Michael Zimmer.org

Holidays, travel, deadlines, start of semester…plenty of excuses for my lapse in blogging. Here are some quick links of important stories I can’t provide detailed comments on right now.

• January 28, 2008 is Data Privacy Day
• US intelligence agencies are reportedly working on new plans to allow government access to virtually any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search.
• Joris van Hoboken reacts to a comment in the above story from an intelligence officer that “security and privacy are a zero sum game”.
  
• Alec Saunders at GigaOM has written a Privacy Manifesto for the Web 2.0 Era. It includes four key principles (which essentially map onto the Code of Fair Information Practices): a customer’s right to know what private information is being collected; the right to know the purpose for which the data is being collected; the position that each customer owns her personal information; and that customers have a right to expect those collecting their information to store it securely.
• Jack Balkin outlines three different kinds of surveillance that will be increasingly important in what he describes as the National Surveillance State: democratic or participatory surveillance, distributed surveillance, and metasurveillance.

I’m still going through my Bloglines account and will surely have more links to share soon…