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Official misuses are bad enough, but the unofficial uses worry me more. Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured. An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and by the people you don't. (...) But that's not the most serious misuse of a telecommunications surveillance infrastructure. In Greece, between June 2004 and March 2005, someone wiretapped more than 100 cell phones belonging to members of the Greek government -- the prime minister and the ministers of defense, foreign affairs and justice. Ericsson built this wiretapping capability into Vodafone's products, and enabled it only for governments that requested it. Greece wasn't one of those governments, but someone still unknown -- a rival political party? organized crime? -- figured out how to surreptitiously turn the feature on

Whilst listening in on normal telephone calls over landlines or mobile phone networks has become a routine procedure, Voice over IP connections frequently present a problem for investigators, especially when the persons being monitored use Skype via foreign servers or call direct from PC to PC and encrypt their data. The Swiss Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications (UVEK) is therefore examining the use of spy software to allow it to listen in on conversations on PCs.

Utimaco LIMS distinguishes itself among competitive solutions by its comprehensive multivendor support. It integrates seamlessly with more than 200 different network nodes (switches, routers, gateways, application servers) by all leading infrastructure vendors. Utimaco LIMS enables realtime monitoring of telephony, fax, SMS, MMS, e-mail, VoIP, Push-to-Talk and other IP-based communication services. The modular architecture of LIMS facilitates cost-efficient LI solutions for small operators and is scalable for surveillance networks with several thousand concurrent intercepts. Utimaco LIMS mediates and delivers data in accordance with international LI standards by ETSI, 3GPP, ANSI/ATIS and Cablelabs. The highest security requirements are implemented in LIMS to protect all private data from eavesdropping and manipulation.

Amazon's new world-beating gadget isn't the savior of the e-book, genre. It's a proprietary, market-protecting anomaly in a world of increasingly open standards and accessible media. Shame on you, Amazon. (...) The thing that e-books need, I'm convinced, is PDF. Secure, reflowable, customizable PDF. The reader devices need to be easy on the eyes, lightweight, and allow users to shunt any PDF to it, whether it's a specially formatted e-book or not. If I am paying $300+ for essentially a document storage device on steroids, I need to be able to put my own junk on it, too. (...)You might be lining your own pockets and making a few sales, Mr. Bezos, but you're also promoting confusion in the marketplace and causing division in the e-book space at a time when everyone else is pushing for convergence and open standards. Thanks for nothing.

when you actually look at what happens when you add a lot of surveillance, it doesn't make it any easier to find the needles; it just makes the haystack bigger. On September 11 American intelligence agencies knew everything they needed to know to prevent the attack, they just didn't know they knew it.