserved the right to do so in the future.

"AT&T does not today engage in online behavioral advertising, but we understand the uniquely sensitive nature of this practice," Dorothy Attwood, senior vice president of public policy and chief privacy officer at AT&T, told the Senate Commerce Committee.

Attwood said that AT&T would not use customer information for targeted ads "without an affirmative, advance action by the consumer that is based on a clear explanation of how the consumer's action will affect the use of her information."

Peter Stern, chief strategy officer for Time Warner Cable, took a similar stance.

"Presently, Time Warner Cable does not engage in targeted Internet advertising as an ISP or as a Web site operator," Stern said. "Should Time Warner Cable decide to engage in such activities, our customers' privacy will be a fundamental consideration." ...

Hell yeah.

Screw you, washington dc.

I want my country back. I don't like the "o" in its being superfluous.

Screw you, tsa.

Screw you, washington dc.

Screw you, washington dc. WTF will be next? Government-installed cameras in our homes' bedrooms and bathrooms?

...If privacy and security really were a zero-sum game, we would have seen mass immigration into the former East Germany and modern-day China. While it's true that police states like those have less street crime, no one argues that their citizens are fundamentally more secure. ...

Record Data Breaches in 2007, Groups Say
By MARK JEWELL
The Associated Press
Monday, December 31, 2007

BOSTON -- The loss or theft of personal data such as credit card and Social Security numbers soared to unprecedented levels in 2007, and the trend isn't expected to turn around anytime soon as hackers stay a step ahead of security and laptops disappear with sensitive information.

And while companies, government agencies, schools and other institutions are spending more to protect ever-increasing volumes of data with more sophisticated firewalls and encryption, the investment often is too little too late.

"More of them are experiencing data breaches, and they're responding to them in a reactive way, rather than proactively looking at the company's security and seeing where the holes might be," said Linda Foley, who founded the San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center after becoming an identity theft victim herself.

Foley's group lists more than 79 million records reported compromised in the United States through Dec. 18. That's a nearly fourfold increase from the nearly 20 million records reported in all of 2006. ...




Emphasiseses mine.
I'm so glad that positive steps have been taken to protect folks' private and financial inf-, um... never mind.

... "Sites like Facebook are revolutionizing how we communicate with each other and organize around issues together in a 21st century democracy," said Adam Green, a spokesman for MoveOn.org, a liberal activist group that has launched the petition drive to pressure Facebook to stop broadcasting members' purchases and using their names as endorsements without explicit permission. "The question is: Will corporate advertisers get to write the rules of the Internet or will these new social networks protect our basic rights, like privacy?" ...

Once again The Clash have succinctly said it:

You have the right to free speech, as long as you don't actually try it.

Eat steel, sexist pig!

Chips: High Tech Aids or Tracking Tools?
By TODD LEWAN
The Associated Press
Sunday, July 22, 2007

-- CityWatcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, attracted little notice itself - until a year ago, when two of its employees had glass-encapsulated microchips with miniature antennae embedded in their forearms.

The "chipping" of two workers with RFIDs - radio frequency identification tags as long as two grains of rice, as thick as a toothpick - was merely a way of restricting access to vaults that held sensitive data and images for police departments, a layer of security beyond key cards and clearance codes, the company said.

"To protect high-end secure data, you use more sophisticated techniques," Sean Darks, chief executive of the Cincinnati-based company, said. He compared chip implants to retina scans or fingerprinting. "There's a reader outside the door; you walk up to the reader, put your arm under it, and it opens the door."

Innocuous? Maybe.

But the news that Americans had, for the first time, been injected with electronic identifiers to perform their jobs fired up a debate over the proliferation of ever-more-precise tracking technologies and their ability to erode privacy in the digital age. ...

Senators Subpoena The White House
Panel Demands Papers On NSA Wiretapping
By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 28, 2007

A Senate committee investigating the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program issued subpoenas yesterday ordering the White House to turn over documents related to the eavesdropping effort, escalating a legal showdown between Congress and the Bush administration.

The Judiciary Committee's subpoenas were delivered to the offices of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the national security adviser and to the Justice Department. They demanded copies of internal documents about the program's legality and agreements with telecommunications companies that participated in the program.

Lawmakers said their aim is to understand and reconstruct the administration's internal debate about the program's legality, an aim White House officials have resisted.

