A few years ago, then-DC Mayor Adrian Fenty (D) unveiled plans for a city-wide surveillance system  (VIPS). At the time, the Washington Examiner reported: “The Video Interoperability for Public Safety system, or VIPS, links 5,200 District-owned closed-circuit television cameras within a single monitoring office under the Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. The goal: Assist Homeland Security ‘to rapidly identify and respond to emergency circumstances that occur within the District.’ Every camera in a school, in a jail cell, in a government building, outside a public housing project or attached to a traffic light has been integrated into the network. The police department’s crime cameras, which require passive monitoring only, are not included.” The Fenty administration gave the DC Council and the public little information on the project, and critics (including me) charged that it did not adequately address the substantial privacy and civil liberty questions that were raised.

Last year, the Washington Examiner reported that DC Mayor Vincent Gray (D) sought to expand the city’s camera surveillance system to watch the public. (Note that the District of Columbia also uses license-plate readers to capture images of vehicles’s plates.)

Now, the Washington Times reports on a public-private partnership on surveillance cameras in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood that is raising privacy and civil liberties questions:

When D.C. police began installing surveillance cameras in neighborhoods more than five years ago as crime-fighting tools, privacy concerns voiced by civil liberties groups limited their scope and use.

Now a less-formal agreement from a citizens association planning to expand the Metropolitan Police Department’s watchful eye in Georgetown over the next few months is hitting a similar hurdle.

The Citizens Association of Georgetown, a private neighborhood association, plans to pay for the installation of up to 10 cameras in the hopes that the additional surveillance will deter crime. [...] Read more »

The Washington Post reports that privacy questions are starting to become more prominent in India:

The Indian government’s recent announcement that it taps nearly 300 new phones every day has sparked a debate about privacy in a country that traditionally views such concerns as an ugly offshoot of Western individualism.

Indians tend to stress identities of family and community over any others. But a growing desire for privacy and what many say is a government assault on it are creating tension in this nation of 1.2 billion people.

The reasons for the shift, experts say, include changing family structures and lifestyles among the urban middle class, a mass media explosion and the Internet, all coming just as the government has begun tapping more phones and using surveillance cameras in more public places.

India’s constitution does not guarantee a right to privacy, nor does the country have a data protection law to guard against the misuse of personal information. But the government has proposed a wide-ranging privacy law, and a coalition of organizations and activists, including the newly formed advocacy group Privacy India, is trying to help shape it. [...] Read more »

Last week, Google announced changes in its privacy policies that will affect users of its services, such as search, Gmail, Google+ and YouTube. Advocates and legislators questioned the changes, saying that there were privacy issues, and criticized the Internet services giant (Congress pdf; archive pdf) for not including an opt-out provision; Google said that users who objected could stop using its services and move their data elsewhere. Google responded to the criticisms in a letter (pdf) to U.S. lawmakers and a blog post.

Now, the EU’s Article 29 Data Protection Working Party has written (Working Party pdf; archive pdf) to Google about the privacy policy, which affect 60 Google services. The Working Party includes data protection authorities from all 27 European Union member states as well as the European Data Protection Supervisor. Jacob Kohnstamm, chairman of the Article 29 Working Party, writes:

The Department of Homeland Security’s Privacy Office has released a new Privacy Impact Assessment (DHS pdf; archive pdf) cybersecurity program Einstein. It is a Bush-era pilot program, continued under Obama, that seeks to have private telecommunications companies route the Internet traffic of civilian government agencies through hardware and software that would search for and block malicious computer codes; see more here and here. Recently, the Constitution Project included a discussion of EINSTEIN and privacy and civil liberties in a report, “Recommendations for the Implementation of a Comprehensive and Constitutional Cybersecurity Policy” (Project pdf; archive pdf), calling on Congress to include strong privacy protections in any cybersecurity legislation it adopts.

From the Privacy Impact Assessment:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Defense (DoD) are jointly undertaking a proof of concept known as the Joint Cybersecurity Services Pilot (JCSP). The JCSP extends the existing operations of the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) Exploratory Cybersecurity Initiative (DIB Opt-In Pilot) and shifts the operational relationship with the CSPs in the pilot to DHS. The JCSP is part of overall efforts by DHS and DoD to enable the provision of cybersecurity capabilities enhanced by U.S. government information to protect critical infrastructure information systems and networks. The purpose of the JCSP is to enhance the cybersecurity of participating DIB critical infrastructure entities and to protect sensitive DoD information and DIB intellectual property that directly supports DoD missions or the development of DoD capabilities from unauthorized access, exfiltration, and exploitation. [...] Read more »

The scandal about the alleged hacking of thousands of British citizens’ phones by the UK News of the World led to that newspaper’s closing and the questioning of owner Rupert Murdoch and his son, James Murdoch, by British officials. (It also led to much discussion about the privacy and security of telephone voicemail systems.) Now, the New York Times reports that the voicemail hacking scandal has spread to the Murdochs’ Times of London and it could include e-mail hacking:

The hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers took a new turn on Thursday when a lawmaker said police investigations had spread to the flagship Times of London. The revelation came a day after lawyers said an e-mail referring to “a nightmare scenario” of legal repercussions from widespread phone hacking at the News of the World tabloid was deleted from James Murdoch’s computer less than two weeks before the police opened investigations.

The lawmaker, Tom Watson, from the opposition Labour Party, who has been a central figure in the inquiries into phone hacking, said in a message on Twitter that Scotland Yard had “confirmed to me they are investigating” The Times “over e-mail hacking.” [...]

The development was significant in two regards: it focused attention on e-mail hacking rather than the illicit voice mail interception at the center of inquiries so far, and it suggested that the most august of the Murdoch publications in Britain was not immune from scrutiny. Read more »

The Associated Press reports on the U.S. no-fly list. In 2003, Homeland Security Presidential Directive No. 6 consolidated administration of the no-fly, selectee and other security watchlists under the jurisdiction of the Terrorist Screening Center. In 2009, the Justice Department’s Inspector General released a report (pdf) reported substantial problems with the terrorist watchlists. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has improperly kept nearly 24,000 people on a terrorist watch list based on outdated or sometimes irrelevant information, while it missed others with legitimate terror ties who should have been on the list,”said the New York Times. Here are a few stories in the archives about problems with watchlists.

The Associated Press reports:

Even as the Obama administration says it’s close to defeating al-Qaeda, the size of the government’s secret list of suspected terrorists who are banned from flying to or within the United States has more than doubled in the past year, the Associated Press has learned.

The no-fly list jumped from about 10,000 known or suspected terrorists one year ago to about 21,000, according to government figures provided to the AP. Most people on the list are from other countries; about 500 are Americans.

The flood of new names began after the failed Christmas 2009 bombing of a Detroit-bound jetliner. The government lowered the standard for putting people on the list, and then scoured its files for anyone who qualified. The government will not disclose who is on its list or why someone might have been placed on it. [...] Read more »