Via Spencer Ackerman at Wired, West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin has proudly announced the state's new snitching App is available on iTunes.

[A] project of the West Virginia Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and the West Virginia Intelligence Fusion Center, the app sends submitted information, including photos and texts, to the Fusion Center where the information can help authorities react to and prevent incidents from occurring.

What's wrong with this? As Spencer says:

There’s nothing in the app to stop you from snapping a picture of your annoying neighbor and sending it to the attention of federal and state counterterrorism agents in West Virginia, who can keep information on your neighbor’s face, body and perhaps his vehicle for an unspecified period of time.

[More...]

The Associated Press reports the NYPD's monitoring of Muslim students extended far beyond New York City schools and all over the Northeast -- far more widely than previously reported.

Officers from the NYPD's Cyber Intelligence unit visited the websites, blogs and forums of Muslim student associations as a "daily routine."

The universities included Yale; Columbia; the University of Pennsylvania; Syracuse; New York University; Clarkson University; the Newark and New Brunswick campuses of Rutgers; and the State University of New York campuses in Buffalo, Albany, Stony Brook and Potsdam, N.Y.; Queens College, Baruch College, Brooklyn College and La Guardia Community College.

One NYPD report describing the daily monitoring is here.

A new study by the ACLU has found New York City cops initiated street stops (aka Terry stops, stops and frisks or interrogations) 684,330 times in 2011, an increase of 600% since Bllomberg took office in 2002.

Of the stops, 90% were "completely innocent" (no arrest or summons issued) and 87% were Black or Latino.

Last year alone, the NYPD stopped enough totally innocent New Yorkers to fill Madison Square Garden more than 30 times over,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said. “It is not a crime to walk down the street in New York City, yet every day innocent black and brown New Yorkers are turned into suspects for doing just that. It is a stunning abuse of power that undermines trust between police and the community.”

[More...]

Karen Handel, the senior vice president of public policy for Susan G. Komen for the Cure, resigned today. Koman founder and CEO Nancy Brinker released this statement:

"Today I accepted the resignation of Karen Handel, who has served as Senior Vice President for Policy since April 2011. I have known Karen for many years, and we both share a common commitment to our organization's lifelong mission, which must always remain our sole focus. I wish her the best in future endeavors."

You can read Handel's letter here.

New technology is all abuzz with news of programs that would replace those pesky 10 digit "letter-number -character" passwords we are getting accustomed to, with using our faces as our passwords to log into our protected information instead.

On the one hand, it sounds Orwellian. It takes very little for a copy to get a copy of your photo from these merchandisers, media and social media sites. On the other hand, for those of us with passwords at home, passwords at work and more passwords for online shopping and paying bills, it could be a relief. Except it's not a done deal yet. Why? Because someone cold hold up a picture of you at the computer or whatever, and the computer may not be able to tell the difference.

Yet, this may be the next wave. Why does it have to be the face we show, which is a dead giveaway to law enforcement if they get hold of it? Why can't it be a scar somewhere on your body, or a tatoo that's never visible in your photos? Flash the tat or scar and presto, you're in to your site. And nobody gets to see your face.

How do you feel about having so many images of your face all over the internet?

The digital world is eroding our privacy. Every week, users post 3.5 billion pieces of information on Facebook. Twitter has over 100 million users. Google has over 900,000 servers. The content on social media sites reaches 80% of all internet users.

The data trail we leave behind on the internet is enormous.

“There has never been another time in history where privacy was under the kind of assault it is today,” said Rainey Reitman, activism director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “Consumers have increasingly digital lives and they are developing an unfathomably large data trail every day.”

There is a perfect storm, Reitman says, involving digital lives, low-cost storage that allows companies to save everything, and the revenues that incent those companies to collect as much data as possible.

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While the validity of the charges in the Megaupload indictment will take years to work its way through the courts, and many will have little sympathy because of the amounts of money the defendants earned, consider the case of British student Richard O'Dwyer.

O'Dwyer set up a site in his basement, TV Shack.net. He didn't download copyrighted material, he just provided links to it. His site was hosted on servers located in the UK, not the U.S. His site did not violate laws in the U.K. But the U.S. charged him with criminal copyright violations and sought his extradition. A few weeks ago, a court in the U.K. ordered his extradition. He will now come to the U.S. where he is facing two crimes, each with a 5 year penalty. [More...]

The FBI has published a solicitation seeking applications capable of massive social media datamining. It says it is conducting "market research."

The Federal Bureau of Investigations is conducting market research to determine the capabilities of the IT industry to provide a social media application. The tool at a minimum should be able to meet the operational and analytical needs described in the attachment.

......All submitted solutions should include price estimates for the respective solution(s) which will be reviewed and used for market research and planning purposes.

You can download the solicitation packet here, or read it here. [More...]

The Constitution Project's Liberty and Security Committee has released a new report warning of the potential for privacy invasion in proposed cybersecurity intitiatives, especially those providing for sharing of information between the government and private sector. The full report is here.

It is important that our nation develop and operate cybersecurity programs and policies to these vulnerabilities. These programs, however, pose a potential threat to Americans’ privacy rights and civil liberties. As proposals have arisen that would enable the federal government to move toward monitoring all information transferred over private networks, individuals face the risk of being subjected to the equivalent of a perpetual “wiretap” on their private communications and web browsing behavior.

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A federal judge in Virginia has refused to stay a federal subpoena issued to Twitter for three user accounts associated with Wikileaks. The opinion is here.

Birgitta Jonsdottir, Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp had asked the Court to stay the subpoena pending an appeals court challenge. A federal magistrate judge upheld the subpoenas in November.

The [Magistrate]Judge rejected the users' claims under the First Amendment and Fourth Amendment as well as their other arguments. She says there is no right of privacy in your IP address if you turn it over to a third party like Twitter. Wikileaks has said in the past it believes similar subpoenas went out to Google and Facebook.

The Government sought the subpoenas in connection with its grand jury investigation into Wikileaks. You can read the subpoena here. The judge that issued Wednesday's opinion said the three had little chance of prevailing in the appellate court. [More...]

This video featuring Hillary Clinton,produced a few weeks ago by the State Department, is yet another example of the differences between a Republican and Democrat Administration. Can you imagine it coming from a Secretary of State appointed by Romney or Gingrich?

The media's obsessive focus on Iowa is beyond annoying. Who cares which Republican wins? What matters is keeping a Democrat in the White House and gaining enough of a Democratic majority in Congress to reduce the need to compromise and capitulate. Whether it's civil liberties, Medicare or the war on drugs, Republicans are always worse. They really don't deserve the attention they have been getting lately.

On December 14, the Suffolk District Attorney issued a subpoena to Twitter for information related to Occupy Boston and some members of Anonymous. The ACLU moved to quash on First Amendment grounds. Today, the judge upheld the subpoena.

Twitter released the subpoena to the account holders of those named, @p0isAn0n @OccupyBoston #BostonPD #d0xcak3, who in turn posted it online. You can read it here. The subpoena also sought “IP address logs for account creation and for the period December 8, 2011 to December 13, 2011."

In this pastebin press release, an Anonymous member or supporter posted the reasons the subpoena was invalid.

More here.

It's good that Twitter provided the subpoena to the affected account holders. It's bad that a judge has upheld a subpoena for a hashtag. The ACLU has said it may appeal.