The New York Times reports: The Justice Department is completing rules to allow the collection of DNA from most people arrested or detained by federal authorities, a vast expansion of DNA gathering that will include hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, by far the largest group affected. The new forensic DNA sampling was authorized by Congress in […]
Category: Archive Solove Blog Posts
Older Posts by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
Is Identity Theft Really Declining?
A study by Javelin Strategy & Research finds that identity theft declined by 11.5% in 2006: According to the study, 8.4 million adult Americans, or one in 27, learned last year that criminals committed fraud with personal data such as credit card or Social Security numbers. That’s down from 8.9 million in 2005 and 10.1 million in […]
Tucker Carlson’s Videos
The Washington Post reports on an interesting little incident involving Tucker Carlson: Potomac Video store clerk Charles Williamson, 28, posted a message on his blog, Freelance Genius, Dec. 23 that described how he set up a movie rental account for MSNBC host Tucker Carlson at the MacArthur Boulevard store the day before. “I could tell you what […]
Pruning the Airline Screening List
For some time, many people have been wrongly placed on the airline no fly list or extra screening list. I blogged about some accounts of this here and here. Now, according to the AP, the TSA will finally try to clean up its lists: The Bush administration is checking the accuracy of a watch list of suspected […]
Funniest Law Firm Names
I recently heard the name of a law firm that struck me as incredibly funny, and so I immediately thought “blog post fodder.” I went searching for a few others. Here is a list of some of the funniest law firm names I found. All of these are real:
The Pentagon, the CIA, and National Security Letters
From the New York Times: The Pentagon and to a lesser extent the CIA have been using a little-known power to look at the banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage within the United States, officials said Saturday. The C.I.A. has also been issuing what are known as […]
What Exactly Is a “Spammer”?
I’m coming a little late to the party, but the case of Omega World Travel, Inc. v. Mummagraphics, Inc., (4th Cir. Nov. 17, 2006) raises some interesting issues about the Controlling the Assault of Non Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (“CAN SPAM Act”), 15 U.S.C. §§ 7701 et seq. Omega World Travel sent 11 […]
Hewlett Packard Pays for Privacy . . . and Copyright?
Hewlett Packard has agreed to pay $14.5 million to resolve a lawsuit by the California attorney general over its phone records scandal. From the New York Times:
Your Terrorist Risk Score
Ever see those creditreport advertisements, the ones for freecreditreports.com (which aren’t free by the way)? According to the guy in the ad, everybody should know their credit score. And not only do you have a credit score, but you also might have a terrorist risk score. This score, called the Automated Targeting System (ATS), measures […]
Shaming Rats
I’ve blogged a lot about Internet shaming, and haven’t been too keen on the practice. Here’s the latest instantiation of the practice from the AP: