Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Gov't tightens oversight of laptop border searches
The long-criticized practice of searching travelers' electronic devices will continue, but a supervisor now would need to approve holding a device for more than five days. Any copies of information taken from travelers' machines would be destroyed within days if there were no legal reason to hold the information.
Given all the personal details that people store on digital devices, border searches of laptops and other gadgets can give law enforcement officials far more revealing pictures of travelers than suitcase inspections might yield. That has set off alarms among civil liberties groups and travelers' advocates who say the government has crossed a line by examing electronic contact lists and confidential e-mail messages, trade secrets and proprietary business files, financial and medical records and other deeply private information.
In some cases, travelers suspected that border agents were copying their files after taking their laptops and cellphones away for time periods ranging from a few minutes to a few weeks or longer.
Last July, amid mounting outside pressure, the Homeland Security Department issued a formal policy stating that federal agents can search documents and electronic devices at the border without a warrant or even suspicion. The procedures also allowed border agents to retain documents and devices for "a reasonable period of time" to perform a thorough search "on-site or at an off-site location."
The new directive, effective immediately, put more restrictions on the searches:
-- A supervisor must be present during these searches.
-- As before, Customs and Border Protection officials can keep the electronic device or information on it only if they have probable cause to believe it is connected to a crime. But now if there is no legal reason to hold the information, it must be destroyed within seven days.
-- Officers must consult agency lawyers if they want to view a traveler's sensitive legal material, medical records or a journalist's work-related information.
-- Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents cannot keep property for more than 30 days, depending on the circumstances of each case.
Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil rights advocacy group, said in an interview the new rules are an improvement. But they don't go far enough, she said.
She said travelers should be told if information is copied from their devices. The new directive states that federal agents must tell travelers if they are looking at their property. But if officials copy the hard drive during this search, the traveler will not know.
"I don't think that's the way to go," Hofmann said.
Reps. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif., commended the administration for tightening oversight of these searches.
Opponents of the searches have said they threaten Fourth Amendment safeguards against unreasonable search and seizure and could chill free expression and other activities protected by the First Amendment. What's more, they warn, such searches raise concerns about ethnic and religious profiling since the targets often are Muslims, including U.S. citizens and permanent residents.
The searches, which predate the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, have uncovered everything from martyrdom videos and other violent jihadist materials to child pornography and stolen intellectual property, according to the government.
One successful search the government cites from recent years: In 2006, a man arriving from the Netherlands at the Minneapolis airport had digital pictures of high-level al-Qaeda officials, video clips of improvised explosive devices being detonated and of the man reading his will. The man was convicted of visa fraud and removed from the country.
Between Oct. 1, 2008, and Aug. 11 of this year, Customs and Border Protection officers processed more than 221 million travelers at U.S. borders and searched about 1,000 laptops, of which 46 were "in-depth" searches, the Homeland Security Department said.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Mosquito bites used to deliver malaria 'vaccine'
The results were astounding: Everyone in the vaccine group acquired immunity to malaria; everyone in a non-vaccinated comparison group did not, and developed malaria when exposed to the parasites later.
The study was only a small proof-of-principle test, and its approach is not practical on a large scale. However, it shows that scientists may finally be on the right track to developing an effective vaccine against one of mankind's top killers. A vaccine that uses modified live parasites just entered human testing.
"Malaria vaccines are moving from the laboratory into the real world," Dr. Carlos Campbell wrote in an editorial accompanying the study in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. He works for PATH, the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, a Seattle-based global health foundation.
The new study "reminds us that the whole malaria parasite is the most potent immunizing" agent, even though it is harder to develop a vaccine this way and other leading candidates take a different approach, he wrote.
Malaria kills nearly a million people each year, mostly children under 5 and especially in Africa. Infected mosquitoes inject immature malaria parasites into the skin when they bite; these travel to the liver where they mature and multiply. From there, they enter the bloodstream and attack red blood cells — the phase that makes people sick.
People can develop immunity to malaria if exposed to it many times. The drug chloroquine can kill parasites in the final bloodstream phase, when they are most dangerous.
Scientists tried to take advantage of these two factors, by using chloroquine to protect people while gradually exposing them to malaria parasites and letting immunity develop.
