Data Privacy

Bruce Schneier has an interesting piece over at the Wired blog on data security

We need to take back our data.

Our data is a part of us. It's intimate and personal, and we have basic rights to it. It should be protected from unwanted touch.

We need a comprehensive data privacy law. This law should protect all information about us, and not be limited merely to financial or health information. It should limit others' ability to buy and sell our information without our knowledge and consent. It should allow us to see information about us held by others, and correct any inaccuracies we find. It should prevent the government from going after our information without judicial oversight. It should enforce data deletion, and limit data collection, where necessary. And we need more than token penalties for deliberate violations.

On another note, Brewster Kahle of Open Library fame, recently announced that the Internet Archive and he had been served with one of those pesky national security letters demanding information about one of its users. Kahle was under a gag order but the term of the settlement which ended the the demand allows him to comment on the incident.

Project Safe Childhood

Several bloggers have commented on the latest study from the study published in American Psychologist dealing with the myths and realities of online predators. To quote from the press release:

Contrary to stereotype, most Internet sex offenders are not adults who target young children by posing as another youth, luring children to meetings, and then abducting or forcibly raping them, according to researchers who have studied the nature of Internet-initiated sex crimes.

Rather, most online sex offenders are adults who target teens and seduce victims into sexual relationships. They take time to develop the trust and confidence of victims, so that the youth see these relationships as romances or sexual adventures. The youth most vulnerable to online sex offenders have histories of sexual or physical abuse, family problems, and tendencies to take risks both on- and offline, the researchers say.

The full text of the study is available from APA


This topic is not new -
Chatmag published an editorial debunking the myth of 50,000 online predators in 2006 which was used when Project Safe Childhood was announced. Neither the FBI nor the Center for Missing and Exploited Children can explain the figure. Benjamin Radford even explores the history of the alarming number and concluded that "The vast majority of crimes against children are committed not by released sex offenders, but instead by the victim's own family, church clergy, and family friends", not online predators.

As Libraries are increasingly becoming the target of battles against pornography, they are also being targeted as enablers of criminal activity. All across the country the discussion is heating up - Colorado, Sacramento, Gwinnett County, Georgia, and Brooklyn, to cite a few examples.

And just in case you think the Department of Justice isn't serious about this, on May 7th they announced the distribution of $5 million to fund 43 US Attorneys who are solely charged with combating "technology-facilitated sexual exploitation crimes against children"

Stumbling around censorship

I was stumbling around and found an interesting website called Project Censorsed which is a media research group out of Sonoma State University - they like to list things such as the top censored stories for the year - feel free to submit stories to them