You really got to love the new AG

[Neal Lang]

		** 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."