Archive for November, 2007

UK Child Benefit agency: records for 25 million lost

Here’s a good one, it looks like an agency in the UK has lost two computer discs containing “…the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16 have gone missing. The Child Benefit data on them includes name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and, where relevant, bank details [...]

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Hushmail unencrypted and handed over client’s emails; backdoor revealed

Hushmail was always known as a secure, private webmail company that markets itself by saying that “…not even a Hushmail employee with access to our servers can read your encrypted e-mail, since each message is uniquely encoded before it leaves your computer.” But it turns out that statement seems not to apply to individuals [...]

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AT&T’s programming language for mass surveillance

While data-mining techniques used for marketing should be viewed with a skewed eye, the fact that AT&T has developed a C language variant called Hancock to mine gigabytes of telephone and Internet records should raise red flags automatically. “…the phone company uses Hancock-coded software to crunch through tens of millions of long distance phone [...]

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Intel official: say goodbye to privacy

During a hearing to review the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act, Congress was told by intelligence official Donald Kerr that, “…it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy. Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and [...]

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