Surveillance Update

Several things occurred within the past few days on the privacy/surveillance frontier. First, the EU Parliament decision we mentioned yesterday is being widely reported as an assault on privacy (the European press barely mentions the spam angle we covered yesterday). As far as I can tell, this decision will loosen the EU's protections against surveillance, but does not implement any spying itself - national governments are free to NOT spy on their citizens, in the (perhaps unlikely) event that they don't want to do so. In the U.S., the FBI will be increasing their general surveillance - that is, they'll be doing more surveillance unrelated to any suspected crime, using commercial databases, etc. We can expect the Bureau to be used for more overtly political uses in the future - spying on the not-in-power political parties is no longer prohibited and will, therefore, occur. The NYT has an interesting analysis. Finally, the Washington Post reports that banks will be creating a massive financial database/blacklist of terrorists, wife-beaters, anti-globalization protesters, etc.

Comments

./ed already

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't want to be branded a carmawhore, so posting AC, but the Google cache is here