Our friends at ACLU have put up a petition to Google to not enter into a data-sharing agreement with the military. Check out the interactive petition form here.

March 1, 2010

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

In November 2009, many of the undersigned organizations wrote to you to express our concern over the lack of nominations to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). We write again, with increased urgency, to encourage you to appoint individuals immediately.

Last night, the U.S. Senate passed -- on unanimous consent and no recorded vote -- a measure to renew some expiring police-state provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act for another year. The U.S. House is scheduled to vote on the extension tonight. The White House has promised to sign the bill.

Call your Congressman's office (the Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121) today and urge a NO vote.

Background here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/25/AR201002...

REDWOOD CITY — It's now up to a San Mateo County Superior Court judge to decide whether to set a legal precedent on the powers police have to search a person's cell phone following arrest.

After nearly three and a half hours of testimony and arguments Thursday afternoon on the legality of Daly City police officers' search of an identity theft suspect's iPhone, Judge John Runde said he will consider the case and issue a ruling.

Declan McCullagh has the story on the latest in back-door spyware demanded by US police agencies:

CNET has reviewed a survey scheduled to be released at a federal task force meeting on Thursday, which says that law enforcement agencies are virtually unanimous in calling for such an interface to be created. Eighty-nine percent of police surveyed, it says, want to be able to "exchange legal process requests and responses to legal process" through an encrypted, police-only "nationwide computer network."

By Bruce Schneier, Special to CNN

Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn't that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated -- we knew that already -- it's that the U.S. government inadvertently aided the hackers.

In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/18/AR201001...

Special to The Washington Post and Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Children will be tracked by satellite on public transport and encouraged to spy on their friends and report bad behaviour, under a pilot scheme by the Welsh Assembly.