Obama Faces Major Online Privacy Test 72
CNET has a piece on the prospects for an initiative to revamp privacy law for the digital age being put forward by an unlikely coalition that includes Microsoft, Google, privacy advocates, and conservative and libertarian organizations. "When Barack Obama was campaigning for the presidency in 2008, he promised that as president, he would 'strengthen privacy protections for the digital age.' That pledge will be put to the test as the Obama administration considers whether to support a new privacy proposal released by a coalition including Google, eBay, Microsoft, AT&T, the ACLU, and Americans for Tax Reform... The [so-called] Digital Due Process coalition already has met with attorneys from the Justice Department's computer crime unit, White House attorneys, FBI representatives, and Commerce Department officials... the law enforcement meetings were 'respectful' and 'substantive.'"
Re:Double Speak (Score:5, Interesting)
I really don't understand your point. Wallowing in paranoia? Dude - it's NOT paranoia, when every lackwit in the world is TRYING to pry into your computer via malware, cookies, supercookies, etc ect ad nauseum. Wallowing in paranoia? You think that citizens should eliminate antivirus, antispam, malware scanners, and all the rest, open all their ports, and accept all incoming requests on all ports?
Personally, I don't think it's paranoid to close the drapes when I'm getting laid, nor do I think it's paranoid to close ports, and refuse unsolicited connections from Liberia, Surinam, Nigeria, Latvia, and China.
A good step forward, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
They want to protect our information from the government, but what about themselves? Some of their very business models depends on people giving their information to the company (Google). Such a coalition is not likely to recommend privacy laws that also apply to their own corporations, so any privacy reform spearheaded by these members will be incomplete and potentially damaging.
On their principles page [digitaldueprocess.org] they only make mention of limiting the government's access to information, and don't even reference anything about corporations. While I applaud their attempt to limit government access to our private information, their (understandable) bias in favor of their corporate needs kind of limits this effort in my opinion. I am more concerned about the amount of data that google and other such companies have about me at this point.
Any privacy legislation needs to restrict the amount and kinds of information these companies can collect about us in order to really protect privacy on the internet, since the internet is really more the domain of corporations than the federal government.
End-to-end encryption. (Score:5, Interesting)
Once more proof that end-to-end encryption(*) should be the norm to guarantee someone's privacy.
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(*) as provided out-of-the box by several chat programs supporting Off-The-Record [cypherpunks.ca] such as Adium on Mac [adium.im]. Or Pidgin on Linux [pidgin.im] if you take into account the plug-in [cypherpunks.ca] that most Linux distribution are offering into their base repository, and is available through an installer on Windows.
It's not some complex arcane setup that only a couple of criminals bother to use to hide the evil doing. It's a pretty much standard and freely available technology that everyone can use, just because you shouldn't help anyone spying on you.
Looking at Senator Obama's record... (Score:4, Interesting)
Particularly at his FISA vote, I'm guessing he will go with guidelines that strengthen privacy of individuals wrt companies, but will go for even more of a Federal power grab. Governments hate privacy and love power. Given any opportunity, they will weaken one and strengthen the other.
Re:Their priciples (Score:3, Interesting)