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The FBI is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents -- allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention. < SNIP > Some of the most notable changes apply to the lowest category of investigations, called an "assessment." The category, created in December 2008, allows agents to look into people and organizations "proactively" and without firm evidence for suspecting criminal or terrorist activity.

InformationWeek Analytics, the leading service for peer-based IT research and analysis, today announced the release of its "Research: 2010 State of Database Technology" report. More than 750 business technology professionals weigh in on their database strategies. Report author Richard Winter is founder and president of WinterCorp, an independent consulting firm that specializes in the performance and scalability of data management systems. Research Summary: Our first InformationWeek Analytics State of Database Technology Survey reveals serious fault lines beneath the critically important enterprise database and data warehousing markets. The 755 business technology professionals taking part in our poll express discontent with rising...

We all collected things as children. Rocks, baseball cards, Barbies, perhaps even bugs -- we all tried to gather up as much stuff as possible to compile the biggest most interesting collection possible.  Some of you may have even been able to amass a collection of items numbering into the hundreds (or thousands). As the story always goes, we got older, our collections got smaller, and eventually our interests died out...until now. There are currently organizations around the world in the business of amassing collections of things, and their collections number into and above the trillions.  In many cases these collections, or...

Home » News » Milwaukee County Milwaukee County DNA of 12,000 felons missing from state registry By Gina Barton and John Diedrich of the Journal Sentinel Posted: Sept. 16, 2009 A fellow prisoner posed as Walter E. Ellis in 2001 and gave a DNA sample for him, keeping the accused serial killer out of a statewide database and letting him avoid capture for years, according to a state Department of Justice memo.It wasn't an isolated incident. DNA for about 12,000 felons convicted since 2000 is missing from the database, the department said Wednesday. Even today, the failures in the system...

In a ruling with broad implications for computer privacy, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that federal investigators went too far when they seized the digital records of a drug testing company and kept the results of confidential drug tests performed on all Major League baseball players during the 2002 season. According to published reports, 104 players tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. The names of four of them — Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, and (now retired) Sammy Sosa — were leaked to the press by an anonymous source or sources. The court...

The FBI suspects that serial killers working as long-haul truckers are responsible for the slayings of hundreds of prostitutes, hitchhikers and stranded motorists whose bodies have been dumped near highways over the last three decades. Federal authorities first made the connection about five years ago while helping police link a trucker to a string of unsolved killings along Interstate 40 in Oklahoma and several other states. After that, the FBI launched the Highway Serial Killings Initiative to track suspicious slayings and suspect truckers. A computer database maintained by the FBI has grown to include information on more than 500 female...

The Exclusionary Rule and Security Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that evidence gathered as a result of errors in a police database is admissible in court. Their narrow decision is wrong, and will only ensure that police databases remain error-filled in the future. The specifics of the case are simple. A computer database said there was a felony arrest warrant pending for Bennie Herring when there actually wasn't. When the police came to arrest him, they searched his home and found illegal drugs and a gun. The Supreme Court was asked to rule whether the police had the...

The last time "plumbers" were as prominent in national politics as accidental celebrity Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher, they were a team of political operatives caught breaking into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. This time, however, it may be the real plumber whose privacy is being invaded: Ohio's inspector general is investigating why Wurzelbacher's records in several government databases were accessed shortly after he became the official everyman of the 2008 presidential race. ... read more

MADISON, Wis. - A landlord snooped on tenants to find out information about their finances. A woman repeatedly accessed her ex-boyfriend's account after a difficult breakup. Another obtained her child's father's address so she could serve him court papers. All worked for Wisconsin's largest utility, where employees routinely accessed confidential information about acquaintances, local celebrities and others from its massive customer database. Documents obtained by The Associated Press in an employment case involving Milwaukee-based WE Energies shine a light on a common practice in the utilities, telecommunications and accounting industries, privacy experts say. Vast computer databases give curious employees the...

