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Next week, the White House will launch a blog to discuss the Obama administration's open government initiative. In a nod to openness and citizen participation in government, the administration also plans to soon open White House blogs to public comments. In a speech to an annual National Archives and Records Administration conference, Beth Noveck, deputy CTO of the open government initiative at the Office of Science and Technology, asserted that the Obama administration continues to make strides toward opening up the government's data and operations to public scrutiny.

Open government? America might just have to learn to read again.

Stunned applicants filling out immigration forms are now being warned their personal information can be shared with the RCMP, national security and intelligence agents, and even foreign cops. The immigrants, many who arrive here from brutal regimes, are being told that they must sign a consent form or their requests will not be dealt with by federal immigration officials. One form, which was obtained by Sun Media, said the data can be shared with the Canada Border Services Agency, RCMP, Canadian Security Intelligence Service and foreign police. TARGET FRIENDS The information can be used to target friends or family members of those who say negative things about their homelands, said Jamal Kaker, of the Afghan Association of Ontario. "This will impact a lot of immigrants in many communities," he said yesterday. "This is scary because the information will get back to Afghanistan in no time." Toronto lawyer Guidy Mamann said it can be deadly for immigrants who give information that may be negative to their governments and are then refused by Canada. "The rights of these immigrants are being trampled," Mamann said. "All this was done under the radar without an announcement." He said foreign police -- some working for the worst regimes -- will be able to find out where their nationals who fled to Canada live and allegations they have leveled against their homelands. "All this information will now be shared," Mamann said. "The lives of immigrants and some Canadian citizens will become an open book." SIGN FORMS He said Canadian citizens are affected if they sign forms to sponsor a spouse or loved ones. "It's another nail in the coffin for civil rights in Canada," Mamann said. "Negative information against governments will now be open for sharing." Toronto lawyer Mendel Green called the changes troubling. "This is a serious breach of our privacy laws," he said. "It appears to be an excess of authority. Big Brother wants to watch our visitors." Federal immig

Proof that George Bush was actually protecting us by limiting access to government information!

At the National Archives and Records Administration's annual conference Thursday, one keynote speaker asked the crowd of several hundred how many of the archivists in attendance were sold on the use of social media. Only a smattering raised their hands. Clearly, it's a challenge for the government to figure out how to navigate complex archival and e-discovery regulations that require it to capture and store all sorts of new content in the age of social media, cloud computing, and seemingly endless storage. "The federal government is in a constantly evolving records environment," Adrienne Thomas, acting archivist of the United States, said in a luncheon speech to the conference. "These are exciting and challenging times." Obama administration ambitions toward cloud computing and more openness only make that issue more complicated. "Many of us in the federal records administrations have struggled with the implications of this new direction," Paul Wester, director of modern records programs at the National Archives, said in an interview. "We deeply believe in transparency and openness, but we are concerned about FOIA, HIPAA, the Privacy Act, personally identifiable information, and compliance with the Disability Act and Federal Records Act."

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski will unveil in a speech on Monday new proposals that would force Internet providers to treat the flow of content equally, sources familiar with the speech said on Friday. The concept, referred to as net neutrality, pits open Internet companies like Google Inc against broadband service providers like AT&T Inc, Verizon Communications Inc, and Comcast Corp, which oppose new rules governing network management. Advocates of net neutrality say Internet service providers must be barred from blocking or slowing traffic based on content. Providers say the increasing volume of bandwidth-hogging services like video sharing requires active management of their networks and some argue that net neutrality could stifle innovation. "He is going to announce rulemaking," said one source familiar with his speech about broadband, to be delivered at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank. "The commission will have to codify into new regulations the principle of nondiscrimination." The FCC could formally propose the rules aimed at applying to wireless and landline platforms at an open meeting in October.

