By Adam Levin

When it comes to protecting our privacy, our data, and consumers from identity theft; government leaders, particularly those in our nation’s capital, have been as effective as the U.S. men’s soccer team at winning Olympic medals. We haven’t captured one since our bronze and silver twofer in 1904.

Similarly, for over a decade, American politicians have tended to treat identity theft, privacy and security as issues best handled by their successors. Whether it is the sophistication of the crime or fear of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers Association, their abysmal record shows up in the headlines nearly every week, as cyber criminals, hacktivists and identity thieves pull off caper after caper with no foul calls and, in some cases, active assistance from the refs.

Lately, however, a precious few politicians have at long last sprinted ahead and taken some shots on goal against the bad guys. As Teddy Roosevelt would say, they are in the arena. They’re competing. They are making some awesome plays.    These players have become deadly serious, organizing special units to focus on the crime and throwing perpetrators in prison for a long time.

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Scott Walker has earned a national reputation for his hack-and-slash approach to government spending. Working hand-in-glove with both Houses of the GOP-controlled Legislature, the Wisconsin governor gutted the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions.

While tight with the purse strings when it comes to public employees and a self-proclaimed advocate for small business (though very well-funded by big business), apparently the Walker administration does support full employment for at least one group of workers that clearly doesn’t rely upon collective bargaining: identity thieves.
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Sometimes people are dumb. There’s really no way to sugar coat this, and I say this with all humility, as I have done more than my fair share of dumb things. But when I read last week that a Twitter account had been created whose sole purpose was to re-tweet pictures people had taken of their own credit and debit cards, as a cautionary tale, what else could I say? What these people did was incredibly stupid, but also very telling.

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Over the past few months there’s been a growing hue and cry over reports that some employers ask job applicants for their Facebook login and password information as part of the vetting process. They are hardly alone, though it’s not easy to know just who’s doing it and who’s not. But this is not new–some state and local government agencies, particularly law enforcement agencies, have been doing it for years.

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For those of us who care about privacy, these past seven days have truly sucked.

With relatively little fanfare in the midst of a cacophonous (that means “noisy” Senator Santorum) parade of news, three significant events seriously undermined our constitutional right to privacy and highlighted (in a muted sort of way) the extent to which new business practices and perhaps the second oldest human inclination (criminality) have continued the relentless assault on our individual rights and liberties. The worst part is that it seems we’re all becoming accustomed to it. Indeed, these affronts to our privacy seem to be becoming part of the country’s genetic makeup… perhaps even as American as apple pie.

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If you’re a Visa or MasterCard cardholder, your personal information may be in jeopardy.

The company that processes credit and debit cards for banks and merchants—including Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc.—suffered a breach in security, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

Roughly 1.5 million cardholders may be at risk. Visa and MasterCard are warning their customers. The extent of the security breach and any data loss is not yet known.

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The Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Sentinel report lists the top consumer complaints received by the agency in 2011. For the 12th year in a row, identity theft complaints remained the number one gripe for consumers.
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The Obama administration unveiled a “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights” at a White House event Thursday morning, making the case that values such as transparency, security and accuracy should guide companies as they collect and use data about consumers.

The announcement is one more step in a years-long effort by the administration to create a simple and clear way for consumers to decide whether and how they want their online activities to be tracked. The effort includes major industry players like Google and Facebook, consumer advocates and technology researchers, who are trying to build a framework of rules and regulation that would protect consumers’ privacy without squelching the growth of new technologies.

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by Adam Levin

Last week was a pretty good one for the notion of privacy in America, which has increasingly become forlorn and tattered as a result of the advancement of digital technology. First, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Jones that warrantless GPS tracking of a criminal suspect by the FBI was unconstitutional, and then later in the week Google announced its new privacy policy, a model of simplicity and fairness with one sizeable flaw. Oddly, this particular decision by the court sheds some important light on the particular problem within Google’s otherwise admirable new privacy policy.

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The Stop Online Piracy Act, and its sister legislation in the Senate, the Protect Intellectual Property Act caused quite a stir in Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Washington. The two bills were intended to put a hard stop on theft of intellectual property on the Internet, by means that are controversial in terms of the First Amendment. Big players from the overlapping worlds of movies and music pushed for this bill. So did their high priced lobbyists. But SOPA and PIPA were ultimately shelved last week, and not just because there were formidable forces lined up against it. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL and Twitter are just a few of the tech companies that opposed the bills, and they can certainly afford some pretty high priced lobbyists, too.

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