"This committee has made no fewer than nine formal requests to the Department of Justice and to the White House, seeking information and documents about the authorization of and legal justification for this program," Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, wrote in letters delivered with the subpoenas. "All requests have been rebuffed." ...

White House Is Subpoenaed on Wiretapping
By JAMES RISEN
Published: June 28, 2007

WASHINGTON, June 27 -- The Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday issued subpoenas to the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney's office and the Justice Department after what the panel's chairman called "stonewalling of the worst kind" of efforts to investigate the National Security Agency's policy of wiretapping without warrants.

The move put Senate Democrats squarely on a course they had until now avoided, setting the stage for a showdown with the Bush administration over one of the most contentious issues arising from the White House's campaign against terrorism.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the committee, said the subpoenas seek documents that could shed light on the administration's legal justification for the wiretapping and on disputes within the government over its legality.

In addition, the panel is seeking materials on related issues, including the relationship between the Bush administration and several unidentified telecommunications companies that aided the N.S.A. eavesdropping program. ...

... Mr. Leahy said Wednesday at a news conference that the committee had issued the subpoenas because the administration had followed a "consistent pattern of evasion and misdirection" in dealing with Congressional efforts to scrutinize the program.

"It's unacceptable," Mr. Leahy said. "It is stonewalling of the worst kind." ...




Also here.

Many thanks to The Tall Furry Pink Bloke.

All Laptops Present and Accounted For? Um, We'll Get Back to You on That . . .
By Al Kamen
Monday, September 25, 2006

Back in July, after a Department of Veterans Affairs laptop loaded with personal information on millions of vets and active-duty military personnel was stolen, other agencies revealed security breaches.

So House Government Reform Committee Chairman Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) and ranking Democrat Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) wrote 17 Cabinet-level departments and agencies to ask whether they had experienced any similar incidents.

Of the 14 that have responded so far, either in whole or in part, the Commerce Department looks far and away the worst, owning up to the loss of more than 1,000 agency computers.

But what about the three departments that have not responded? Do they have bigger problems? And these three would be . . .? Treasury, Defense, and Health and Human Services. Oh, well -- none of them has sensitive information about Americans. ...

US Census Bureau Loses Hundreds of Laptops
Friday September 22, 2006 8:16 AM
By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Census Bureau collects the most personal information about Americans, from how much money they earn and where they spend it to how they live and die. It's all confidential - as long as no one steals it.

Lost or stolen from the Census Bureau since 2003 are 217 laptop computers, 46 portable data storage devices and 15 handheld devices used by survey takers.

Although the number of people affected isn't known, the Commerce Department reports that passwords, encryptions and other safeguards were in place. Nothing so far indicates a misuse of any information. ...




Ah, well, nothing to worry about then, eh?
Idiots.

Verizon Blocks Cell Phone Telemarketer
Verizon Wireless Obtains Injunction Blocking Telemarketer From Making Calls to Its Customers

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. Jul 20, 2006 (AP)-- Verizon Wireless has obtained a permanent injunction blocking a Miami telemarketer from making automated calls to its customers, the cellular phone company said Thursday.

The injunction comes after Verizon Wireless reached an agreement with All Star Vacations and Marketing Group Inc., which Verizon sued in February, along with another Florida travel company, for illegally soliciting wireless phone customers.

Verizon Wireless, jointly owned by Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC, said more than 500,000 of its customers received telephone calls in Spanish from All Star on behalf of the two travel companies. The customers were told they had won a trip to one of several resorts and then directed to call a toll-free number to claim the prize.

Verizon Wireless and All Star agreed on the injunction May 24, and the agreement was later entered into New Jersey Superior Court by Judge Robert Reed. Under the settlement, All Star has paid $5,000 in damages to Verizon Wireless, which will donate the money to Casa de Esperenza, which works to prevent domestic violence in Latino communities. ...

Judge Refuses to Dismiss Spying Lawsuit
Thursday July 20, 2006 9:31 PM
By DAVID KRAVETS
Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A federal judge Thursday refused to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the Bush administration's domestic spying program, rejecting government claims that allowing the case to go forward could expose state secrets and jeopardize the war on terror.

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said the warrantless eavesdropping has been so widely reported that there appears to be no danger of spilling secrets.