The Homeland Security Department's privacy office will hold a conference to explore the use of social media as if affects security and privacy. The "Government 2.0: Privacy and Best Practices" conference will be held June 22 to June 23 in Washington and is open to the public. The workshop is meant to help agencies use Web 2.0 technologies in ways to protect privacy and security, and to explore the best practices for implementing President Barack Obama's memo on open government that was released in January, according to a notice published in the federal register April 17. Panelists will discuss topics such as transparency and participation in government, privacy and legal concerns brought by the government's use of social media, and how the government can best use the technologies while protecting privacy rights during the conference, DHS officials said. DHS is asking for comments by June 1 on topics such as: * How the government is using social media. * The risks, benefits and operational concerns that come from government use of the technologies. * Privacy, security and legal issues raised by the government's use of social media. * Recommendations on best practices for government use of the technologies.

Guess what? That unlocked rant you put on your MySpace profile is open to the public and can be seen by anyone with a computer. Imagine that! Cynthia Moreno learned this the hard way. A judge ruled earlier this month that it was not an invasion of her privacy when a local newspaper published a rant pulled from her MySpace blog. After a visit to her hometown of Coalinga, Calif., college student Moreno penned a 700-word blog entry titled "An Ode to Coalinga" that opened with "the older I get, the more I realize how much I despise Coalinga." Moreno subsequently deleted the blog entry, but Roger Campbell, principal of Coalinga High School, discovered it before the deletion and handed it over to his friend Pamela Pond, editor of the Coalinga Record newspaper. Pond then published the rant in its entirety as a letter to the editor, printing Cynthia's full name. The Moreno family was met with death threats and shots were fired outside their home. Cynthia's father David was forced to close his 20-year-old family business, and the family moved to another town. The family sued the newspaper and the Coalinga-Huron Unified School District for invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress. The case against the newspaper was dismissed on free speech grounds, but the case against Campbell and the school district was allowed to proceed. Campbell did not violate Moreno's rights when he handed over her rant to Pond because Moreno's blog entry was published on the Internet and available for anyone to see, according to the Superior Court of Fresno County.

Cloud services are now vulnerable to malicious use, a security company has suggested, after a techie worked out how Amazon's EC2 service could be used as a BitTorrent file harvester and host. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web service software developers can use to access computing, compilation and software trialling power on a dynamic basis, without having to install the resources locally. Now a developer, Brett O'Connor, has come up with a step-by-step method for using the same service to host an open source BitTorrent application called TorrentFlux. Getting this up and running on Amazon would require some technical know-how, but would be within the reach of a moderately experienced user, right down to following O'Connor's command line low-down on how to install the public TorrentFlux app straight to Amazon's EC2 rather than a user's local machine. Finding an alternative way of using BitTorrent matters to hardcore file sharers because ISPs and admins alike are increasingly keen to block such bandwidth-eating traffic on home and business links, and O'Connor's EC2 guide was clearly written to that end - using the Amazon service would make such blocking unlikely. "I created a web-based, open-source Bittorrent 'machine' that liberated my network and leveraged Amazon's instead," says O'Connor. He then quips "I can access it from anywhere, uploading Torrent files from wherever, and manage them from my iPhone." However, security company GSS claims the guide shows the scope for possible abuse, using EC2 to host or 'seed' non-legitimate BitTorrent file distribution. "This means, says Hobson, that hackers and other interested parties can simply use a prepaid (and anonymous) debit card to pay the $75 a month fee to Amazon and harvest BitTorrent applications at high speed with little or no chance of detection," said David Hobson of GSS. "The danger here is that companies may find their staff FTPing files from Amazon EC2 - a completely legitimate domain -

In October 2001, the Bush administration took an administrative action that would prove sadly symptomatic of its rule. John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, issued a memorandum warning against casual release of information to the public under the Freedom of Information Act. Such releases, Ashcroft said, should be made "only after full and deliberate consideration of the institutional, commercial and personal privacy interests that could be implicated." In case anyone missed the point, Ashcroft added that any bureaucrat who said no to such a request could "be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis." It goes without saying that Ashcroft did not promise any such defense of government employees who released information under the terms of the act. If cavalier disregard of the law and the public's right to hold its government accountable were hallmarks of the recently departed administration, we can only hope that President Obama's response signals a new approach. One of his first presidential acts was to issue a memo to federal agencies on the Freedom of Information Act. It opens by quoting former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis' pronouncement that sunlight is the "best of disinfectants" and continues by trumpeting the act as "the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open government." Where Ashcroft searched for excuses to withhold information, Obama directed all agencies to "adopt a presumption" in favor of releasing it.

