Senate Bill Would Let a Document Be Self-Authenticated
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A Senate bill that would propose allowing documents to be self- authenticated without being notarized passed a House committee Tuesday and was placed on the consent calendar.  SB154, sponsored by Sen.
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Lawmakers may soon pass a bill that would set up a huge network of databases that law enforcement officials could tap to find terrorists. But that kind of unfettered access to data about Americans raises eyebrows. By Ryan Singel.
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Advocates for paper-verifiable electronic voting were encouraged Wednesday by unanimously passing a resolution calling for the drafting of requirements for independently verifiable voting records, just days after a different audit proposal was rejected.
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Legislation that would allow the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to seek civil penalties against businesses that obtain personal data under false pretenses may soon get a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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Americans seek international database to carry iris, palm and finger prints
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(InfoWorld) - Requiring print-outs as a back-up to electronic voting machines would not improve security but would increase costs of U.S. voting systems, according to a report released Tuesday. Tech-focused think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) said so-called voter-verified paper trail ballots used in conjunction with e-voting machines would "prevent the use of innovative voting technology that offers voters more security, transparency, and reliability" than paper-only balloting systems. The U.S. House of Representatives has before it a bill that would require paper-trail ballots to be used with direct recording electronic voting machines. But a paper trail would create several problems, said report author Daniel Castro, an ITIF senior analyst. Paper audit trails would create an "even bigger dispute" than past elections with missing electronic votes, Castro said. "People wouldn't know which record was accurate -- the paper or the electronic record," he said. Paper-trail ballots would also increase the cost of elections, Castro said. Printers will fail on election days, and counting machines will malfunction, he said. "When you manually count it, you have problems with the human element," he added. U.S. residents trust computers to run many other "critical applications" in banking, medicine, and aviation, the report said. Supporters of paper-trail audits disputed the report's findings. "The argument that people trust computers in other places is specious -- safety-critical systems have been developed in other contexts using rigorous standards that are not applied to voting machines," said Eugene Spafford, chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM's) U.S. policy committee. ACM has not called for e-voting machines to be scrapped, but instead for the machines to go through two levels of audit, paper trails and random machine audits, said Spafford, executive director of the Purdue University Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. While the report discounts claims that e-voting machines can be hacked and elections reversed, malicious hacking isn't the only problem with e-voting machines, Spafford added. "Errors, bugs and accidents can also result in problems unless there is an independent, durable audit trail," he said. "Under several guises [the authors] trot out the canard that 'if fraud is so possible, how come it hasn't been proven yet?' This is so obviously wrong that I'm not sure it even deserves a response." Pamela Smith, president of VerifiedVoting.org, suggested readers of the report "consider the source." "This is an industry body that has come out with this screed to support the industry," Smith said. Smith disputed the report's suggestion that a "growing technophobic movement believes that no computer can be trusted for electronic voting." Several prominent computer security experts have called for paper-trail audits, she said. "The harshest critics of e-voting -- in particular paperless e-voting -- are computer technologists who are the literal opposite of technophobic," she said. "What they claim is that in order to have secure elections, they must be auditable and recountable." Instead of printouts, lawmakers should look to the next generation of e-voting machines, the report said. One such technology provides a small receipt that voters can take with them and use to check online whether their ballots have been counted. The receipt would give voters more assurance than a typical paper-trail ballot, which they cannot take with them, Castro said. But Spafford said most newer technologies are unproven, and many aren't transparent to typical voters. "It is important that the mechanism is understandable and trusted by the population as well as correct and auditable by experts," he said. "Systems based on ... cryptographic methods are not understandable to the lay person -- and especially not to technophobic ones. Paper is well understood."
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The U.S. government will offer over the Internet low-quality images of its new &#36;50 bill for artists, students and others who discover that their computers, scanners or printers won't allow them to view or copy pictures of the new currency.
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The Office of Personnel Management wants to convert its retirement-related documents into electronic form, but it's no small task: There are about 8 million pages to be digitized.
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InfoWorld - A coalition of voting rights groups on Monday called on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would require electronic voting machines to have printers attached as a way to audit the touch-screen results.
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A bill introduced last week in the California state legislature would make it state law next year for all state agencies to create, preserve, and archive their digital documents using an XML-based file format, and to be able to receive new documents in XML-based formats as well. The bill does not mention any format specifically, though observers believe it refers indirectly to OpenDocument Format (ODF).
