Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said that we can soon count on having “no anonymity” online. Soon appears to be now. This month, Facebook added a feature, Places, that tracks users’ physical locations, and automatically opts in every single user (translation: if you use Facebook and haven’t changed the settings, it’s possible a stranger can see where you are. Right now.).

At the same time, the Wall Street Journal concluded a five-part series on Internet privacy, called “What They Know.” The Journal set up a computer with special tracking software to monitor the placement of cookies, beacons, and other monitors as they surfed the web; the results of their investigation sent shock-waves through online communities. 

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The American Civil Liberties Union has been persistently diligent — and accurate — in alerting us to the ever-increasing government invasion of our privacy. As the ACLU reported on Aug. 11: “The government’s appetite for our electronic information is out of control. The National Security Agency is intercepting 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other communications per day.”

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Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to roll out sophisticated electronic ID tags to track individual pairs of jeans and underwear, the first step in a system that advocates say better controls inventory but some critics say raises privacy concerns.

Starting next month, the retailer will place removable “smart tags” on individual garments that can be read by a hand-held scanner. Wal-Mart workers will be able to quickly learn, for instance, which size of Wrangler jeans is missing, with the aim of ensuring shelves are optimally stocked and inventory tightly watched. If successful, the radio-frequency ID tags will be rolled out on other products at Wal-Mart’s more than 3,750 U.S. stores.

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President could get power to turn off Internet

A US Senate committee has approved a wide-ranging cybersecurity bill that some critics have suggested would give the US president the authority to shut down parts of the Internet during a cyberattack.

Senator Joe Lieberman and other bill sponsors have refuted the charges that the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act gives the president an Internet “kill switch.” Instead, the bill puts limits on the powers the president already has to cause “the closing of any facility or stations for wire communication” in a time of war, as described in the Communications Act of 1934, they said in a breakdown of the bill published on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee website.

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Democrats want to pay the feds to watch every penny you spend

Sen. Christopher Dodd’s “regulatory reform” bill, S. 3217, the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010, has many contentious proposals that have members from both political parties on edge.

The bill cauterizes “too big to fail” by establishing a Financial Stability Oversight Council that would indentify politically important institutions, sending the signal that some companies are indeed too big to fail.

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Palo Alto, California (CNN) — In the 1990s, a researcher named Kris Pister dreamed up a wild future in which people would sprinkle the Earth with countless tiny sensors, no larger than grains of rice.

These “smart dust” particles, as he called them, would monitor everything, acting like electronic nerve endings for the planet. Fitted with computing power, sensing equipment, wireless radios and long battery life, the smart dust would make observations and relay mountains of real-time data about people, cities and the natural environment.

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Washington (CNSNews.com) – Vice President Joe Biden, touting the importance of electronic health records, on Tuesday announced $220 million in grants for 15 communities to pave the way for wide-scale use of health information technology.

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Roger Hedgecock warns, recent incident shows ‘we have no rights left’

The Lower Marion School District, which runs two high schools in this suburb of Philadelphia, gives an Apple laptop (MacBook) to all 2,300 of its high-school students for use during the school year.

Programs like this throughout the country have proven popular with students, teachers and parents. The computers enhance the students’ capabilities in understanding assignments, keeping track of deadlines for work and researching topics, for example. Teachers and parents can better track performance in the classroom and with homework assignments.

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One of Britain’s greatest gifts to the world is our part in developing the philosophy of liberty and freedom under the law. From both good causes (the British colonists’ exportation of education, debate and free thinking to the colonies) and ill (the spur to freedom given by overweening, unrepresentative government), that development played a great part in the thinking and philosophy of the founding fathers of the United States. A direct line can be drawn from Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Sensible Britons are proud of that and of America’s development of and championing of those freedoms.

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There is scope for debate – and innumerable newspaper quizzes – about who was the most influential public figure of the year, or which the most significant event. But there can be little doubt which word won the prize for most important adjective. 2009 was the year in which “global” swept the rest of the political lexicon into obscurity. There were “global crises” and “global challenges”, the only possible resolution to which lay in “global solutions” necessitating “global agreements”. Gordon Brown actually suggested something called a “global alliance” in response to climate change. (Would this be an alliance against the Axis of Extra-Terrestrials?)

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