On Monday, U.K.-based digital rights organization Open Rights Group submitted an open letter to major online media players, urging them to prevent ISP-level behavioral targeting firm Phorm from tracking user interactions on their Web sites. The letter, sent to Google, AOL, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon and Ebay, said, "[ORG] believes that it is clearly in your company's interest, it is in the interests of all of your customers, and it will serve to protect your brand's reputation, if you insist that the Phorm/Webwise system does not process any data that passes to or from your website." "We have received the letter and are giving it careful consideration from privacy and business perspectives," a spokesperson for AOL and its social network Bebo told ClickZ News. Similarly, in reference to the ORG correspondence, a Google spokesperson told ClickZ, "We've received the ORG's letter, but we're still considering the points they raised, so we don't have a response to make at this time." According to information published on the British Telecom Web site (one of Phorm's ISP-partners,) site owners can specifically request that their properties are not "scanned" by Phorm's technology, by contacting the firm directly. Phorm announced deals with three major U.K. ISPs over a year ago, but its technology is still yet to be fully deployed. BT has, however, carried out live trials of the platform with some of its customers. Phorm's CEO, Kent Ertugrul, claims that BT will implement his company's technology by the end of the year, but BT itself remains less committed to that timeline. Both AOL and Google have vested interests in the behavioral targeting space, although not in the controversial area of deep packet inspection (DPI), in which Phorm's technology lies. AOL-owned Tacoda targets ads based on users' activity across a range of partner sites, but does not directly intercept ISP-data. Google also announced this month that it will begin testing similar behavioral targe

Identity thieves are getting more clever and are increasingly using stolen information to get driver's licenses, employment and government assistance, according to a new report. The survey by the Identity Theft Resource Center also found that the greater awareness of this problem by the public has led to more people discovering they are victims themselves, through monitoring of their bank accounts and credit card statements. Typically, victims learned of their identity theft when they were denied a job or credit or were informed by law enforcement. "Most of our information is beyond our control," said Linda Foley, co-founder of the Identity Theft Resource Center, which surveys victims each year to see how identity theft is changing. "If a thief wants to get it, he will find a way to get it." The report covers the experiences of around 100 of the 1,500 people who were victimized in 2008 and contacted the center, a nonprofit that helps people recover from identity theft. Stolen personal information is now cheap - identities may sell on the black market for as little as 60 cents each - and thieves churn through them quickly to lower their chances of getting caught, Foley said. Rather than opening 10 or 20 credit card accounts in a victim's name, they now open two or three, charge as much as they can and move on to the next person. This raises the cost of identity theft to businesses, whose average loss to fraud nearly doubled last year to $90,107, up from $48,941 the year before.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, a recent survey indicates that more than half of large companies have limited knowledge of which systems or applications their employees have access to. This marks a system access problem, and a growing risk during a period of frequent and large layoffs. If a company needs to turn off access manually (which is often the case), it may miss several user accounts that they don't realize exist. This leaves the door open for past employees, and others, to access important data, including financial information and customer information. To learn more about these open-door system risks, I asked Courion vice president Kurt Johnson about his firm's research.

"There's a known weakness in browsers which we wrote about in the book. Every time we talked with someone about it, they'd ask us why we didn't start a company that took advantage of the loophole, and the answer was, well, it's creepy. The loophole basically lets you see where else your visitors have been on the Internet. Well, it's now out in the open, in two forms: Beencounter, and Haveyourfriendsbeenthere. To be perfectly clear, the site won't show you everything your visitors surf-just whether or not they've been to a set of sites you define. Here's how it works:"