They assigned 10 volunteers to a "vaccine" group and five others to a comparison group. All were given chloroquine for three months, and exposed once a month to about a dozen mosquitoes — malaria-infected ones in the vaccine group and non-infected mosquitoes in the comparison group.
That was to allow the "vaccine" effect to develop. Next came a test to see if it was working.
All 15 stopped taking chloroquine. Two months later, all were bitten by malaria-infected mosquitoes. None of the 10 in the vaccine group developed parasites in their bloodstreams; all five in the comparison group did.
The study was done in a lab at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and was funded by two foundations and a French government grant.
"This is not a vaccine" as in a commercial product, but a way to show how whole parasites can be used like a vaccine to protect against disease, said one of the Dutch researchers, Dr. Robert Sauerwein.
"It's more of an in-depth study of the immune factors that might be able to generate a very protective type of response," said Dr. John Treanor, a vaccine specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, New York, who had no role in the study.
The concept already is in commercial development. A company in Rockville, Md. — Sanaria Inc. — is testing a vaccine using whole parasites that have been irradiated to weaken them, hopefully keeping them in an immature stage in the liver to generate immunity but not cause illness.
Two other reports in the New England Journal show that resistance is growing to artemisinin, the main drug used against malaria in the many areas where chloroquine is no longer effective. Studies in Thailand and Cambodia found the malaria parasite is less susceptible to artemisinin, underscoring the urgent need to develop a vaccine.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Airport security bares all, or does it?
A TSA employee, shown from the back, as he stands in an airport whole-body imaging machine.
"People need to know what's happening, with no sugar-coating and no spinning," said Coney, who is also coordinator of the Privacy Coalition, a conglomerate of 42 member organizations. She expects other groups to sign on in the push for the technology's suspension until privacy safeguards are in place.
Right now, without regulations on what the Transportation Security Administration does with this technology, she said, "We don't have the policy to hold them to what they say. They're writing their own rule book at this point."
The machines "detect both metallic and nonmetallic threat items to keep passengers safe," said Kristin Lee, spokeswoman for TSA, in a written statement. "It is proven technology, and we are highly confident in its detection capability." 
Watch a video of the body-imaging scans »
Late last month, freshman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, introduced legislation to ban these machines. Of concern to him, Coney and others is not just what TSA officials say, it's also what they see. iReport: Tell us what you think about these scanners
The sci-fi-looking whole-body imaging machine -- think "Beam me up, Scotty" -- was first introduced at an airport in Phoenix, Arizona, in November 2007. There are now 40 machines, which cost $170,000 each, being tested and used in 19 airports, said TSA's Lee.
Whole-Body Imaging
These six airports are using whole-body imaging as a primary security measure, according to TSA:
Six of these airports are testing the machines as a primary security check option, instead of metal detectors followed by a pat-down, she said. The rest present them as a voluntary secondary security option in lieu of a pat-down, which is protocol for those who've repeatedly set off the metal detector or have been randomly selected for additional screening.
So far, the testing phase has been promising, said Lee. When given the choice, "over 99 percent of passengers choose this technology over other screening options," she said.
A big advantage of the technology is the speed, said Jon Allen, another TSA spokesperson, who's based in Atlanta, Georgia. A body scan takes between 15 and 30 seconds, while a full pat-down can take from two to four minutes. And for those who cringe at the idea of being touched by a security official, or are forever assigned to a pat-down because they had hip replacements, for example, the machine is a quick and easy way to avoid that contact and hassle, he said.
Using millimeter wave technology, which the TSA says emits 10,000 times less radio frequency than a cell phone, the machine scans a traveler and a robotic image is generated that allows security personnel to detect potential threats -- and, some fear, more -- beneath a person's clothes.
TSA officials say privacy concerns are addressed in a number of ways.
The system uses a pair of security officers. The one working the machine never sees the image, which appears on a computer screen behind closed doors elsewhere; and the remotely located officer who sees the image never sees the passenger.
As further protection, a passenger's face is blurred and the image as a whole "resembles a fuzzy negative," said TSA's Lee. The officers monitoring images aren't allowed to bring cameras, cell phones or any recording device into the room, and the computers have been programmed so they have "zero storage capability" and images are "automatically deleted," she added.
