Use Facebook? Beware identity theft

Washington, DC - A warning tonight for Facebook users. Hackers stole
one man's online password and his identity. They changed his Facebook
page to say he was in trouble and then hit up his friends for money.

Catina Dailey, who says she has 695 friends on Facebook, has taken steps to try and stay safe.

"Only a few people have access to my pictures and I change my password once a month," says Dailey.

Marika Anastassidis, has more than 800 friends in her Facebook
network and there are more than a thousand pictures of her online.

She worries about security, but feels ,"if you use the privacy protection correctly I think it's safe."

There's no question Facebook is a great way to connect with people
who want to be friends with you. The danger is the people who want to
be you.

Commissioner pours scorn on internet freedom law

New EU laws to protect freedom on the internet and force ISPs to stand up to authoritarian regimes are "unnecessary" and proposed penalties are "heavy", EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding told the European Parliament this week.
"We should not put European companies in an invidious position where their choice appears to be to break the law or leave the market to more unscrupulous operators," Reding argued. "Our goal should be to find ways to allow operators and service providers to respect human rights without doing either."
This is an important contribution to a debate that has been rumbling on since 2007, when the Global Online Freedom Act (GOFA) was introduced to the US House of Representatives. After a preamble that makes much of the threat to freedom posed by censorship under authoritarian regimes in Belarus, Cuba, Ethiopia, Iran and China, it asserts: "It shall be the policy of the United States to promote as a fundamental component of foreign policy the right of everyone to freedom of opinion and expression, including the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers".

More>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/06/eu_internet_freedom/

CIA Agent Pleads Guilty to Defrauding Covert Credit Cards

A 16-year veteran of the CIA pleaded guilty Thursday to a federal fraud charge after using undercover agency credit cards to run up $75,000 in personal expenses, including costly hotel stays and a $700 watch.
Steven J. Levan, 48, worked as a case agent at the CIA until his recent termination over the fraud. According to an affidavit (.pdf) by a U.S. postal inspector who investigated the case, Levan made unauthorized personal use of four special credit cards that, while not officially billed to the government, are “customarily paid by the agency.”
“The agency had to pay the defendant's fraudulent charges on those credit cards, in order to maintain the means by which the agency protects the identity of certain of its employees,” reads the affidavit.
Despite the relatively mild charges, Levan’s been held without bail since his arrest on January 12, based on the government’s assertion that the former spy could begin peddling national security secrets to foreign powers to raise more money. Levan’s attorney slammed the espionage rhetoric as “rank speculation” in a motion for bail (.pdf) last month.

More:>> http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/02/cia-agent-plead.html

The (Virtual) Global Office

The (Virtual) Global Office
Moving beyond Second Life marketing, many companies are infiltrating virtual worlds for employee meetings, mixers, and recruiting

Using software from Activeworlds,
IBM builds virtual work spaces that let workers in far-flung regions
use avatars, or graphic representations of themselves, to handle such
tasks as rehearsing presentations or learning about employee benefits.
The experimentation puts IBM in the vanguard of companies that, having
tested the limits of marketing in such online environments as Second
Life, are now infiltrating virtual worlds to tackle a range of other
activities, from meetings to collaboration, from training to employee
recruiting.

First Came Virtual Marketing

At companies like Sun Microsystems (JAVA),
where upwards of 50% of employees may work outside traditional office
spaces on any given day, virtual worlds can help scattered colleagues
forge closer bonds. "It's difficult to maintain a global corporate
culture with people so spread around," says Nicole Yankelovich,
principal investigator at Sun Labs, who says the ethos can vary on Sun
campuses from Menlo Park, Calif., to Burlington, Mass. "Virtual world
technology is a way to bring the company together to build a global
corporate culture where people are on equal footing," she says.

London Olympics terror threat used to vastly increase surveillance powers

The threat of terrorism at the 2012 London Olympics is being hyped up in order to justify a vast increase in the surveillance powers of the British state.

According to a memo leaked to the Daily Telegraph, Home Office officials are planning to expand the police DNA database to identify suspects and use greater powers to track individuals through advanced closed circuit television (CCTV) technology and the Oyster card used by millions of people on London’s bus and rail network.

The memo discusses different means the government could use to persuade the British public to accept these measures. It asks, “To what extent should the expectation of liberty be eroded by legitimate intrusions in the interests of security of the wider public?” and concludes, “Increasing [public] support could be possible through the piloting of certain approaches in high-profile ways such as the London Olympics.”[...]

As well as increasing the number of police, the proposed scheme involves an elaborate and sophisticated security system spanning the whole of London. According to a BBC report last month, the Metropolitan Police Service wants to pool its 10,000 existing cameras with the thousands of traffic and congestion cameras already in operation across the city.
This would give the police control over a vast network of up to half a million CCTV cameras, making it the largest of its kind in the world. The network would then be controlled by a central £100 million bomb-proof command bunker operated jointly by the military, police and intelligence services brought together under the umbrella of the Olympic Security Directorate.

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The Surveillance Society Does Not Work

Costing in excess of billions of pounds each year, every single area of the British surveillance society has been proven ill effective when dealing with crime, fraud and terrorism – the very reasons government officials implement such measures.

Which begs the question: How can the Government justify such spending when it also imposes an increasing risk to our personal freedom and privacy? What is more, as current technology has failed to live up to the expectations of the British Government they still have widespread plans to advance citizen surveillance like we have never seen before.

More: A surveillance society simply does not work.

Cell Phone Spying: Is Your Life Being Monitored?

It connects you to the world, but your cell phone could also be giving anyone from your boss to your wife a window into your every move. The same technology that lets you stay in touch on-the-go can now let others tap into your private world — without you ever even suspecting something is awry.


The new generation

Long gone are the days of simple wiretapping, when the worst your phone could do was let someone listen in to your conversations. The new generation of cell phone spying tools provides a lot more power.

Eavesdropping is easy. All it takes is a two-minute software install and someone can record your calls and monitor your text messages. They can even set up systems to be automatically alerted when you dial a certain number, then instantly patched into your conversation. Anyone who can perform a basic internet search can find the tools and figure out how to do it in no time.

But the scarier stuff is what your phone can do when you aren’t even using it. Let’s start with your location.

Simple surveillance

You don’t have to plant a CIA-style bug to conduct surveillance any more. A service called World Tracker lets you use data from cell phone towers and GPS systems to pinpoint anyone’s exact whereabouts, any time — as long as they’ve got their phone on them.

All you have to do is log on to the web site and enter the target phone number. The site sends a single text message to the phone that requires one response for confirmation. Once the response is sent, you are locked in to their location and can track them step-by-step. The response is only required the first time the phone is contacted, so you can imagine how easily it could be handled without the phone’s owner even knowing.

Once connected, the service shows you the exact location of the phone by the minute, conveniently pinpointed on a Google Map. So far, the service is only available in the UK, but the company has indicated plans to expand its service to other countries soon.