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After more than eight months in limbo, a bill that would criminalize the practice of lying to obtain the telephone records of private citizens passed the Senate late Friday.
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(InfoWorld) - Legislation that would allow the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to seek civil penalties against businesses that obtain personal data under false pretenses may soon get a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. The full House could vote on Prevention of Fraudulent Access to Phone Records Act as soon as late Friday or Saturday, Representative Joe Barton, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said Friday. Barton, a Texas Republican, asked the House leadership to move forward with the bill afterÂ lawmakers ripped into Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) officials ThursdayÂ for allowing the practice during an investigation into board leaks. HP President and Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd and former HP Chairwoman Patricia Dunn both testified Thursday that they did not know the details of how the leak investigation was conducted. The pretexting legislation has been stalled since the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously approved it in March. The bill would allow the FTC to seek civil penalties against so-called pretexters, those who masquerade as a customer to gain access to phone records or other personal information. Representatives of five mobile phone service carriers raised no objections to the bill during Friday's hearing. Lawmakers questioned if more businesses than HP have used pretexting or other questionable investigatory methods. "How do we, and how does corporate America, break this ethos that, if someone thinks that illegal or unethical activity ... is acceptable, everybody else in a corporation goes along with it?" said Representative Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat. DeGette will explore ways to add new requirements to the Sarbanes-Oxley financial reporting law, she said. Christopher Bryon, a columnist for the New York Post, told lawmakers Friday that he was a victim of pretexting four years ago, long before the HP investigation came to light. A facial recognition software company hired a pretexter to gain access to his sources after he wrote a column about the company, Bryon said. Pretexting appears to be a widespread practice among U.S. businesses, Bryon said. "This is not something I wanted my family to grow up with ... wondering if your mail is being read, if your phone is tapped, if there's a bug in your bedroom," he said. The FTC has filed five lawsuits against alleged pretexters, but the agency lacks the legal authority to seek civil damages, said Joel Winston, associate director of privacy and identity protection at the FTC. The FTC sought to recover pretexting-related profits in those cases, but additional civil penalties would give the agency an additional tool to use against identity thieves, he said. A second pretexting bill, the Telephone Records and Privacy Protection Act, has passed the House, but the measure is hung up in the Senate over disagreements over the best approach. The House bill would make pretexting a crime, with a penalty of up to 10 years in prison. Congress is scheduled to adjourn by early next week until after the Nov. 7 general election. Congress may come back into session late in the year to address unfinished business.
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Search technology for images may lead to a way to search handwritten manuscripts.
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(InfoWorld) - Members of the U.S. Congress introduced a flurry of new technology-related bills this week, including two bills that would require companies with data breaches to notify affected customers. Senators Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, and Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, introduced the Personal Data Privacy and Security Act. In addition to requiring data breach notification, the bill would also require data brokers to disclose what information they hold on individuals. The bill would allow individuals to correct information held by data brokers, and it would require companies that have databases with personal information on more than 10,000 U.S. residents to implement data privacy and security programs. Representatives Bobby Rush, a Illinois Democrat, and Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican, introduced the Data Accountability and Trust Act this week. Their bill, with 24 co-sponsors, authorizes the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to draw up data privacy requirements for businesses, including requirements that they have vulnerability assessments and policies for disposing of obsolete data. After a company reports a data breach, the FTC would conduct an audit of its security practices, and, like the Leahy-Sanders bill, the bill would require data brokers to disclose the information they hold on individuals and allow individuals to correct wrong information. Organizations have lost 100 million personal records belonging to U.S. residents in data breaches since 2005, Leahy said in a speech on the Senate floor. Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, singled outÂ data breaches at the U.S. Department of Veterans AffairsÂ last May andÂ retailer The TJX Companies,Â announced in January, in his speech. "These data security breaches are compelling examples of why we need strong federal data privacy and security laws to protect Americansâ personal data and to address the ills of lax data security," he said. "In the information age, any company that wants to be trusted by the public must earn that trust by vigilantly protecting the databases they use and maintain." Members of Congress introduced about a dozen bills requiring data breach notification after a series of breaches in early 2005, but legislation stalled largely over committee jurisdictional wrangling. About 30 states have passed breach notification laws, most of them since 2005. The Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a trade group of IT security vendors, in January called on Congress to pass a comprehensive data protection bill, including breach notification. But some groups, including conservative think tank the Progress and Freedom Foundation, have questioned the need for a breach notification law, saying the cost to businesses may far outweigh the benefits to consumers. Other tech-related bills introduced this week: -- Two bills allowing the FTC toÂ investigate the practice of pretexting, when an investigator assumes a false identity to gain access to a person's telephone records. President George Bush signed a bill creating penalties for pretexting in January, but the two new bills would give the FTC the authority to investigate and prosecute pretexters. Many lawmakers became interested in the issue afterÂ Hewlett-Packard disclosedÂ in September that investigators it had hired used pretexting in an attempt to gain access to board members' and reporters' phone records. -- A bill targeted at spyware by establishing criminal penalties for a number of actions. The bill would prohibit keystroke logging, taking control of a computer without the user's consent, diverting Web browsers, using computers to create botnets and modifying a computer users' browser and security settings without permission. Two spyware bills passed the House of Representatives by overwhelming majorities in March 2005, but the Senate didn't act on them. Â
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That plastic card, the one with the lousy photo that's jammed into your wallet or purse, isn't just a license to drive. It's the green light to buy a drink, the ticket to federal benefits, the must-have document to get aboard airplanes.
