Photo by Xacobe de Toro
The identity information protection act 2006 has been passed by the Californian state senate and given to governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for signing, according to reports.
Identity Information Protection Act (SB 768): Setting the Record Straight, EFF Website
Office of Privacy Protection - California Department of Consumer Affairs
Photo by Xacobe de Toro
Text Source EPIC newsletter
In a letter addressed to the Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, EPIC urged the Department of Commerce to restrict the export of high-tech surveillance equipment to China. While the US has restricted the export of products such as tear gas, handcuffs, and shotguns to China, the letter noted, high-tech equipment that can be used for surveillance and censorship is freely exported to the country.
The export restrictions were put in place following the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre. Recent reports on human rights abuses in China have focused on the role that US technology companies have played in the suppression of free speech. A recent article in BusinessWeek, for example, highlighted the fact that Oracle, Cisco, Motorola, and EMC Corp. all sold technology products to Chinese police and security authorities that can be used to track political dissidents, in spite of China's "dismal" human rights record.
The Information Law Institute will held the Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium: Identity and Identification in a Networked World, September 29-30, 2006, New York University School of Law .
Increasingly, who we are is represented by key bits of information scattered throughout the data-intensive, networked world. Online and off, these core identifiers mediate our sense of self, social interactions, movements through space, and access to goods and services. There is much at stake in designing systems of identification and identity management, deciding who or what will be in control of them, and building in adequate protection for our bits of identity permeating the network.
This symposium will examine critical and controversial issues surrounding socio-technical systems of identity, identifiability and identification. It will showcase emerging scholarship of graduate students at the cutting edge of humanities, social sciences, artists, systems design & engineering, philosophy, law, and policy to work towards a clearer understanding of these complex problems, and build foundations for future collaborative work.
In addition to graduate student panels, keynote talks will be delivered by Professor Ian Kerr, Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law & Technology at the University of Ottawa, and Dick Hardt, CEO and founder of Sxip Identity.
Text Source: Information Law Institute website
Pew Internet & American Life Project has just published a survey of internet leaders, activists, and analysts shows that a majority agree with predictions that by 2020:
People will wittingly and unwittingly disclose more about themselves, gaining some benefits in the process even as they lose some privacy.
The experts and analysts also split evenly on a central question of whether the world will be a better place in 2020 due to the greater transparency of people and institutions afforded by the internet: 46% agreed that the benefits of greater transparency of organizations and individuals would outweigh the privacy costs and 49% disagreed.
Transparency builds a better world, even at the expense of privacy: As sensing, storage and communication technologies get cheaper and better, individuals' public and private lives will become increasingly “transparent” globally. Everything will be more visible to everyone, with good and bad results. Looking at the big picture - at all of the lives affected on the planet in every way possible - this will make the world a better place by the year 2020. The benefits will outweigh the costs.46% agreed... 49% disagreed... 5% didn't answer
Full results of the survey, including engaging quotes from hundreds of respondents and brief biographies on many of these people, can be found on the Web at http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org by using the "Predictions Surveys" link.
Text Source Pew Internet & American Life Project Press Page
Links:
Elon University "Imagining the Internet" database
First report on the Future of the Internet
BBC: Internet's future in 2020 debated
Pictures of the Future by Siemens
Text source PARC website
The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a subsidiary of Xerox Corporation, conducts pioneering interdisciplinary research in the physical, computational, and social sciences. Building on a 36-year tradition of innovation, PARC today provides research services, technology, and intellectual property to Xerox and other strategic partners.
One of the research areas is: Security & Privacy
PARC is developing technologies that intelligently support security and privacy for ubiquitous computing environments. Work in this area ranges from usable techniques for securely managing large networks of devices, to privacy-preserving methods for collecting and disseminating content over such networks.
This research area incorporates competencies in applied cryptography, human factors, and network security.
Project Areas
Usable Security
Today's users want mobile access to previously unknown devices and services as well as firewalled content. A fundamental challenge in providing such access securely is ease of use: if a security procedure is too difficult, users may configure it incorrectly, won't deploy it, or will just switch it off. PARC is developing technology that enables easy management of large networks of devices as well as usable access control for the content distributed on these networks. An example of a technology is the Network-in-a-Box.
Privacy-preserving Data Management
The trend toward ubiquitous computing has made the gathering and sharing of personal data increasingly easy. PARC is developing technologies that support such activities while providing strong privacy guarantees. One particular technology is a privacy appliance that protects against the identification of individuals through inference control.
Content Protection
With the growing demand for data-management outsourcing and the continued growth of content piracy, secure and efficient methods for protecting content are of increasing importance. One particular project in this space is developing semi-automated ways of protecting documents based on deep content analysis. This project is in collaboration with natural language processing and image analysis groups at PARC.
