Private Eyes

From...

By Michaela Cavallaro

(IDG) -- It's taken almost two weeks, but privacy advocates are starting to get noticed for speaking out against the increased security measures being proposed in the wake of the terrorist attacks. A slew of pundits filed dispatches over the past few days; many focused on what they see as dire consequences if some of the measures are implemented.

For example, a provision of the Combating Terrorism Act of 2001, passed by the Senate on Sept. 13, would expand the government's wiretapping authority to e- mail transmission and Net surfing. Law-enforcement agencies that stop short of requesting permission for a wiretap, which requires a hearing, have long been allowed to obtain a list of all the phone numbers calling in or out of a suspect's home. The new legislation seeks to expand that authority to e-mail headers and URLs, though not the text of e-mail messages. According to the New York Times' Carl Kaplan, that has been standard practice for the last few years anyway.

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Biometrics drew its fair share of criticism this weekend, as pundits responded to proposals for expanded use of the face-scanning software that was hotly criticized at the last Super Bowl. Supposedly, the technology would be used to identify terrorists at airports and other sensitive locations. However, Hal Plotkin wrote in SF Gate, "iris- and facial-recognition systems can be thwarted" by a good makeup job. In a generally positive piece on the technology, the Los Angeles Times noted that the systems work "only if airlines are able to tap into a centralized database of fingerprints or faceprints of criminal suspects" - and even then, they catch only already-identified bad guys.

The Boston Globe reported on the readiness of state motor-vehicle agencies to respond to calls for a national identity card, which would have a digitized fingerprint embedded in it, or at the very least, a magnetic data strip which would be checked at airports and border crossings. Few outlets Grok perused picked up on Larry Ellison's support for the idea - or the offer he made in a TV interview, to provide the necessary Oracle software for free. As for privacy concerns, Ellison told the San Jose Mercury News, "This privacy you're concerned about is largely an illusion."