Dozens of lawsuits alleging that telecommunications companies and the government are illegally intercepting Americans' communications without warrants have been filed. This is the first time a judge has ruled on the government's claim of a "state secrets privilege."

"It might appear that none of the subject matter in this litigation could be considered a secret given that the alleged surveillance programs have been so widely reported in the media," Walker said.

Walker also wrote that he did not see how allowing the lawsuit to continue could threaten national security.

"The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one," Walker said. "But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security." ...

EFF's Class-Action Lawsuit Against AT&T for Collaboration with Illegal Domestic Spying Program



* EFF Files Evidence in Motion to Stop AT&T's Dragnet Surveillance April 6, 2006
* EFF Motion in AT&T Surveillance Case Draws Government's Eye March 31, 2006
* EFF Sues AT&T to Stop Illegal Surveillance January 31, 2006


Nicked from TheSobSister, who rocks.

FTP: ...The notes reveal a plan to -

Store 100% of User Data

... With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).

We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today. (...) This theme will help us make the client less important (thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and is also of great value to the user.

As we move toward the 'Store 100%' reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache."

Perhaps it's Google's gift to the US government. In August 2003, Admiral John M Poindexter was forced to resign after his 'Total Information Awareness' data mining program was revealed to be indexing "everyday transactions as credit card purchases, travel reservations and e-mail."

Exactly what Google will have if its 'GDrive' ever materializes.

And here's a coincidence.

What tipped Poindexter's resignation was his specific plan to operate "terror casino". The scheme purported to tap "collective wisdom" of the public in predicting world events such as assassinations.

This hokum New Age idea, beloved by autistic technophiliacs, was rapidly shot down. But it has its fans in Silicon Valley, as this slide from Google's analyst presentation shows....



Kelliannie and I-Am-Wolfman both sent me this, bless 'em.

FTP: "Yahoo Inc. said that it recently turned over information about its users searching habits to federal investigators, a startling admission that has touched off a new round of privacy concerns.

As previously reported, search inquiries may be evidence in an upcoming trial that the government hopes will revive a controversial 1998 Internet law to protect children from stumbling onto inappropriate material on the Web.

The law was struck down two years ago.

The search queries are to serve as the raw material so the government can test whether Web filters are a match for the overwhelming amount of pornography that a child could run into while online."


Yeah, suuuuuuuuuuure.
Hey, yahoo helped the Chinese find its dissidents; bill gates helps censor Chinese internetS access - why not do the same for shrub and co?
Money is money no matter where it's from, eh bill and yahoo?
We have to stop using their search engines and services.

FTP: "The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.

The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.

In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.

The Mountain View-based search and advertising giant opposes releasing the information on a variety of grounds, saying it would violate the privacy rights of its users and reveal company trade secrets, according to court documents.

Nicole Wong, an associate general counsel for Google, said the company will fight the government's effort ``vigorously.''

``Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and the demand for the information is overreaching,'' Wong said."


Iruugai avaj nuruugai maijmar, ilgai avaj bogsoo archmar.

Bush, who said the wiretapping is legal and necessary, has pointed to a congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that authorized him to use force in the fight against terrorism as allowing him to order the program.

The program authorized eavesdropping of international phone calls and e-mails of people deemed a terror risk.

But the New York lawsuit noted that federal law already allows the president to conduct warrantless surveillance during the first 15 days of a war and allows court authorization of surveillance for agents of foreign powers or terrorist groups.

Instead of following the law, Bush "unilaterally and secretly authorized electronic surveillance without judicial approval or congressional authorization," the lawsuit said.

At a news conference, Center for Constitutional Rights Legal Director Bill Goodman portrayed the president as a man on an unprecedented power grab at the expense of basic democratic principles.

He said the public was starting to understand the assertion that the erosion of individual rights is a slippery slope that lets the government "brand anyone a terrorist with no right to counsel, no right to be brought before a judge and no right to privacy in communications."

The Detroit lawsuit said the plaintiffs, who frequently communicate by telephone and e-mail with people in the Middle East and Asia, have a "well-founded belief" that their communications are being intercepted by the government.

"By seriously compromising the free speech and privacy rights of the plaintiffs and others, the program violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the United States Constitution," the lawsuit states.