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Help may be on the way to deal with the backlog of unprocessed passport requests. Legislation passed Monday by the House would make it easier for the State Department to rehire retired personnel to pitch in.
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(InfoWorld) - An antispyware bill that the U.S. House of Representatives passed this week earned praise from cybersecurity groups, but faces an uncertain future in the Senate. The bill, which would create penalties of up to five years in prison for some spyware-like behavior, is a "needed piece of legislation in order to protect consumers," said Kevin Richards, federal government relations manager for Symantec Corp. Many online identity theft schemes start with spyware on a victim's computer, he said. Though versions of the Internet Spyware Prevention Act (I-SPY) have passed through the House in the last two sessions of Congress, they stalled in the Senate. The House passed I-SPY and a second spyware bill in May 2005. But the Senate failed to act, partly because of concerns that the second proposal, called the Securely Protect Yourself Against Cyber Trespass Act or SPY Act, too broadly defined spyware. The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee also became hung up on what approach to take for a spyware bill -- a criminal penalties approach similar to I-SPY or a broader approach attempting to define spyware technologies similar to the second House bill. Concerns over the SPY Act remain. Last month, theÂ Electronic Frontier Foundation issued an alert about the SPY Act, saying it opposes the bill because it would preempt tougher state laws against spyware and hacking. "In fact, having been massaged by lobbyists for the software and adware industries, the bill would actually make things worse, insulating adware vendors from more stringent state laws and private lawsuits," wrote EFF lawyer Fred von Lohmann. Any bills that have not passed through the House and Senate during their two-year session must be reintroduced. This year the SPY Act has been approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee but has not faced a vote on the House floor. On the other hand,Â there seems to be less opposition to I-SPY. I-SPY has "broad support from the industry," said Geoff Gray, legislative consultant for the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a trade group. "It concentrates on bad actions as opposed to bad technologies." I-SPY now goes to the Senate for consideration. Two champions of antispyware legislation in the Senate, Republicans George Allen of Virginia and Conrad Burns of Montana, were defeated in last November's elections. Meanwhile, supporters of the I-SPY Act say they will push for passage in the Senate. Symantec is engaging senators about the need for a spyware bill and other cybersecurity measures, Richards said. Several senators seem open to cybersecurity legislation, he said. "I think there's interest there," he said. "But senators are focused on a big plate of issues." Although Burns and Allen are gone, I-SPY has a "decent" chance of passing the Senate, added Gray. The House may have given it a better shot by not passing the more controversial SPY Act at the same time, he said. "A little steam has gone out of it on the Senate side, but maybe some of the conflict as well," Gray said. A spokesman for Representative Zoe Lofgren, one of the primary sponsors of I-SPY, said it's early to gauge the bill's chances in the Senate. The California Democrat will begin pushing for the bill in the Senate soon, the spokesman said. Representatives of tech-focused senators said their bosses are looking at antispyware legislation. "It's one of our priorities," said a spokesman for Senator John Ensign, a Nevada Republican and cosponsor of an antispyware bill in the last session of Congress. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, is also looking into the issue, a spokeswoman said. Wyden, cosponsor of the broader antispyware bill in the Senate last Congress, is "looking into what he feels the correct course should be legislatively ... based on the way the spyware issue has evolved over the last two years," said spokeswoman Melissa Merz.