Privacy

A Swiss bank that successfully sued to yank the Wikileaks.org domain name, and then faced a severe setback in a subsequent court ruling, has given up for now.

Bank Julius Baer filed a brief note with a court in San Francisco Wednesday saying it would voluntarily dismiss its own case, while reserving the right to file it again in the future or pursue it "in an alternate court, jurisdiction, or venue."

BJB's sudden move comes a few days after U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White reversed his earlier ruling (which pulled the plug on the Wikileaks.… Read more

A seemingly odd phenomenon is occurring among some U.S. states that have flatly rejected the Real ID Act.

Even though officials in these states have publicly assured privacy-conscious voters that they steadfastly oppose Real ID's requirement of nationalized driver's licenses and ID cards, these same politicians and bureaucrats are quietly asking the Bush administration for more time to comply with the law.

The latest example is Oklahoma. In our special report published last month, we listed five states that--at the time we wrote the articles--indicated that they would not comply with Real ID. Those were Maine, South … Read more

A team of respected security researchers known for their work hacking RFID radio chips have turned their attention to pacemakers and implantable cardiac defibrillators.

The researchers will present their paper, "Pacemakers and Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators: Software Radio Attacks and Zero-Power Defenses," during the "Attacks" session of the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, one of the most prestigious conferences for the computer security field.

The authors of the paper are listed as: Shane S. Clark, Benessa Defend, Daniel Halperin, Thomas S. Heydt-Benjamin, Will Morgan, Benjamin Ransford, Kevin Fu, Tadayoshi Kohno, William H. Maisel.

Kevin Fu, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, … Read more

Customers of HSBC, Bank of America, and Washington Mutual suffer the highest rates of identity theft in the banking industry, according to an investigative study released Wednesday by a UC Berkeley Law School researcher.

The Federal Trade Commission received over 245,000 reports of identity theft in 2006, but does not typically publish the names of the financial firms and companies listed in the reports. Through an extensive Freedom of Information Act request, Chris Hoofnagle, a staff attorney at UC Berkeley's Boalt School of Law, was able to get detailed records on the individual consumer complaints.

Hoofnagle received detailed … Read more

Using the Internet to steal someone's account information by masquerading as a bank, brokerage, or credit card company has been illegal for many, many years.

Back in 2004, the Justice Department won a criminal conviction against a phishing scammer who pretended to be AOL's billing center. The Federal Trade Commission has been busy filing civil lawsuits.

At least seven states have enacted antiphishing legislation, and companies including Microsoft and Amazon.com have used those laws to target Internet scammers. Plus, fraud has been prohibited for hundreds of years at common law. In short, there's no obvious lack … Read more

Google could soon be forced to delete identifying user information from its search logs, statements by the European Union data regulators suggest. The search engine's lawyers have long argued that network addresses don't really count as personal information, and even if they did, the company's policy of masking the last few digits of an IP address after 18 months is more than sufficient. European regulators don't appear to be buying Google's claims.

According to an Associated Press report, European data privacy regulators confirmed this past Thursday that Internet search engines based outside Europe must also … Read more

Computer scientists have discovered a novel way to bypass the encryption used in programs like Microsoft's BitLocker and Apple's FileVault and then view the contents of supposedly secure files.

In a paper (PDF) published Thursday that could prompt a rethinking of how to protect sensitive data, the researchers describe how they can extract the contents of a computer's memory and discover the secret encryption key used to scramble files. (I tested these claims by giving them a MacBook with FileVault; here's a slideshow.)

"There seems to be no easy remedy for these vulnerabilities," the … Read more

Rebuffing a series of incendiary statements from President Bush, House Democrats left town for a week without granting telecommunications firms immunity from violating federal privacy laws.

In a speech on Thursday, Bush accused Democrats of endangering "the lives of countless Americans" by not enacting the legislation he and fellow Republicans had proposed, which includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that illegally opened their networks to the National Security Agency.

The White House subsequently circulated a statement saying: "This risks creating new intelligence gaps, which damages our national security and makes no sense if the first priority is … Read more

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have scuttled an attempt to grant a temporary extension to a controversial wiretap law--that did not include retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.

By a 191-229 vote on Wednesday afternoon, the House failed to approve a bill to extend the Protect America Act for 21 days in its current form. The law--which Republicans say is necessary to allow interception of communications that transit the United States--is scheduled to expire on Saturday.

The vote, in which 34 Democrats joined the Republicans, comes hours after President Bush called for including retroactive immunity for any companies … Read more