Privacy

Draft legislation allowing widespread sharing of personal data among government agencies, bypassing the Data Protection Act, has now been changed after a campaign by Privacy International and other groups.

A clause in the Coroners and Justice Bill would allow any Minister by order to take from anywhere any information gathered for one purpose, and use it for any other purpose. After the dangers of such a wide ranging power were pointed out the government has decided to abandon this clause. However Privacy International expect that this victory is temporary and that the government will seek to pursue the legislation in a different bill at a later stage.

Recent report reveals the scale of Chinese police surveillance of Skype and Tom-Skype text chats.
The full text chat messages of Chinese TOM-Skype users, along with Skype users who have communicated with TOM-Skype users, are regularly scanned for sensitive keywords, and if present, the resulting data are uploaded and stored on servers in China.

• These text messages, along with millions of records containing personal information, are stored on insecure publicly-accessible web servers together with the encryption key required to decrypt the data.

• The captured messages contain specific keywords relating to sensitive political topics such as Taiwan independence, the Falun Gong, and political opposition to the Communist Party of China.

• Our analysis suggests that the surveillance is not solely keyword-driven. Many of the captured messages contain words that are too common for extensive logging, suggesting that there may be criteria, such as specific usernames, that determine whether messages are captured by the system.

Help stop the 2011 census being run by an arms company with close links to the United States government.The process of running the 2011 Census will be contracted out by the Office of National Statistics to a private company.

One of the two contractors in the final round of selection is the arms company Lockheed Martin, 80% of whose business is with the US Department of Defense and other Federal Government agencies.

This might concern you because:

• The Census rules mean that every household will be legally obliged to provide a wide range of personal information that will be handled by the chosen contractor.
• Lockheed Martin produces missiles and land mines which are being used in Afghanistan and Iraq and which are illegal in many countries.
• They also focus on intelligence and surveillance work and boast of their ability to provide ‘integrated threat information’ that combines information from many different sources.
• New questions in the 2011 Census will include information about income and place of birth, as well as existing questions about languages spoken in the household and many other personal details.
• This information would be very useful to Lockheed Martin’s intelligence work, and fears that the data might not be safe could lead to many people not filling in their Census forms.

Be sure to hide all your data first…

In April a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you’re entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days.

Meanwhile in Canada border guards could be able to search ipods and other devices for content that “infringes” on copyright laws, such as ripped CDs and movies.

According to an article on Canada.com, the Canadian federal government is secretly negotiating an agreement called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which would “create a international regulator that could turn border guards and other public security personnel into copyright police”.

Following the Government’s loss of millions of confidential records on CDROM, Manchester NO2ID took to the streets to distribute CD-ROMs labelled
“Confidential Data” to the public. The CD wallets contained NO2ID flyers, and information about the HMRC data leak and the threats posed by ID cards and a central identity register.

Following the Government’s loss of millions of confidential records on CDROM, Manchester NO2ID took to the streets to distribute CD-ROMs labelled
“Confidential Data” to the public. The CD wallets contained NO2ID flyers, and information about the HMRC data leak and the threats posed by ID cards and a central identity register.

Web users worried about privacy can now use a modified version of Firefox that lets them browse the net anonymously. The Torpark browser uses technology backed by digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It has been created by Hacktivismo – an international coalition of hackers, human rights workers, lawyers and artists.

The House of Lords accepted the amendment that anyone applying for a new biometric passport before January 2010 could opt out of having an ID card. See the latest on campaigning against ID cards and databases in the UK.

MPs will debate the ID Cards Bill on 13 February. Liberty have prepared a briefing detailing their support for amendments made by the House of Lords – including those which ensure the scheme will be compulsory.

Stella Rimington asserted “ID cards may be helpful in all kinds of things but I don’t think they are necessarily going to make us any safer.”