Between stops in his globe-trotting life as an Internet mogul, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales came to Ybor City Friday to launch a new Web site that offers a wide range of resources for the homeless in the Tampa Bay area.

The new site, tampabayhomeless.wikia.com, was introduced after the Hillsborough Homeless Coalition’s annual meeting at Teatro on Seventh, a restaurant on Eighth Avenue.

Coalition CEO Rayme Nuckles said the site would be only the third of its kind in the world. The first two were created in San Francisco, where Wikipedia operations are based, and Los Angeles, Wales said.

Source: St. Petersburg Times

Note: Shirl Kennedy, ResourceShelf senior editor, is a news researcher for the St. Petersburg Times.

Identity fraud has been on the rise, as criminal cunning may be mixing with desperation during the downturn. Schemes seem to multiply daily, as scammers often half a world away dream up new ways to steal data to enrich themselves. According to Javelin Strategy and Research, 9.9 million Americans were victims of identity theft in 2008, up from 8.1 million in 2007.

With all kinds of private information residing in all kinds of places, vigilance can be difficult. Using caution when surfing the Internet and keeping antivirus software up to date are vital steps, experts say, but they are not enough. And most tools for fighting identity fraud — credit-monitoring services, fraud alerts and credit freezes — are reactive, not proactive, and they primarily address abuse of financial accounts, not other types of identity fraud.

But a new breed of products is tackling the trickier matter of preventing identity theft. New approaches include scouring the Internet in search of signs that criminals have your information, so you can move to block them. Others focus on keeping your data away from criminals in the first place, locking it down while you bank, shop or do other personal tasks online. Here are some ways to keep your information yours.

Source: New York Times

Big Brother is watching. That is the message corporations routinely send their employees about using email.

But recent cases have shown that employees sometimes have more privacy rights than they might expect when it comes to the corporate email server. Legal experts say that courts in some instances are showing more consideration for employees who feel their employer has violated their privacy electronically.

Driving the change in how these cases are treated is a growing national concern about privacy issues in the age of the Internet, where acquiring someone else’s personal and financial information is easier than ever.

Source: Wall Street Journal

This Article offers a new way of thinking and talking about government secrecy. In the vast literature on the topic, little attention has been paid to the structure of government secrets, as distinct from their substance or function. Yet these secrets differ systematically depending on how many people know of their existence, what sorts of people know, how much they know, and how soon they know. When a small group of similarly situated officials conceals from outsiders the fact that it is concealing something, the result is a deep secret. When members of the general public understand they are being denied particular items of information, the result is a shallow secret. Every act of state secrecy can be located on a continuum ranging between these two poles.

Attending to the depth of state secrets, the Article shows, can make a variety of conceptual and practical contributions to the debate on their usage. The deep/shallow distinction provides a vocabulary and an analytic framework with which to describe, assess, and compare secrets, without having to judge what they conceal. It sheds light on how secrecy is employed and experienced, which types are likely to do the most damage, and where to focus reform efforts. And it gives more rigorous content to criticisms of Bush administration practices. Elaborating these claims, the Article also mines new constitutional territory – providing an original account of the role of state secrecy generally, as well as deep secrecy specifically, in our constitutional order.

Several options available for retrieval of full text.

Source: Stanford Law Review, Forthcoming (David Pozen)

Hat tip: Secrecy News

“For America to obtain an optimal return on our investment in science, publicly funded research must be shared as broadly as possible,” is the message that forty one Nobel Prize-winning scientists in medicine, physics, and chemistry gave to Congress in an open letter delivered yesterday. The letter marks the fourth time in five years that leading scientists have called on Congress to ensure free, timely access to the results of federally funded research – this time asking leaders to support the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009 (S.1373).
…
The bi-partisan Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), introduced by Senators Lieberman (I-CT) and Cornyn (R-TX), would deliver online public access to the published results of research funded through eleven U.S. agencies and departments, requiring that peer-reviewed journal articles stemming from publicly funded research be made available in an online repository no later than six months after publication.

+ An Open Letter to the U.S. Congress Signed by 41 Nobel Prize Winners (November 2009)

Source: Alliance for Taxpayer Access

The National Archives has joined the National Recreation Reservation Service (NRRS), a Federal interagency reservation service, provided under contract by the U.S. Forest Service. Participating in the NRRS online reservation service, www.Recreation.gov, will make it easier for individuals, families, and large groups alike to visit the National Archives. By simply going online, visitors can now reserve their choice of dates and times in a matter of minutes. While reservations are not required to visit the National Archives, this new service will offer another option for those who wish to plan ahead and beat the crowds.

