The New York Times discusses surveillance efforts by local, state and federal officials and the privacy and civil liberty problems connected to these programs. 

A growing number of big-city police departments and other law enforcement agencies across the country are embracing a new system to report suspicious activities that officials say could uncover terrorism plots but that civil liberties groups contend might violate individual rights.

Here and in nearly a dozen other cities, including Boston, Chicago and Miami, officers are filling out terror tip sheets if they run across activities in their routines that seem out of place, like someone buying police or firefighter uniforms, taking pictures of a power plant or espousing extremist views.

Ultimately, state and federal officials intend to have a nationwide reporting system in place by 2014, using a standardized system of codes for suspicious behaviors. [...]

But the American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups warn that the program pioneered by the Los Angeles Police Department raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns.

 “The behaviors identified by L.A.P.D. are so commonplace and ordinary that the monitoring or reporting of them is scarcely any less absurd,” the A.C.L.U. said in a report last July.

The European Voice reports on the European Commission’s discussions about online privacy.

[Jacqueline Minor, a director in the Commission's health and consumer protection department,] said that the Commission’s Joint Research Centre had uncovered a “privacy paradox” in that more than 80% of young people were concerned about their data being used without their knowledge on the internet and shared with third parties. But evidence showed they were not using the technology to protect themselves, leaving the regulators with the task of building trust on the internet. 

More research was needed to examine the types of businesses offering online advertising, how they target consumers and what their impact is on privacy, Minor added.

Minor said that a stakeholders group might be set up after the Commission finishes “canvassing views from industry, experts and governments. A fact-finding mission would be sent to the UK to discuss the issue with Google and Microsoft and the UK’s regulatory body Ofcom and to the US to discuss the subject with the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces consumer protection and competition policy.”

The Associated Press reports on bills that would expand government surveillance powers that being debated in the Nevada legislature.

The proposals range from expanding collection of DNA for genetic analysis of criminals to creating a database of people accused of elder abuse. Others would allow government to secretly search citizens’ electronic communications and create a state repository for court records of people with mental health issues that would be shared with federal officials.

While advocates say the plans will make Nevada a safer place, critics are concerned the state may be compromising the privacy of its citizens. [...]

One Senate-approved bill now working its way through the Assembly was modeled after the USA Patriot Act, which President Bush signed in 2001 and gave authorities unprecedented ability to search, seize, detain or eavesdrop in their pursuit of possible terrorists. The Nevada bill, SB82 would permit the government to conduct secret searches on electronic communications without getting a warrant from a judge. Read more »

The Los Angeles Times reports on a new study (pdf) from the National Association for College Admission Counseling, which finds, “about a quarter of U.S. colleges reported doing some research about applicants on social networking sites or through Internet search engines. The study, which included 10 California colleges, did not specify which schools acknowledged the practice or how often scholarships or enrollment offers might be nixed because of online postings.” This isn’t a surprise; I have blogged before about how colleges and graduate schools have been gathering data about applicants via Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites.

The group noted other findings about the use of social networking sites by universities: 

More than half (53 percent) of colleges monitor social media for “buzz” about their institution.

A majority of colleges maintain a presence in social media, as 33 percent of colleges maintain a blog, 29 maintain a presence on social networking Web sites, 27 percent maintain message- or bulletin-boards, 19 percent employ video blogging, and 14 percent issue podcasts. Thirty-nine percent of colleges reported using no social media technology.

Eighty-eight percent of admission offices believed social media were either “somewhat” or “very” important to their future recruitment efforts.

The Washington Post reports on Google’s latest service: Google Public Data, which seeks to make data from local, state and federal governments easier to search and more accessible to the public. On its blog, Google said, “The data we’re including in this first launch represents just a small fraction of all the interesting public data available on the web. There are statistics for prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers’ salaries, number of wildfires, and the list goes on.” This is a new tool to promote government transparency.

The Washington Post reports: 

The E-Government Act of 2002 required government agencies to make information more accessible electronically, but users have complained that many agencies do not organize their Web sites so they can be easily indexed by search engines. And some agencies, Google has said, embed codes in their sites that make certain pages invisible to search engines. [...]

Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs, a project within the Sunlight Foundation that uses technology to improve government transparency, said he’s encouraged by Google’s new tool, although he has not yet used it.

He cautioned, however, that there is no guarantee that government data is free of typographical and other errors.

He added that specific pieces of data could be misleading without a full understanding of how it fits with other information that may not be visible. For example, a Google searcher may not know enough about campaign contribution laws to spot inaccurate data entries or statistics.

The Journal UK has an opinion column about online privacy by Fred Cate, a professor at the Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington, director of the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, and senior policy advisor to the Center for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton & Williams.

We live in a world of constant data collection – online and off. Increasingly, everything we do, every step we take, every transaction we enter into is memorialized in digital data. These digital footprints are then collected, stored, manipulated and often shared by third parties, usually without meaningful notice or consent. [...]

Even information we don’t provide online is consistently converted to electronic format and launched onto computer networks. This is true of the 30 billion cheque and 48 billion credit and debit card transactions that we engage in annually. More surprising is how much personal data is collected and stored that we are never aware of.

Consider, for example, location information. There are upwards of 2.7 billion mobile phones worldwide, which 95 per cent of users say they keep within three feet of themselves at all times. [...]

Protecting privacy in the face of ubiquitous data requires many tools: technology, education, market pressure but most of all it requires strong laws that impose serious obligations on industry to act as stewards, not merely processors, of our data, and firm limits on government access to those data.