Politics

A little-known but powerful government database, which had featured information on millions of Americans, is no more.

The Justice Department created the pilot project, which went by the contrived acronym of MATRIX (Multistate Anti-TeRrorism Information eXchange), and made it available to state and local police starting in 1998. Now the grant has expired.

Data was provided by Seisint, a data-mining firm recently embroiled in a flap over an intrusion into its databases that may have compromised the information of about 310,000 Americans. Seisint is owned by Lexis-Nexis.

While MATRIX officially concluded as a federal pilot project on April 15, … Read more

The U.S. House of Representatives is continuing its series of Patriot Act-related hearings. Up for review Tuesday by a Judiciary subcommittee: section 203 of the law.

That's the portion of the Patriot Act that lets police share information with spy agencies if it's said to be related to terrorism, foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and so on. It's controversial because it tears down part of the wall that has, in recent decades, legally separated the FBI from the CIA, NSA, DIA, and their even more clandestine counterparts. If Congress does nothing, section 203 will expire in December 2005. … Read more

Jake Appelbaum is on a geek tour of Iraq.

First the 22-year old native of San Francisco found a driver to take him from the border city of Diyarbakir, Turkey to Iraq last week. Then he drove to the Iraqi city of Arbil under cover of darkness.

Appelbaum is amusing himself by taking plenty of touristy photos with his Canon 20D, dodging insurgents, and figuring out how Iraqis get Internet access. On Monday he posted a link to his LiveJournal site where he described how an Iraqi engineer in Sulimaniya, Iraq set up an Internet link via satellite.

"You … Read more

The French government has ruled that the software industry may monitor copyright violations on the Internet.

On Tuesday, the French data protection agency (CNIL) said that software firms can employ an automated system to detect intellectual property violations on peer-to-peer networks. This is, of course, commonplace in the U.S. and has led to a number of lawsuits.

The above is my admittedly poor translation of the French document; here's an English-language summary.

The People's Republic of Berkeley, Calif., will be the host city of the Bridging the Divide 2005: Technology, Innovation and Learning in Developing Economies conference April 21-23. A co-production of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and Microsoft nemesis the University of California, the conference will cover "technology essentials for economic development," "healthcare technology in the developing world," and "technology for communications and commerce," among other less technological subjects.

A week later, on April 30, Berkeley will welcome 1997 Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, … Read more

Congress returned on Wednesday to the topic of what new laws, if any, are necessary to respond to security breaches.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, representatives of the Federal Trade Commission, FBI, Secret Service, ChoicePoint, LexisNexis, and Acxiom were scheduled to testify.

This week saw a flurry of legislation anounced as a response to a recent string of high-profile data thefts and other mishaps. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., wants to require disclosure of breaches, while another Democrat-backed bill casts a far wider net. (I've placed the text of the second online.)

Look for a federalism theme to bubble … Read more

Arianna Huffington--biographer, rightist-turned-leftist, and former candidate for governor of California (but who wasn't?)--is planning to pull the stars from the skies and deposit them in a giant liberal celebrity-ridden blog.

That's what the New York Observer reports, anyway. The Huffington Report's lineup includes the likes of Warren Beatty, Sen. Jon Corzine, David Geffen, Viacom co-COO and co-President Tom Freston, Barry Diller, Tina Brown and Gwyneth Paltrow.

The Observer positions Huffington's new venture as Hollywood liberals' answer to Matt Drudge. Drudge's response: "I look forward to the Warren Beatty News Network."

Connecticut smokers who shop online are in for an unwelcome surprise.

The state tax agency is sending letters to state residents who bought smokes online to avoid stiff Connecticut taxes, the Associated Press reports.

Generally states aren't that aggressive about collecting state sales and use taxes, which is why you can buy items through mail order and not have to worry, as a practical matter, about the state taxocrats sniffing around.

But as I wrote about in a column, cigarettes are an exception.

A 1949 law called the Jenkins Act says anyone who ships cigarettes nationally must file monthly … Read more

A number of public policy groups on Monday released studies that both praised and scorned the economic viability of municipally funded broadband networks.

It's a hot-button issue that has prompted many states to introduce legislation against these projects, while sparking heated responses from cities looking to build their own wireless or fiber broadband networks.

The New Millennium Research Council released two studies penned by the free-market-leaning group Progress and Freedom Foundation raising "serious questions about the need for and viability" of the recent business plan for the city of Philadelphia to build its own wireless broadband network.… Read more