Source: NARA

Confused by all the proposed changes to the Patriot Act ricocheting through the Capitol? The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) has put together a handy chart comparing the current law with the various amendments in the House and Senate.

The chart compares proposed amendments (.pdf) to National Security Letters (NSLs) and the so-called “lone wolf” provisions of the Patriot Act. The proposals have only been passed by the judiciary committees, and face further amendments before they hit the full House and Senate for votes.

+ Direct to the Amendments Chart (7 pages; PDF)

+ Access the Complete Wired Story
Much more on the proposed amendments.

Source: Threat Level (Wired)

Source: Wired

Wikipedia is under a censorship attack by a convicted murderer who is invoking Germany’s privacy laws in a bid to remove references to his killing of a Bavarian actor in 1990.

Lawyers for Wolfgang Werle, of Erding, Germany, sent a cease-and-desist letter (.pdf) demanding removal of Werle’s name from the Wikipedia entry on actor Walter Sedlmayr. The lawyers cite German court rulings that “have held that our client’s name and likeness cannot be used anymore in publication regarding Mr. Sedlmayr’s death.”

It’s not the first time Wikipedia, the world’s most popular online, public-driven encyclopedia, has been targeted by would-be censors. And it likely won’t be the last.

The site went offline overseas for a day in December, as British censors blacklisted it over an entry on the German rock band Scorpions. The entry included the cover art of the Scorpions’ 1976 Virgin Killer album, which depicts a nude young girl.

[Snip]

Wikipedia did not respond for comment.

Access the Cease-and-Desist Letter (PDF)

Source: Wired

See Also: Much More About this Case from the Electronic Frontier Foundation

NARA has completed two of five planned increments of ERA, but has experienced schedule delays and cost overruns, and several functions planned for the system’s initial release were deferred. Although NARA initially planned for the system to be capable of ingesting federal and presidential records in September 2007, the two system increments to support those records did not achieve initial operating capability until June 2008 and December 2008, respectively. In addition, NARA reportedly spent about $80 million on the base increment, compared to its planned cost of about $60 million. Finally, a number of functions originally planned for the base increment were deferred to later increments, including the ability to delete records and to ingest redacted records. In fiscal year 2010, NARA plans to complete the third increment, which is to include new systems for Congressional records and public access, and begin work on the fourth.

Source: Government Accountability Office (David A. Powner, director, information technology management issues, before the Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census and National Archives, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform)

Researchers from Rovira i Virgili University, Autonoma of Barcelona, and Oberta of Catalonia have developed a system that protects the privacy of Internet search engine users through a new computer protocol. “It is a model based on cryptographic tools, which distort the profile of users when they use search engines on Internet in such a way that their privacy is preserved,” says Rovira i Virgili University’s Alexandre Viego. The researchers note that there are systems that provide anonymous navigation, but say their system provides a significant improvement in response time over anonymous systems, though it still delays searches slightly. The new protocol has already been tested in both closed research center intranets and on the Internet, and the results have made the researchers optimistic about a global implementation model. The researchers are currently working on the development of a final user version, and believe that it will soon be easy to integrate the system into the major platforms and browsers.

Read the Complete News Item

Source: AlphaGalileo

At a European privacy conference in Spain Thursday, the company unveiled a new service called Google Dashboard that summarizes the data that Google collects in users’ accounts for products like Gmail, Picasa Web Albums, Web History, Checkout, Reader and YouTube. Users will be able to adjust their privacy settings for the various Google products directly from the dashboard.

Much of the information was previously available in the accounts and settings sections for each product, so Dashboard simply brings all that information together in one place.

[Snip]

[Our emphasis] Dashboard provides information only about users’ Google accounts for products that require users to log in or products where the log-in is optional. It does not address the search records of people who are not logged into Google or the cookie data that Google uses to aim ads at people. Many advocates say that the collection and storage of such data may raise the biggest privacy concerns.

[Snip]

Still, privacy advocates hailed the product.

“It is a significant step forward in terms of trying to unite the user experience for people who use Google products,” said Ari Schwartz, chief operating officer of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an independent advocacy group that receives some funding from Google and other technology companies. “We still need a lot more to protect consumers’ privacy.”

