[e-privacy] [EFF] Per l'esercito USA il Privacy Act non si applica

[Andrea Glorioso]

Ciao a tutti.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001837.php

  Army Okays Computer Spying
  August 24, 2004

  JetBlue ignited a huge privacy scandal when  the news broke that the
  airline secretly  provided more than 5  million passenger records to
  Torch Concepts,  a  military contractor.   Yet the  Army   Inspector
  General Agency  concluded  [PDF] that  JetBlue did not   violate the
  Privacy Act. The reason: Torch  never looked up individuals by name,
  but instead used a computer to dig through and analyze their private
  information.

  The Privacy   Act  specifically bars  the government   from creating
  secret databases   that track  people by   name  and social security
  number. But the Army contends that Torch  didn't create this kind of
  system.  Torch  employees didn't  search   for individuals; a  Torch
  computer  crunched data. "The evidence  indicated that Torch neither
  created nor maintained a system of records as defined by the Privacy
  Act of 1974,"  reads the report.  "There was no  evidence that Torch
  retrieved individual records from the  databases...by name or by any
  other  identifying particular   at any  time  in  the  course of the
  study."

  So  according to the Army  Inspector  General report, Big Brother is
  a-okay -- as long as  the government outsources the  dirty work to a
  computer.

Vedi anche:

  http://www.secondaryscreening.net/static/docs/foias/2004/%20ArmyIGTorchReport.pdf
  http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,64647,00.html

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Ciao,

--
Andrea Glorioso             sama at miu-ft.org         +39 333 820 5723
        .:: Media Innovation Unit - Firenze Tecnologia ::.
	      Conquering the world for fun and profit