Ian Ayres of Yale University Law School talks about the ideas in his new book, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart. Ayres argues for the power of data and analysis over more traditional decision-making methods using judgment and intuition. He talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about predicting the quality of wine based on climate and rainfall, the increasing use of randomized data in the world of business, the use of evidence and information in medicine rather than the judgment of your doctor, and whether concealed handguns or car protection devices such as LoJack reduce...

dtjohnson writes "Amazon.com has applied for a patent to create an online customer database which would allegedly contain 'massive amounts of intimate information about its millions of shoppers, including their religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and income.' From the article: "The database, which would combine information disclosed voluntarily by customers with facts gleaned from public databases, conceivably would give Amazon a larger or more detailed profile of its customers than any other retailer. Does this cross the privacy line or is it just reasonable data gathering to make retail sales more responsive to customer needs?"

We used to fingerprint felons -- now, we're "inking" traffic scofflaws. Run a couple of mph over the speed limit in the state of Kansas (or even fail to "buckle up for safety") and you'll be duly entered into the Kansas Bureau of Investigation's electronic fingerprint database -- a privilege once reserved for actual criminals, not ordinary citizens who commit minor violations of the motor vehicle code. KBI, authorized by the state government, will be "testing out" 60 automated fingerprint readers throughout the state beginning this month -- all of it funded by a $3.6 million grant from the Department...

May 12, 2006 — Americans by nearly a 2-1 ratio call the surveillance of telephone records an acceptable way for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, expressing broad unconcern even if their own calling patterns are scrutinized. Lending support to the administration's defense of its anti-terrorism intelligence efforts, 63 percent in this ABC News/Washington Post poll say the secret program, disclosed Thursday by USA Today, is justified, while far fewer, 35 percent, call it unjustified. Indeed, 51 percent approve of the way President Bush is handling the protection of privacy rights, while 47 percent disapprove — hardly a...

A JOKE in China goes that if you call out the name Wang Wei in the street at least one person is bound to respond. The name Wei, or “Mighty”, is so popular that parents have been turning to ancient and esoteric dictionaries to find more unusual monikers for their children. Not anymore. The Ministry of Public Security has drawn up new rules and babies’ names must in future be drawn from a database that excludes thousands of rare Chinese characters. Out go indecipherable names. With the introduction of electronic identity cards, the authorities will register only names that they...

Google bringing search to historical manuscripts Using shape-matching technology Nancy Gohring History buffs can search George Washington's manuscripts online today for terms such as 'revolution', but only thanks to the tireless workers who transcribed the hand-written documents into digital form. Soon, many other hand-written historical documents could be made available for the public to search - and through considerably less effort - if a research project funded by Google and being executed by three universities works out as planned. The project, announced by DCU (Dublin City University) yesterday, started on a whim. DCU professor Alan Smeaton has been working on...

Computerized security measures inaugurated after 9/11, intended to help in the war against terrorism by foreigners, are providing an addition benefit: the apprehension of U.S. citizens wanted by police. Since the terror attacks in 2001, immigration computers have been hooked up to the database of criminal records and terrorist watch lists maintained by the FBI. The computers are in use at airports, most border crossings and in domestic immigration offices that handle applications for permanent residency and citizenship. ~snip~Among those caught at the Mexican border were a North Carolina man wanted for multiple sex crimes involving children, and a fugitive...

Share-cropping became common in the United States after the Civil War. Back then, many Southern plantations had ample land, but little money to pay wages. At the same time, a large segment of the population was left impoverished, with little prospect of earning an adequate living. So, it was little surprise that the landed people -- those with the means of producing a product -- contracted with the poor, who had labor to offer, to produce a product from which both might profit. Share croppers normally received a home, the necessary tools, farm animals, and sometimes even some education, for...

PanIP claims that if you use graphical and textual information on a video screen for purposes of making a sale, then you are infringing on its patent. Read more on this story here.Patents. They protect us when we come up with a great piece of technology, and allow us to reap the rewards from our hard work and intellectual property. As a creator of intellectual property myself, I thoroughly understand and support the need for patent and copyright laws. Without them, innovation and creativity would be severely stifled.But they can be abused. A company called PanIP holds patents that it...

Weapons Under Moore's Law You will never see effective gun control. The NRA is not to blame (or to thank, depending on your point of view). Neither is the Constitution. Technological trends are at work. In the future, the only law that will govern armaments is Moore's Law. Moore's Law says that weapons will get smaller, cheaper, and varied in form. This phenomenon will pose a challenge not just for disarmament advocates, but for all of us. Ray Kurzweil, in The Age of Spiritual Machines, forecasts how the nature of warfare will change as Moore's Law progresses. "[in 2009] warfare...