IDG News Service reports on the European Parliament and telecommunications:

European parliamentarians, set to vote on changes to the European telecommunications legal landscape this week, will put off at least one crucial question: Should IP addresses be considered private data?

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) will give their verdict on a range of issues including how to regulate telecom companies in the EU, how to punish firms that distort competition, how to share the windfall of radio frequencies that are being freed up by TV’s migration to digital broadcasting, and how to preserve citizens’ data in the digital age.

But they are divided about whether to consider IP addresses as personal data. “We will ask the Commission formally to produce a report on this,” said Malcolm Harbour, a British conservative MEP who is playing a central role shepherding the so-called telecom review through the Parliament. Read more »

The New York Times reports on a case in India concerning brain scan technology believed to identify when an individual is lying. “The Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test, or BEOS, was developed by Champadi Raman Mukundan, a neuroscientist who formerly ran the clinical psychology department of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences in Bangalore.” The brain scan evidence was used to convict a woman accused of murdering her fiance.

Now, well before any consensus on the technology’s readiness, India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from this controversial machine: a brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to reveal signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question. [...]

The technologies, generally regarded as promising but unproved, have yet to be widely accepted as evidence — except in India, where in recent years judges have begun to admit brain scans. But it was only in June, in a murder case in Pune, in Maharashtra State, that a judge explicitly cited a scan as proof that the suspect’s brain held “experiential knowledge” about the crime that only the killer could possess, sentencing her to life in prison. [...]

This latest Indian attempt at getting past criminals’ defenses begins with an electroencephalogram, or EEG, in which electrodes are placed on the head to measure electrical waves. The suspect sits in silence, eyes shut. An investigator reads aloud details of the crime — as prosecutors see it — and the resulting brain images are processed using software built in Bangalore. Read more »

News sources are reporting that Memphis “will put its first license-plate reader on the street next month and plans to add 65 more in the next year. The device can read up to 1,500 plates a minute and instantly sift through databases searching for outstanding warrants, stolen vehicles, expired tags, suspended licenses or other violations.”

Memphis Commercial Appeal reports, “The readers will tap into data collected at the Real Time Crime Center. The $3.5 million center includes an incident crime ticker, wall-to-wall monitors displaying cameras trained around the city, and a massive databank instantly available for officers in the field.” Also, the city has asked “businesses and individuals to register surveillance video equipment so the police can put more eyes on the street.”

I discussed the issue when Washington, DC, began expanding the use of these license plate readers. One of the biggest questions is: What happens to all the data on innocent individuals? After all, we don’t know what the restrictions are on the collection and use of the data. In the UK, police admitted (under the pressure of Freedom of Information Act requests) that they are keeping for five years the data from license plate scanners recording the trips of 10 million drivers a day — even those drivers who are innocent.

TPRC is a non-profit organization that hosts an annual forum for scholars and decision-makers in the fields of telecommunications and information policy. The purpose of the conference is to acquaint policy-makers with the best of recent research, and to familiarize researchers with the knowledge needs of policy makers.

The 36th Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy will be held September 26 – September 28, 2008 at The National Center for Technology & Law, George Mason University School of Law, Arlington, VA.

Date: September 26-28, 2008
Location: George Mason University School of Law; Arlington, VA
For more information: http://www.tprcweb.com/

UPDATE: The San Francisco Chronicle has a story on documents released to the Asian Law Caucus and EFF under FOIA. “The Bush administration has overturned a 22-year-old policy and now allows customs agents to seize, read and copy documents from travelers at airports and borders without suspicion of wrongdoing, civil rights lawyers in San Francisco said Tuesday in releasing records obtained in a lawsuit.”

The Washington Post has a follow-up on a story that ran last month on the Department of Homeland Security broadening its search and seizure powers at the US border.

The U.S. government has quietly recast policies that affect the way information is gathered from U.S. citizens and others crossing the border and what is done with it, including relaxing a two-decade-old policy that placed a high bar on federal agents copying travelers’ personal material, according to newly released documents.

The policy changes, civil liberties advocates say, also raise concerns about the guidelines under which border officers may share data copied from laptop computers and cellphones with other agencies and the types of questions they are allowed to ask American citizens.

In July, the Department of Homeland Security disclosed policies that showed that federal agents may copy books, documents, and the data on laptops and other electronic devices without suspecting a traveler of wrongdoing. But what DHS did not disclose was that since 1986 and until last year, the government generally required a higher standard: Federal agents needed probable cause that a law was being broken before they could copy material a traveler was bringing into the country. Read more »

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation announces a Full Committee hearing on Broadband Providers and Consumer Privacy, scheduled for Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 10:00 a.m. The Committee will examine broadband provider practices with respect to consumer privacy.

Date: September 25, 2008 at 10:00 a.m.
Location: Room 253, Russell Senate Office Building
For more information: http://tinyurl.com/3j3b2b