On Sunday, May 19 at 7 p.m. ET and PT, “60 Minutes” will have include a segment, “A Face in the Crowd,” on the issue of privacy and facial-recognition technology. Here’s what “60 Minutes” says:

The odds are you are not just a face in the crowd any longer. Even if your picture isn’t plastered all over social networking and photo-sharing sites, facial recognition technology in public places is making it harder if not impossible to remain anonymous. Lesley Stahl reports on the new ways this technology is being used that even has one of its inventors calling it too intrusive. Her 60 MINUTES report will be broadcast Sunday, May 19 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

Professor Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon, who researches how technology impacts privacy, stunned Stahl with an experiment. He photographed random students on the campus and in short order, not only identified several of them, but in a number of cases found their personal information, including social security numbers, just using a facial recognition program he downloaded for free. Read more »

Politico reports that Republican lawmakers have shown increasing interest in online privacy rights and proposals to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (“ECPA,” also known as Title 18 § 2511 of the United States Code):

Momentum to update the nation’s antiquated email privacy laws is again coursing through the Capitol — and this time, movement is coming from the right.

Republicans have been increasingly attaching their names to reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act — an issue where Democrats have traditionally taken the lead.

Four Republican congressmen introduced a pair of bills this week that would require government investigators to score a warrant before obtaining someone’s email content. Arizona Reps. Matt Salmon and Trent Franks are partnering on a House version of ECPA reform; Kansas Rep. Kevin Yoder and Georgia Rep. Tom Graves are teaming up on the Email Privacy Act. Read more »

The Associated Press announced that the Department of Justice secretly obtained two months’ worth of phone records of its journalists, and the news service wants to know the reason for this surveillance, which could have significant implications for First Amendment civil rights:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. [...] Read more »

To recap: A privacy and civil liberties oversight board was recommended by the 9/11 Commission, and the board was created in 2004 and placed within the White House. In 2008, Congress passed and President Bush signed the “Implementing the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act of 2007,” which took the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board out of the White House and established it “as an independent agency within the executive branch.”

Terms for the original board expired in January 2008, but President Bush delayed the nomination of new board members for many months; none were confirmed by the Senate. In 2010, President Obama nominated James X. Dempsey, Vice President for Public Policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Elisebeth Collins Cook, who worked in the Justice Department in the Bush administration. Privacy Lives joined in the call to nominate and confirm experts to the board. (For more information on the board, here’s a 2008 Congressional Research Service report (pdf) on the board’s history and powers.)

In December 2011, Obama nominated Rachel L. Brand (Chief Counsel for Regulatory Litigation at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Chamber Litigation Center), Patricia M. Wald (who had served for twenty years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia), and for the chairmanship, David Medine (a partner at WilmerHale whose practice focuses on data security and privacy). In August, all but Medine were approved by the full Senate, so the board did not have a chairman.

On Tuesday, the Senate finally voted to confirm (pdf) Medine (53 yeas, 45 nays, 2 did not vote). On the floor, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of Judiciary Committee, which sent the nomination to the full Senate for a vote, said: Read more »

The Los Angeles Times reports that the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff’s departments concerning privacy questions about the use of license-plate recognition systems. The groups have requested through the state public records act one week’s worth of the license-plate scanning data gathered and kept by the departments. (See a previous post for more information on the camera surveillance technology.)

Privacy rights groups on Monday filed a lawsuit against Los Angeles County’s two major law enforcement agencies after they refused to turn over information collected by electronic license plate scanners, the suit claimed.

CNet reports that President Obama has chosen Nicole Wong, a lawyer for social-networking site Twitter, as chief privacy officer:

President Obama has picked Nicole Wong, Twitter’s legal director, to be the White House’s first chief privacy officer, CNET has learned.

Wong previously was a vice president and deputy general counsel at Google at its Mountain View headquarters, where she managed a team of lawyers that worked with the company’s engineers to review products before they launched. The reviews included privacy, copyright, and removal requests, which earned her a nickname of “The Decider” — as recounted in a 2008 New York Times Magazine article. [...]

Choosing a Silicon Valley lawyer who has been immersed in technology issues is a reversal of the administration’s previous picks for department-level chief privacy officers. Homeland Security Chief Privacy Officer Mary Ellen Callahan is a Washington lawyer who previously worked for the Library of Congress.