The Department of Justice (DOJ) has released its annual report on the number of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) orders, Wiretap Act orders, and National Security Letters issued in 2005.
For FISA surveillance orders, 2072 applications were made to the FISA court; none were denied. Over the past few years, the number of orders has been steadily increasing:
A while ago, I blogged about companies that were selling records of the numbers people call on their cell phones on the Internet. Congress is currently conducting an investigation into these companies.
Today, Bob Sullivan at MSNBC reports:
It’s time to modernize the lyrics to some old Beatles songs. The University of Colorado police are using a website to post surveillance photos of students and other individuals it wants to identify for smoking pot on Farrand Field. Apparently, there’s a tradition at the University of Colorado for students to spoke pot on Farrand Field on April 20th of each year. According to the Rocky Mountain News:
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post criticizing an essay by William Stuntz (law, Harvard) in The New Republic. Today, he has responded to my post in The New Republic Online.
I’ll reply briefly here to a few of Stuntz’s points in response. Stuntz observes:
Yes, Dorothy, you really can tell your doctor about sex in Kansas. A while ago, I wrote about the Kansas Attorney General’s interpretation of a law prohibiting sex with minors under the age of 16 as requiring doctors to report any sexual activity by people under 16 to the state authorities (here and here).
Recently, a federal district court judge concluded in Aid for Women v. Foulston:
William Stuntz (law, Harvard) has long been advancing thoughtful provocative ideas about criminal procedure. I’ve always found Stuntz to be insightful even when I disagree (and I have disagreed with him a lot). Stuntz’s recent essay in The New Republic entitled Against Privacy and Transparency has me not just disagreeing, but doing so rather sharply.
Recently, New York AG Eliot Spitzer settled a case against Datran Media that could have some wide-ranging implications for information privacy law. Datran Media styles itself “a leading performance-based marketing company with Enabling Technology that connects marketers to consumers through a comprehensive set of email marketing and digital media services.” This is basically a verbose way of saying that it sends unsolicited email, which is perhaps a kind way of describing spam.
Datran obtained personal information from other companies which violated their privacy policies in selling the data to Datran. According to the AP:
When it comes to surveillance for the Bush information, it appears that only the sky’s the limit. From the Washington Post [link no longer available]:
A growing data privacy issue is the outsourcing of personal data. Increasingly, US companies are outsourcing data processing to other countries. Although the United States lags much of the world in data protection, our personal information is being sent overseas to many countries that lack the same level of privacy protections as the United States. This can create risks that the data can be misused for identity theft or for fake identification. It could also create national security concerns.
Once upon a time, a wolf came to the home of a little pig:
Wolf: “Hello, little pig, let me come in.”
Pig: “No, no! Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!”
Wolf: “Well, then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in.”
Pig’s Wife: “That won’t be necessary, Wolf, come in, come in.”
But it’s not yet time to rewrite the tale of the Three Little Pigs.