Access Google Dashboard

Source: Bits Blog, NY Times

See Also: Search Engine Land

Verizon recently joined the likes of Comcast and Time Warner, becoming the latest Internet service provider to stop giving its customers access to newsgroups on Usenet, a decades-old collection of thousands of message boards worldwide.

In announcing its decision, Verizon mentioned a Web site that lists third-party commercial “news servers” that provide Usenet access for around $10 a month. Some offer free or low-cost trials.

What Verizon didn’t tell customers is that they can get free access to Usenet and other types of message boards through Google Groups. A Web-based service like Google isn’t as convenient as using news reader software, such as Windows Outlook Express or Windows Mail. But unlike with software, you can use Google to search the so-called Usenet archive, a database of more than 800 millions posts going back to 1981.

You also may find free news servers by searching the Web. We found a couple of sites that list them, including Newsparrot and the DMOZ open directory project. Some of the information we saw was out of date. But on Monday, we were able to post messages through one free server, news.gmane.org. For information about adding a news account, check your newsreader’s help files.

Source: Consumer Reports Money & Shopping Blog

Government records are fundamental to understanding official policies and the decision-making processes of our leaders. They can be vital resources for a journalist following a breaking news story about government misconduct, a military veteran’s family seeking information about benefits, or a student writing a history paper. Government documents provide first-hand, real-time accounts of events as they unfolded, generally without the editorial filter that characterizes secondary sources like books and news articles.

This guide, Effective FOIA Requesting for Everyone: A National Security Archive Guide, provides a comprehensive overview of how to obtain documents from federal executive branch agencies. It focuses primarily on the Freedom of Information Act process. But it also briefly treats other means of accessing government records, including through publicly available sources and through the Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) process for obtaining previously classified records.

Access the Guide By Chapters (PDF) or Download the Complete Guide at One Time (122 pages; PDF)

Source: National Security Archive
Hat Tip: David D. and Net-Gold

Congress’s law library is rebuffing calls from the chairmen of the House and Senate foreign relations committees to retract a report on the military-backed coup in Honduras that the lawmakers charge is flawed.

The request, by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., has sparked cries of censorship from Republicans who say the Democrats don’t like what the August report said: that the government of Honduras had the authority to remove deposed President Manuel Zelaya from office.

A spokeswoman for the Law Library of Congress – one of six Library of Congress agencies – said Thursday that the research agency stands by the report and that Librarian of Congress James Billington is preparing a response to the lawmakers.

Zelaya has been holed up at the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, for several weeks, and high-ranking U.S. officials were working Thursday to try to broker a resolution.

Republicans amped up their criticism Thursday of the Obama administration’s Honduras policy, asking the Government Accountability Office to investigate the State Department’s role in the crisis in Honduras. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., said members of the Honduran congress told visiting members of Congress that the U.S. ambassador to Honduras was trying to put “Zelaya cronies” into government posts.

See previous story: Lawmakers ask Library of Congress to retract Honduras report

Source: Miami Herald

Facebook head of communications Elliot Schrage posted a company blog entry on Thursday inviting members to review proposed updates to the social network’s privacy policy, and much of it deals with what happens to the content of accounts that members have opted to delete.

“Specifically, we’ve included sections that further explain the privacy setting you can choose to make your content viewable by everyone, the difference between deactivating and deleting your account,” and the process of memorializing an account once we’ve received a report that the account holder is deceased,” Schrage wrote. Earlier this week, Facebook detailed the process of “memorializing” an account, which leaves the profile intact to current friends but hides potentially sensitive information.

Now, in the proposed new policy, which members are invited to review and comment on until November 5, Facebook explains to users that they can “deactivate” their account, which hides it but keeps information stored for potential reactivation, or alternately choose to delete it for good.

Access the Complete Article

Source: CNET

See Also: Access the Facebook Blog Post About Proposed Changes

Other Areas Up for Revision Are:

+ Clarification of Current Practices

+ Advertising on Facebook

+ Improving the Quality of Facebook’s Ads

Wikileaks has published more than 1.3 million documents in the three years since its founding, and over that time the organization has faced its own share of threats and lawsuits.

[Wikileaks co-founder Julian] Assange believes a vanguard of politicians and human rights lawyers sympathetic to its goals can shield the Web site to a certain degree. The group has won all its court cases to date, including several high-profile appearances.

Source: Computerworld

See Also: Access Wikileaks

See Also: Wikileaks Also Offers RSS (not working at time of posting) and Twitter Feeds

The title of the 2009 institute is “The Right to Information Access”.

