ABC News reports that the Inspector General for the National Security Agency has begun an investigation into allegations by whistleblowers of abuse in the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. Two former intercept operators said that the agency listened in on intimate calls from American citizens stationed abroad (soldiers, journalists, relief workers) even though the individuals were not suspected of any crimes.

In a letter [to US Senators] released today, [Director of National Intelligence, J.M. McConnell] said the NSA was unaware of the allegations, made by two former intercept operators, until ABC News reported them.

Former Army Arab linguist Adrienne Kinne and former Navy Arab linguist David Murfee Faulk told ABC News they observed and participated in intercepting private calls between Americans while they were detailed to a NSA listening post at Fort Gordon, outside Augusta, Georgia.

The two said calls by American journalists, aid workers and soldiers serving in Iraq were targeted for interception, because, they say they were told, there were “special waivers” to make it legal. Read more »

The Wall Street Journal reports on some new data privacy laws in the states.

Nevada is the first of several states adopting new laws that will force businesses — from hair stylists to hospitals — to revamp the way they protect customer data. Starting in January, Massachusetts will require businesses that collect information about that state’s residents to encrypt sensitive data stored on laptop computers and other portable devices. Michigan and Washington state are considering similar regulations.

While just a few states have adopted such measures so far, the new patchwork of regulations is something many businesses will have to navigate, since the laws apply to out-of-state companies with operations or customers in those states. [...]

The new state data-security laws are stricter than past regulations, which only required businesses to notify people whose personal information they lost. The new laws establish a standard that can be used by plaintiffs in civil suits to argue that a business that lost data was negligent, said Miriam Wugmeister, an attorney with Morrison & Foerster LLP. Read more »

The Washington Post has a story looking into the capabilities of spy satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as Predators.

Although the exploits of the Predator, the Global Hawk and other airborne collectors of information have been widely publicized, there are few authoritative descriptions of what they can see on the ground.

But some insights into the capabilities of the Predator and other aircraft can be drawn from a DARPA paper that describes the tasks of a contractor that will develop a method of indexing and rapidly finding video from archived aerial surveillance tapes collected over past years.

“The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems,” according to the DARPA paper, which was written in March but released last month. Read more »

Xinhua News Agency (which is controlled by the Chinese government) reports that China has started photographing and identifying users of Beijing’s Internet cafes. A customer will have her photo taken and then that “photo and a copy of her resident identity card [will be] sent to the Municipal Law Enforcement Agency of Beijing and placed in a file” in a city-wide database, says Xinhua News. The customer then is given a 4-digit identifier to be used whenever she logs into a computer in an Internet cafe.

“Currently, Internet users in most of China are required to simply show an ID card. Li Fei, an agency spokesman, says the new system is intended to keep different people from using the same card, an occasional tactic used by underage Internet surfers,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

The new photo, database, and unique identifier system will make it easier to track Chinese citizens’ surfing habits. It will also make it easier to connect a person with his online profile. It is likely that China will expand this registration system beyond Beijing, which would create an enormous database of online users. “There are more than 250 million internet users in China, approximately 10 times more than there were in 2000,” according to the Australian. Read more »

The Wall Street Journal has a story about some creepy software. (See the story here if you can’t read it on the Wall Street Journal site.) A media research company called Integrated Media Measurement (IMMI) has created software for mobile phones that would be able to record and identify every snippet of audio around you.

IMMI embeds its software into the cellphones of the company’s 4,900 panelists. The software picks up audio from an ad or a TV show and converts it into its own digital code that is then uploaded into an IMMI database, which includes codes for media content such as TV shows, commercials, movies and songs.

IMMI’s database then figures out what the cellphone was exposed to by matching the code. Cellphone conversations and background noise are filtered out by the software, IMMI says, since there is no “match” in the IMMI database.

To get a handle on the effectiveness of a given ad, IMMI’s data can show, for example, when a panel member is exposed to a movie trailer on TV and whether that same consumer later goes to see the movie. Similarly, IMMI data can show if a panelist watching a promo for a TV program will later watch the show, either on TV or online. IMMI thinks it can expand that idea from films and TV shows to consumer products like shampoo or toothpaste. It is testing its technology with a national grocery store chain. Read more »

In the latest issue of the Journal of Consumer Affairs, the Annenberg School for Communication’s Joseph Turow, Michael Hennessy, and Amy Bleakley offer up an interesting article, “Consumers’ Understanding of Privacy Rules in the Marketplace.” The article summarizes findings from a national survey about online consumers’ understanding of privacy rules and regulations.

The public’s knowledge of the rules of privacy in the marketplace is clearly absent not just online but also offline and across a variety of for-profit and nonprofit entities. Our findings suggest that this ignorance goes beyond the failure to learn about specific privacy details at the point of individuals’ interactions with merchants. It is rooted in a broader difficulty: the combination of a generally correct awareness of the fragmented nature of privacy regulation linked to frequent mistakes about actual facts of those regulations.

In the face of a misunderstanding of privacy regulations in the marketplace, a two-pronged approach of education and mandatory labeling may be required to make Americans aware of the data collection environment that surrounds them.