FTP: "Clinton Fein, a San Francisco resident who runs the Annoy.com site, says a feature permitting visitors to send obnoxious and profane postcards through e-mail could be imperiled.

"Who decides what's annoying? That's the ultimate question," Fein said. He added: "If you send an annoying message via the United States Post Office, do you have to reveal your identity?"

Fein once sued to overturn part of the Communications Decency Act that outlawed transmitting indecent material "with intent to annoy." But the courts ruled the law applied only to obscene material, so Annoy.com didn't have to worry.

"I'm certainly not going to close the site down," Fein said on Friday. "I would fight it on First Amendment grounds."

He's right. Our esteemed politicians can't seem to grasp this simple point, but the First Amendment protects our right to write something that annoys someone else.

It even shields our right to do it anonymously. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas defended this principle magnificently in a 1995 case involving an Ohio woman who was punished for distributing anonymous political pamphlets.

If President Bush truly believed in the principle of limited government (it is in his official bio), he'd realize that the law he signed cannot be squared with the Constitution he swore to uphold."


Umkhii novsh.
Thanks, Voyyaghar

FTP: "Clark said legal remedies are needed to stop companies from selling telephone records.

"When I learned today that my phone records were purchased for less than a hundred dollars I joined millions of Americans who worry about the invasion of their privacy that seems to be the growing price of technology," Clark said. "People should be able to trust that their privacy is being respected and protected by everyone from the government to our internet and mobile phone service providers. Clearly, this is not the case."

Clark urged consumers to contact their senators to urge passage of a law to order the Federal Trade Commission to "restore integrity to the system and give people back a reasonable degree of privacy.""


OMFG
Thanks to dear ProgressiveMe

FTP: "Posted 1:00 AM Eastern
by David Bresnahan
January 4, 2006
NewsWithViews.com

Summary: Turn on your cell phone and you give government agencies instant information about your location, and even your speed of travel. It may not be long before you get a speeding ticket in the mail, or police at your door.

KANSAS CITY, MO. -- Drivers with cell phones are being tracked in a new government program designed to monitor the location and speed of cell phones in vehicles moving along Missouri highways.

The state of Missouri has entered into a $6.2 million contract with National Engineering Technology Corporation (NET) to track cell phone users, without their permission.

The first test of the system is now under way in Kansas City and St. Louis, according to published reports. The high-tech, government authorized spy network is operated by NET and Delcan, a Canadian company. The two are owned by ITIS Holdings, a British company.

Cell phone tracking is also taking place in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Norfolk, Va., Atlanta and Macon, Ga. Vehicles with E-ZPass or FasTrak toll transponder payment systems are also easily tracked by government agencies in a similar way."


Would anyone care to enlighten me as to why this is critical to the safety of the Yankistani people, and why the f*ck our miners don't carry a tracking thingy?
Thanks, Grayem and ZimZalabim!

FTP: "AP is reporting:

The National Security Agency's Internet site has been placing files on visitors' computers that can track their Web surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most files of that type.

The files, known as cookies, disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week. Agency officials acknowledged yesterday that they had made a mistake.

Nonetheless, the issue raised questions about privacy at the agency, which is on the defensive over reports of an eavesdropping program.

"Considering the surveillance power the N.S.A. has, cookies are not exactly a major concern," said Ari Schwartz, associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group in Washington. "But it does show a general lack of understanding about privacy rules when they are not even following the government's very basic rules for Web privacy."

Indeed, if any government agency should be expected to follow privacy rules and to have control of its own technology and software, it should be the NSA. If the Labor Department were doing this, it wouldn't be that worrisome. So was it incompetence, or something more sinister? Only the cookies know for sure."

Thanks, Voyyaghar!

FTP: "Trust federal bureaucrats to take a good idea and transform it into a frightening proposal to track Americans wherever they drive.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has been handing millions of dollars to state governments for GPS-tracking pilot projects designed to track vehicles wherever they go. So far, Washington state and Oregon have received fat federal checks to figure out how to levy these "mileage-based road user fees."

Now electronic tracking and taxing may be coming to a DMV near you. The Office of Transportation Policy Studies, part of the Federal Highway Administration, is about to announce another round of grants totaling some $11 million. A spokeswoman on Friday said the office is "shooting for the end of the year" for the announcement, and more money is expected for GPS (Global Positioning System) tracking efforts."


