Law & Society Blog

Commercial Aviation reports that:
Advertising in security checkpoints will be coming to an airport near you under a proposed Transportation Security Administration pilot program. … “TSA plans to launch a one-year pilot program where airport operators may enter into an agreement with vendors, who will provide divestiture bins, divestiture and composure tables, and metal-free bin return […]

Privacy International published an interesting survey of the degree of informational privacy afforded by various countries to its citizens.

Even though the passage of the NSA surveillance bill was stalled at the last minute, it is pretty clear that the only reliable means of ensuring privacy is to rely on technology, not on the law. For example, here is an excerpt from the privacy policy one of the leading providers of anonymous internet access:[W]e disclose personal information only in the good faith belief that we are required to do so by law, or that doing so is reasonably necessary to: comply with legal process; respond to any spamming and related abuses of netiquette claims; or protect the rights, property or personal safety of [our co, our customers, or the public.

The EFF just published a six step program for protecting online search privacy, an increasingly important issue that we covered on this blog in the past.

Freenigma is an ingenious Firefox plugin that simplifies the social networking aspect of public key cryptography.

Internet privacy is always a tradeoff between usability and anonymity. That tradeoff differs from application to application and from website to website.

Unfortunately, MacOS X 10.4.1 caused all sorts of problems with GPGMail, one of the most useful hacks that integrates GnuPG into Apple’s mail.app…. Open terminal.app and type:defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 2exitThen relaunch mail.app, and GPG should work just fine!