But this is of little comfort to Coney, the privacy advocate with EPIC, a public interest research group in Washington. She said she's seen whole-body images captured by similar technology dating back to 2004 that were much clearer than what's represented by the airport machines.
"What they're showing you now is a dumbed-down version of what this technology is capable of doing," she said. "Having blurry images shouldn't blur the issue."
Lee of TSA emphasized that the images Coney refers to do not represent millimeter wave technology but rather "backscatter" technology, which she said TSA is not using at this time.
Coney said she and other privacy advocates want more oversight, full disclosure for air travelers, and legal language to protect passengers and keep TSA from changing policy down the road.
For example, she wants to know what's to stop TSA from using clearer images or different technology later. The computers can't store images now, but what if that changes?
"TSA will always be committed to respecting passenger privacy, regardless of whether a regulation is in place or not," Lee said.
She added that the long-term goal is not to see more of people, but rather to advance the technology so that the human image is like a stick-figure and any anomalies are auto-detected and highlighted.
But Coney knows only about what's out there now, and she worries that as the equipment gets cheaper, it will become more pervasive and harder to regulate. Already it is used in a handful of U.S. courthouses and in airports in the United Kingdom, Spain, Japan, Australia, Mexico, Thailand and the Netherlands. She wonders whether the machines will someday show up in malls.
The option of walking through a whole-body scanner or taking a pat-down shouldn't be the final answer, said Chris Calabrese, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.
"A choice between being groped and being stripped, I don't think we should pretend those are the only choices," he said. "People shouldn't be humiliated by their government" in the name of security, nor should they trust that the images will always be kept private.
"Screeners at LAX [Los Angeles International Airport]," he speculated, "could make a fortune off naked virtual images of celebrities."
Bruce Schneier, an internationally recognized security technologist, said whole-body imaging technology "works pretty well," privacy rights aside. But he thinks the financial investment was a mistake. In a post-9/11 world, he said, he knows his position isn't "politically tenable," but he believes money would be better spent on intelligence-gathering and investigations.
"It's stupid to spend money so terrorists can change plans," he said by phone from Poland, where he was speaking at a conference. If terrorists are swayed from going through airports, they'll just target other locations, such as a hotel in Mumbai, India, he said.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Enhanced Driver License (RFID)
A Briggs recommends that all regular international travelers who reside in one of the issuing states apply for an EDL.
Washington State is the first state to issue the license, New York State is the second and the others states are following.
The EDL can be used exactly like the new passport card now issued by the U.S. State Department; that is, it can be used in lieu of the passport card or passport book for entering and leaving the U.S. ONLY for land and sea crossings. U.S. citizens traveling by air to any international destination must have a passport book – the traditional passport.
You cannot use an EDL or a passport card for international air travel to any destination out of the U.S, including Canada and Mexico.
Washington State has ads available for use online in the public domain. The purpose of the ads is to promote the use of the EDL for persons who will cross into Canada from Washington State.
Only U.S. citizens can apply for the EDL. When doing so, citizens must present proof of citizenship as a part of the driver’s license process application process. The cost is $25 to $30 higher than the regular driver’s license. The EDL gives the holder the right to drive a vehicle, it proves the identity of the holder, and it proves the U.S. citizenship of the holder. For more information, contact the DMV in the issuing state. Applicants for an EDL must be a legal resident of the state in which they are applying for an EDL. Citizens of states not issuing an EDL cannot obtain one and must apply for either a passport card or a passport book.
Because the passport card is restricted in use for crossing borders only by land and sea and cannot be used for international air travel, A Briggs recommends securing a passport book – the traditional passport.
The Department of Homeland Security claims EDLs will “make it quicker and easier to cross the border back into the United States because they will contain
* A vicinity Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip that will signal a computer to pull up your biographic and biometric data for the CBP [Customs and Border Patrol] Officer as you pull up to the border, and
* A Machine Readable Zone or barcode that the CBP officer can read electronically if RFID isn’t available.”
No personally identifiable information will be stored on the EDL’s RFID chip or be transmitted by the EDL. The EDL uses a unique identification number which will link to the information contained in a secure database. This number will not contain any personal information.