Thanks to dear RussellB

From the page: "Some parents upset about survey
Angela E. Lackey, Midland Daily News
12/09/2005

How many times have you had sexual intercourse in the past 12 months? If so, what type of birth control did you use - condom, IUD, foam or other? Have you recently used chewing tobacco, heroin, LSD or other drugs?
It is these types of questions that have some parents concerned about a survey being given to Midland County students in sixth through 12th grades starting next week.
The Legacy Center for Student Success (TLC) has worked with local agencies and schools to bring the survey, "Profiles of Student Life: Attitudes and Behaviors," to an estimated 8,500 students in Midland County public and charter schools. The survey recently was taken by Midland County juvenile court wards, and has been used to develop programs.
The survey could be viewed, but not copied, at the TLC office because it is copyrighted by the Search Institute of Minneapolis. Other questions ask about suicide tendencies and risky behaviors.
Several parents complained because they felt the initial TLC letter sent home by the schools was vague and did not specify that some explicit questions, such as those listed above, would be asked. Most parents asked not to be identified due to concerns for their children.
The letter from TLC stated, in part, "It will tell us how students spend their time, their perceptions of school and community life and their participation in a wide range of behaviors." The letter goes on to state the survey will ask about time doing homework, watching TV and involvement in sports and the arts.
"From the letter, you couldn't make an informed decision," said Prosecutor Mike Carpenter. "You couldn't tell by that letter that the largest [number of] questions would be about drugs.""

Effin' incredible!
Thanks, dear Redway420 - I'm sending this on to zillions!

FTP: "Security Flaw Allows Wiretaps to Be Evaded, Study Finds
By JOHN SCHWARTZ and JOHN MARKOFF
Published: November 30, 2005

The technology used for decades by law enforcement agents to wiretap telephones has a security flaw that allows the person being wiretapped to stop the recorder remotely, according to research by computer security experts who studied the system. It is also possible to falsify the numbers dialed, they said.

Someone being wiretapped can easily employ these "devastating countermeasures" with off-the-shelf equipment, said the lead researcher, Matt Blaze, an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania.

"This has implications not only for the accuracy of the intelligence that can be obtained from these taps, but also for the acceptability and weight of legal evidence derived from it," Mr. Blaze and his colleagues wrote in a paper that will be published today in Security & Privacy, a journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. said "we're aware of the possibility" that older wiretap systems may be foiled through the techniques described in the paper. Catherine Milhoan, the spokeswoman, said after consulting with bureau wiretap experts that the vulnerability existed in only about 10 percent of state and federal wiretaps today.

"It is not considered an issue within the F.B.I.," Ms. Milhoan said.

According to the Justice Department's most recent wiretap report, state and federal courts authorized 1,710 "interceptions" of communications in 2004."

And how many went ahead without authorization, hmmmmm?

From the page: "It's actually obscene what you can find out about people on the Internet.

Take cell phone records -- literally. Your cell phone bills are there for the taking, for about $100 a month. Dozens of Web sites offer this service -- one month, or one year. Every call, every phone number. However scary that sounds, it won't really hit you until you see it for yourself -- so click here for an example of what's out there. Then hit "back" in your browser, and let me explain.

Who your friends are. How to contact them. Even where you were. All those crumbs are on sale. Right now. Online. To anyone.

It may be outrageous, but it's not new. MSNBC.com first wrote about this problem in October 2001, in a story titled "I know who you called last month."

...For now, Douglas says, Verizon's initial legal forays haven't deterred pretext calling -- and a simple Google search supports his claim. That means even bolder action is required. This is no mere philosophical debate for privacy advocates. Stolen cell phone records and information sold by data thieves and pretext callers have led to embarrassment, unfair harassment, even murder. Reporters used the records to find and hassle families in the Columbine tragedy. In the Internet's most celebrated murder case, stalker Liam Youens purchased Amy Boyer's Social Security number and name of her employer from a data seller named Docusearch. He then showed up at Boyer's office and shot her to death."

Fookin' scary! Why the hell isn't something being done about this???
Thanks, Voyyaghar

Voyyaghar'd suggested I read the last article on the page. I read 'em all, and the last one is fookin' scary!
Dump AOhelL NOW!