"Today, the Federal Trade Commission opened new areas of a "virtual mall" with content that will help kids learn to protect their privacy, spot frauds and scams, and avoid identity theft. The FTC Web site, www.ftc.gov/YouAreHere, introduces key consumer and business concepts and helps youngsters understand their role in the marketplace. The FTC is the nation's consumer protection agency. "YouAreHere presents practical lessons about money and business in a fun and familiar setting," said David Vladeck, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "The new content takes kids behind the scenes to raise their awareness of advertising and marketing, pricing and competition, fraud and identity theft. At the FTC's online mall, visitors play games, watch short animated films, and interact with customers and store owners. They can design and print advertisements for a shoe store, investigate suspicious claims in ads and sales pitches, learn to identify the catches behind bogus modeling schemes and vacation offers, and guess the retail prices of various candies based on their supply, demand, and production costs. At the Security Plaza, visitors can build a social networking page and see the unintended consequences of posting personal information. They also get tips on how to keep their computers safe while they're online. In the arcade, visitors can play Info Defender 3 and protect Earthlings from Cyclorian invaders who would steal their identities. The game teaches the importance of protecting personal information, including Social Security numbers. For parents and teachers, the site offers detailed fact sheets with ideas for related activities. Teachers can use the site to complement lessons in consumer economics, government, social studies, language arts, and critical thinking. The National Council for Economic Education has developed a lesson plan that prominently features YouAreHere; it is available on the Parents and Teachers page. "

"A privacy watchdog's criticisms of Facebook appear to have captured the attention of the Federal Trade Commission. In a letter dated Jan. 14, David Vladeck, head of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, told the Electronic Privacy Information Center that its complaint about recent privacy changes at Facebook "raises issues of particular interest for us at this time." Vladeck added that he has asked an official to arrange a followup meeting with EPIC, but also said he can't currently confirm or deny whether the FTC has opened an investigation. FTC investigations are not public until the agency either issues a complaint or closes the matter. The FTC's consumer protection chief also said in his letter to EPIC that the commission plans to focus on privacy issues raised by social networks at the next roundtable, scheduled to be held in Berkeley, Calif. on Jan. 28. "

FTC may investigate privacy issues on FaceBook? Equal bang for the buck by identifying and educating users who post way too much personal information.

"Facebook tightens security as it deals with the continuing fallout over changes to its privacy settings." ...Earlier on May 13, Facebook had a meeting where employees asked executives questions about privacy. Facebook officials would not comment on exactly what was said. "We have an open culture and it should come as no surprise that we're providing a forum for employees to ask questions on a topic that has received a lot of outside interest," a spokesperson said.

Hey Zuck! Privacy & security are NOT the same thing. Misdirection is not the response FB users are seeking.

"Google has said that its world-roving Street View cars have been collecting information sent over open WiFi networks, contradicting previous assurances by the company. This means that Google may have collected emails and other private information if they traveled over WiFi networks while one of the cars was in range. Previously, the company said no payload data was ever intercepted."

IT companies seem to shoot their own effort in the foot on a regular basis. Usually due to a lack of process. The dot com bubble was small compared to what may be coming for trust in IT services.

"Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin Wednesday said the Internet giant "screwed up" by collecting personal data through wireless networks and promised new oversight as European officials pledged to open investigations of the data collection. Authorities in Germany, Spain and Italy said Wednesday they were investigating Google and its Street View service, which uses camera-equipped vehicles to take street images and mark the location of Wi-Fi networks. Mr. Brin, speaking the same day at Google's developer conference in San Francisco, said the company would put "more internal controls in place" to prevent such data captures in the future, including the hiring of outside help. "Trust is very important to us," Mr. Brin said. "We're going to do everything we can to preserve that trust.""

G apologizes. Again, better to ask forgiveness... If users remain silent & gvt doesn't prosecute, why comply?

An explosion in threats against the nation's cybernetworks has led the Pentagon to develop a cyberwar strategy and prompted states to open cybersecurity offices.

Recent news reports on copier security have brought to the forefront how information stored on a copier's hard drive may be accessible to would-be identity thieves and others. While this vulnerability is eye-opening to many, this concern has been important to manufacturers for quite some time. Just as you would install a virus scan on your laptop or PC, you need data safeguards for multifunction printers (MFPs).

"Mozilla's flagship Firefox browser is vulnerable to at least 11 "critical" vulnerabilities that expose users to drive-by download attacks that require no user interaction beyond normal browsing. The open-source group shipped Firefox 3.5.4 with patches for the vulnerabilities, which range from code execution risk to the theft of information in the browser's form history."