The Wall Street Journal reports that China is the latest country to require cellphone users to prove their identity when signing up for service. Several countries have considered such legislation. In the United States, there is legislation under discussion in the Senate that would require people to present ID when buying a prepaid mobile phones and would require companies to keep the information on file. Mexico, Vietnam, Spain and Japan are all seeking to identify some types of cellphone users and create databases.

Often, governments say this is a way to improve security, as only those with nefarious purposes (kidnappers, blackmailers) would need to have mobile phones that are not linked to their identities. This argument ignores that there are legitimate reasons for people to use prepaid cellphones anonymously: whistleblowers speaking to journalists or government prosecutors, or domestic violence victims who seek to avoid tracking by their abusers.

The Journal reports:

China began implementing a long-discussed measure that requires cellphone users to register by name when setting up an account, prompting concerns over privacy in the world’s largest mobile market. Read more »

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 »

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 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.

At the Black Hat technology conference in Nevada, Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Jane Holl Lute discussed cybersecurity and privacy.

America needs a safe and secure homeland. We need a dynamic economic engine that generates new wealth. We need strong friends and neighbors. We need predictable relations with others. That’s about the rule of law. What is the role of cyber, cyberspace, and cybersecurity in helping to secure US interests? And to secure them against what? The threat seems pretty comprehensive. You can steal our data, our identities, our past life, our opportunities. But you can’t deter that threat, you can’t have a strategy of deterrence or of prevention, if you never talk about the threat, how we can understand it, indeed, how we can understand cyberspace at all.

Cyberspace and homeland security have a lot in common. A lot of brand recognition. But not everyone knows what those two terms mean. Cyberspace: is it a war zone? Is it a marketplace, a neighborhood, a school, a highway, a do loop of our past activities, a playground, a sandbox, a war zone.

How do cyberspace and war zones compare? Wars happen somewhere. They involve somebody. Geography is key. Seizing and holding terrain. Wars happen somewhere, but cyberspace is sort of this space-time thing. Nobody really gets it. [...] Read more »

The New York Times reports on the issues of privacy and security as applied to electronic information:

The threat by the United Arab Emirates to shut down mobile services on BlackBerrys like e-mail and text messaging underscores a growing tension between communications companies and governments over how to balance privacy with national security.

While communications companies want to be able to ensure that their customers’ messages are shielded from prying eyes, governments increasingly insist on gaining access to electronic messages to track down criminals or uncover terrorist plots. [...]

Internet security experts say the demands by the United Arab Emirates for certain access to communications flowing across the BlackBerry network echo requests of other governments around the world. Many countries have laws and regulations requiring telecommunications providers to grant government agencies access to their systems for court-sanctioned intercepts. Read more »