** John Soat: IT Confidential Attorney General John Ashcroft last week appointed a chief privacy officer for the Justice Department and said that person will take a hard look at Carnivore, the FBI's electronic E-mail eavesdropping device. Ashcroft tapped associate deputy attorney general Dan Collins to serve as CPO for Justice, to "provide advice to senior department officials on privacy-related legal and policy issues," according to a statement. Collins will examine issues such as the privacy implications of law-enforcement technology, the Justice Department's obligation to protect the privacy of the information it acquires in its operations, its responsibility to protect personal privacy from unlawful invasion, and new legislation or regulations regarding privacy. Also, Collins will study DCS1000--the official name for Carnivore-and make recommendations about the need for modifications to the system. This guy's no slouch: He graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, got his law degree from Stanford, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia, and served as assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles prior to working at Justice. You think Carnivore's bad? Compare that with a study released last week by security service provider Vigilinx about the risks of doing business in Russia. According to what Vigilinx describes as a "threatscape" assessment of a three-year period, security risks in Russia have escalated since 1996, when then-president Boris Yeltsin ordered top state officials to close the technology gap with the West. According to Vigilinx CEO Bruce Murphy, the Russian government "advocates industrial espionage to close the technological gap with Western economies." The report says highly developed espionage and sabotage techniques are a Cold War legacy. The government controls almost all electronic paths in and out of Russia, the study says, and electronic monitoring is a fact of life. That means "the possibility that U.S. firms are already under active surveillance by Russian special services is very real."