The United States Constitution codifies the right to free expression. But what rights have we to access the results of free expression?

“Libraries,” states the American Library Association, “help ensure that Americans can access the information they need – regardless of age, education, ethnicity, language, income, physical limitations or geographic barriers – as the digital world continues to evolve.” But two decades of rapid developments in information technologies have revealed a contradiction: it is easier than ever to disseminate information and to receive it, but it is also easier to control and monitor access to that information.

You can learn more and find links to view the webcast on this web page.

This event wil feature the following people:

+ John Willinsky, (keynote speaker) Professor of Education, Stanford University, Founder of the Public Knowledge Project and author of The Access Principle: the Case for Open Access. (MIT, 2005).

+ Marybeth Peters, Register of Copyright, US Copyright Office. Author of The General Guide to the Copyright Act of 1976.

+ John Palfrey, Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School . Co-author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (Basic Books, 2008) and Access Denied: The Practice and Politics of Global Internet Filtering (MIT Press, 2008).

+ Clifford Lynch, Director, Coalition of Networked Information, and member of the National Digital Strategy Advisory Board of the Library of Congress , Microsoft’s Technical Computing Science Advisory Board , the board of the New Media Consortium , and the Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access.

If you can’t view the event live it will remain available on the web page once it concludes.

Source: Penn State University Libraries
Hat Tip: CNI

The battle against phishing is a seesaw contest. On one side are the phishers, looking for better ways to steal money and Internet users’ personal data. On the other side is an array of security and software providers, financial institutions, and other like-minded parties who fight back with counter-measures of their own. While phishing remains a dangerous criminal activity involving great losses of money and personal data, the latest statistics also show that phishing has not increased by some measures, and that some anti-phishing measures have had a beneficial impact.

This report attempts to understand the scope of the global phishing problem, especially by examining domain name usage and phishing site uptimes. Specifically, this new report examines all the phishing attacks detected in the first half of 2009 (1H2009) — between January 1, 2009 and June 30, 2009. The data was collected by the APWG and supplemented with data from several phishing feeds and private sources. The APWG phishing repository is the Internet’s most comprehensive archive of phishing and e-mail fraud activity. Our data confirms new and ongoing trends, and we hope that bringing them to light will lead to improved anti-phishing measures.

Source: Anti-Phishing Working Group

The Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute (ACLP) at New York Law School has released a report identifying major barriers to broadband adoption among senior citizens and people with disabilities, and across the telemedicine, energy, education, and government sectors. This report was prepared in coordination with staff of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative (OBI) for use in the development of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan.
…
ACLP Director Charles M. Davidson said “The report provides the FCC with a comprehensive analysis of major barriers to broadband adoption among under-adopting demographic groups and sectors of the economy. Our hope is that this report will be used as a starting point for further discussions regarding ways to maximize the adoption rate across every demographic group and sector.”

+ Full Report (PDF; 1.7 MB)

Should an investigator or attorney “friend” a prosecution witness in order to find impeachment evidence? Are there legal or ethical bars to surreptitiously gathering data from social network profiles? Should the intent of the user have any bearing on the formulation of law related to access? These and more questions were stirred up in the mix of case studies presented at the (first, annual?) symposium, Social Networks: Friends or Foes? Confronting Online Legal and Ethical Issues in the Age of Social Networking, sponsored by UC Berkeley School of Law. Yeah, a long title but, hey, these folks are academics. And the case studies constituted just the first panel (”Problems Unique to Social Networking and the Law”) of an extraordinary assemblage of academic, government, activist, policy and practicing lawyers rounding out the 5-panel day.

Much of the discussion concerned access to profile content, – the difference between civil and criminal (where there’s the familiar prosecution/defense imbalance) cases – whether certain information should be private even if it can be viewed by unintended parties. For example, should employers be able to view deleted personal information? No one mentioned the issue of whether schools have a legal right to compel students to turn over their user names/passwords (See: “Area School Wants Access To Students’ Social Networking”). There may be instances when a legal requirement for disclosure would apply. Lauren Gelman, Executive Director, Stanford Law, Center for Internet and Society, raised the question of whether evidence in the online sites could be used, say, in divorce cases, to support evidence gathered by other means. The Deputy General Counsel for Facebook took the position that user’s profile content is private, begging the audience to sue the company to settle issues of access.

See: Social Networks: Friends or Foes

Source: PI Buzz