March 11, 2005 | While You Wait

While you are taking your shoes off and throwing away any butane lighters you might have on you as you wait in a TSA line, take a moment to check out the following:

• Adam Shostack of Emergent Chaos has been all over the ChoicePoint story. Check his aggregated post out now and after you land.
• DrunkenBlog has a detailed rundown on the CherryOS controversy. For those who don't know what that even means, check out my story about the alleged wholesale theft of open-source code in yesterday's Wired News.
• Kim Zetter over at Wired News has a great story about the price of a background check society for those unfortunate enough to have an inaccurate ChoicePoint file.
• Jonathon Krim of the Washington Post takes another look at the make-up of the Department of Homeland Security's privacy board. It's far better than my Wired News story from a week or so ago.

  I like his piece for a number of reasons, but best of all for bringing up why many in the privacy community stayed away: the Non-Disclosure Agreement and the background check. Few people know how to sign an NDA, and then remain able to actively remain part of public debate, without violating that NDA.

  Folks at the Center for Democracy and Technology know how, but somehow no one from this group ended up on the board, despite the fact that its executive director, Jerry Berman, who is eminently qualified for the job, applied but was not appointed.

  The raft of other stories and the fury on the blogs (Declan for News.com and Leslie Miller in the Associated Press and the kids over at Slashdot) criticizing the panel's make-up almost certainly means the group is on notice that their reports, especially the first one, will be looked on with a cynical eye. It behooves the panel to prove their critics wrong.

UPDATED: I forgot to finish a sentence in the middle of this entry. I also added that Jerry Berman applied for the job.

Posted by Ryan Singel at March 11, 2005 02:54 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.secondaryscreening.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/130