CBS News takes a look at the American public’s views on surveillance camera systems. I’ve discussed the privacy issues connected with such systems before, and my questions about the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of camera surveillance systems remain.  Constant surveillance treats all individuals as if they are already considered suspicious or guilty. Ubiquitous surveillance occurs in certain situations, such as prisons. Do we want people driving or walking in public to become as watched and tracked as prisoners?

CBS reports:

From the operations center of the Office of Emergency Communications in Chicago “48 Hours” correspondent Erin Moriarty reports officials keep watch over the 232 square mile urban area with a massive network of cameras, creating a virtual eye in the sky. Officials refuse to give actual figures, but some estimate the number of publicly and privately owned cameras targeting Chicago to be around 15,000. Read more »

To recap: In February, the Robbins family filed a lawsuit — Robbins v. Lower Merion School District (pdf) — alleging that the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania misused the 2,300 Webcam-enabled laptops it issued to students in order to remotely peep into the students’ homes, take photographs and violate their privacy. The school district said it used the webcams only to track school-issued laptops that it thought were lost, stolen or inadvertently taken without permission. In May, lawyers and computer experts hired by the district to investigate the case released a report (pdf) that said there was “overzealous and questionable use of technology by [Information Services] personnel without any apparent regard for privacy considerations or sufficient consultation with administrators.” Later that month, a federal judge “permanently banned the Lower Merion School District from using webcams or other intrusive technology to secretly monitor students through their school-issued laptops.” (Wired had a story about security vulnerabilities in LANrev Theft Track, a remote-surveillance technology used by Lower Merion School District.)

Now, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the Lower Merion School District’s school board has unanimously passed new policies “to govern the use and tracking of student laptops and other technology” to avoid a repeat of the recent controversy, which has cost the district “nearly $1 million in legal fees and expenses.”

The measures, passed unanimously by the school board at its monthly meeting, spell out in detail when, how, and for what reasons school officials can access or monitor the laptops they will give to each of the district’s nearly 2,300 high school students next month. Read more »

The New York Times reports on the privacy questions surrounding the “net neutrality” proposal from Google and Verizon. (For more about how the proposal could affect the open Internet, visit Public Knowledge.)

Last week, two elephants — Google and Verizon — came together to propose a vision for the Internet that represented what many characterize as a retreat by Google from its past strict adherence to so-called net neutrality. The phrase net neutrality, really more of a rallying cry than a technical term, describes a policy that would prohibit Internet service providers from exploiting their role in delivering information to favor their own content, or the content of the highest bidders.

The two companies were presumed to be on opposite sides of this issue since Google bases its business on an open Internet and Verizon, among other things, sells access to the Internet. For the sake of getting commitments from Verizon to support a “neutral” Internet delivered on hard wires, Google wrote on one of its blogs, it agreed to some exceptions: no neutrality for the Internet delivered wirelessly and for “additional, differentiated” online services. [...] Read more »

The New York Times reports on questions about the security of Web sites, which could allow for surveillance of or eavesdropping on the activities of Internet users:

Computer security researchers are raising alarms about vulnerabilities in some of the Web’s most secure corners: the banking, e-commerce and other sites that use encryption to communicate with their users.

Those sites, which are typically identified by a closed lock displayed somewhere in the Web browser, rely on a third-party organization to issue a certificate that guarantees to a user’s Web browser that the sites are authentic. But as the number of such third-party “certificate authorities” has proliferated into hundreds spread across the world, it has become increasingly difficult to trust that those who issue the certificates are not misusing them to eavesdrop on the activities of Internet users, the security experts say. [...] Read more »

Recap: Research in Motion (RIM) faced the threat that its BlackBerry smartphones would be banned in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia because of security concerns. The New York Times reported that RIM and Saudi Arabia have reached a deal concerning the cellphones, but Reuters reported problems remained for RIM in India.

Now, the Wall Street Journal reports on RIM’s negotiations with India over surveillance of the BlackBerry messaging service, which RIM promises customers is a “secure” e-mail system. The concessions reportedly suggested by RIM in these negotiations with India raise substantial questions about the privacy of BlackBerry users’ data.

In a series of discussions that intensified this summer, RIM offered to provide crucial information that would help the Indian government track down messages sent via the company’s popular and encrypted corporate email service, according to those familiar with the confidential talks and to minutes of meetings reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. [...]

Governments are pressuring RIM to comply with their demands for information in part because unlike other smartphone vendors, it operates its own network of servers, the biggest of which is in Canada, outside their monitoring reach and jurisdiction. Read more »

The Hill reports on new privacy principles from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The agency says in the principles that it has taken steps to improve privacy, including: “Assigned an internal privacy ombudsman to work closely with the DoD Privacy Office, and created an independent Privacy Review Panel that will assess existing and emerging privacy laws, regulations, technologies and norms and analyze their potential. The panel will consist of leading scholars and policy and technology experts in the privacy field.”

The Hill reports that the White House is supporting and commending DARPA’s new guidelines to protect individual privacy. “It is critical that we maintain our privacy and civil liberties in the digital age, and I am delighted to see DARPA’s leadership take this issue so seriously,” Tom Kalil, deputy director for policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told the Hill.