Data Harvesting at Google Not a Rogue Act, Report Finds

New York Times
Dave Streitfield

SAN FRANCISCO — Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report.

The report, prepared by the Federal Communications Commission after a 17-month investigation of Google’s Street View project, was released, heavily redacted, two weeks ago. Although it found that Google had not violated any laws, the agency said Google had obstructed the inquiry and fined the company $25,000. 

On Saturday, Google released a version of the report with only employees’ names redacted.

The full version draws a portrait of a company where an engineer can easily embark on a project to gather personal e-mails and Web searches of potentially hundreds of millions of people as part of his or her unscheduled work time, and where privacy concerns are shrugged off. 

The so-called payload data was secretly collected between 2007 and 2010 as part of Street View, a project to photograph streetscapes over much of the civilized world. When the program was being designed, the report says, it included the following “to do” item: “Discuss privacy considerations with Product Counsel.” 

“That never occurred,” the report says. 

Google says the data collection was legal. But when regulators asked to see what had been collected, Google refused, the report says, saying it might break privacy and wiretapping laws if it shared the material. 

A Google spokeswoman said Saturday that the company had much stricter privacy controls than it used to, in part because of the Street View controversy. She expressed the hope that with the release of the full report, “we can now put this matter behind us.” 

Ever since information about the secret data collection first began to emerge two years ago, Google has portrayed it as the mistakes of an unauthorized engineer operating on his own and stressed that the data was never used in any Google product. 

Federal Court Rules TSA Violated Law By Introducing Body Scanners

Freedom4um

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that the TSA violated federal law by rolling out radiation firing body scanners in airports without soliciting public comment. The court will allow use of the scanners to continue, however.

A unanimous three-judge panel ruled that the TSA’s failure to provide notice and allow sufficient time for comment before adopting the technology as a primary passenger-screening tool was unlawful.
“[M]uch public concern and media coverage have been focused upon issues of privacy, safety, and efficacy, each of which no doubt would have been the subject of many comments had the TSA seen fit to solicit comments upon a proposal to use [advanced imaging technology] for primary screening,” the court said.

Specifically, the TSA’s actions violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires federal agencies to provide notice and opportunity for comment when implementing a rule that affects the rights of the public.

Judge Douglas Ginsburg found there was “no justification for having failed to conduct a notice-and-comment rulemaking,” and said, “few if any regulatory procedures impose directly and significantly upon so many members of the public.”


The court said that the roll out of body scanners could not be “merely interpretive, procedural, or a general statement of policy.”

The TSA, currently operating close to 500 scanners in 78 airports and planning to add 500 more scanners by the end of 2011, must now receive comment on it’s continued deployment of the technology and respond accordingly by law, finally giving critics an official voice on the issue.
The case was brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which argued in its brief that body scanners are “invasive, unlawful, and ineffective,” and that the TSA’s deployment of the devices violated the U.S. Constitution and several other federal statutes.

The rights group is pursuing a case to completely suspend use of the scanners in airports.
EPIC president Marc Rotenberg described the court’s ruling as a “very good decision with far-reaching implications.”

Rotenberg said in a statement that the TSA “is now subject to the same rules as other government agencies that help ensure transparency and accountability. Many Americans object to the airport body scanner program. Now they will have an opportunity to express their views to the TSA and the agency must take their views into account as a matter of law.”


EPIC also argued that the scanners violate the Fourth Amendment by allowing for unreasonable searches, noting that a scan “is more invasive than is necessary to detect weapons or explosives”.

The court stopped short of ruling the scanners unconstitutional, however, noting “we are not persuaded by any of the statutory or constitutional arguments against the rule.”

The panel concluded that use of the scanners by the TSA should continue.

“Due to the obvious need for the TSA to continue its airport security operations without interruption, we remand the rule to the TSA but do not vacate it,” the court said in its ruling.