Privacy Moves to the Top of Legislative Agenda

By Sushuma February 24, 2000 11:36 AM

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(IDG)-A panel of government and business experts at the GTC 2000 Southwest conference agreed that privacy is going go be a key legislative issue this year and in years to come.?Speaking at a roundtable discussion on privacy, Tom O'Conner of CourtLink, a provider of systems that allow public access to court records, called the situation "an ongoing conflict." As governments rush to make more services and information available online, they will soon realize not everything is appropriate to post, he said.?For example, he said, court records pertaining to divorces, adoptions, juveniles and first-time offenders might not be appropriate to post.?"The technology has raised a whole host of issues," O'Conner said.?Another problem is how governments should handle bulk requests for data, he said.?For example, a newspaper recently asked the Washington, D.C., government for information on all DUI cases.?The government declined, saying they couldn't handle such a huge request.?And Rhea Ballard-Thrower, associate librarian at the Georgia State University Law Library, predicted that some governments soon will be pulling information posted on their World Wide Web sites fearing liability.?"We're waiting for a case where somebody sues a state because they make something available online and a third party gets a hold of it," she said.?More ...

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RE: Privacy Moves to the Top of Legislative Agenda   reply

Posted by Demona (frogfarm@hempseed.com) on February 25, 2000 6:32 AM

Oh, they're worried about privacy? Then why, pray tell, aren't we
seeing a great uproar over the recently revealed Echelon
automated globalsurveillance project?

Margaret Newsham, one of the principal architects, noted: "As early
as 1979 we could track a specific person and zoom in on his phone
conversation while he was communicating. Since our satellites could
in 1984 film a postage stamp lying on the ground, it is almost
impossible to imagine how all-encompassing the system must be
today." Those "NSA line eater" proponents weren't such crazy
conspiracy theorists after all. So now that you know the biggest
nation-states in the world are doing the equivalent of "tcpdump |
grep" on any telephone, telex, telefax OR email that they feel
like...whatcha gonna do about it?