privacy

The real reason behind data-localization requirements.

Greetings from the Midwestern Bureau of TWS. We’re dark this week, as regular readers know, but we’re not taking the week off! The website must go on. A number of Standard writers and editors are back in their non-swamp ancestral homes for the Fourth. I’m in Saint Louis, where I went to college…

On May 15, Facebook released its first-ever “Community Standards Enforcement Report.” Despite its numbingly bureaucratic title, the report contains startling details about the scope of the challenge facing the company as it tries to monitor violent, extremist, and false content on its platform;…

Last week, law enforcement officers in California arrested former cop Joseph James DeAngelo and charged him with committing a series of rapes and murders in California in the 1970s and 1980s known as the work of the “Golden State Killer.” The case has generated enormous attention beyond the…

Facebook’s unofficial approach to violating the privacy of its users has always been “ask for forgiveness, not permission.” This week’s testimony by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg before a joint Judiciary and Commerce Committee in the Senate on Tuesday and the House Energy and Commerce Committee on…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, managing editor Christine Rosen discusses Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress.

The Facebook founder faced five hours of questioning by senators; on Wednesday he's back to face the House.

Silicon Valley has long been the Wild West of capitalism, but we may finally be reaching a point where Congress feels both entitled and justified in starting to regulate monopolistic tech giants. Exhibit A: The announcement Wednesday that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be testifying before…

The other day on the Daily Standard Podcast, we mused about whether we could recognize an historic turning point at the time it was happening. Usually, we have to wait for historical perspective to distinguish world-changing moments from the usual alarms and blips of the news cycle.

Lawmakers in the House of Representatives are expected to vote Thursday on whether to renew a controversial surveillance power that Trump officials say is vital for protecting against terrorism and other national security threats.

Unmasking. Leaks. Wiretaps. The mounting surveillance scandals of 2017 are suddenly threatening one of the most effective intelligence-gathering programs in U.S. history.

Unmasking. Leaks. Wiretaps. The mounting surveillance scandals of 2017 are suddenly threatening one of the most effective intelligence-gathering programs in U.S. history.

On February 27 the Supreme Court turned down an appeal in a case from Colorado that would have decided whether nonprofit organizations that run issue advertisements during election campaigns can be compelled to disclose the names and addresses of their donors. This was one of several cases making…

On February 27 the Supreme Court turned down an appeal in a case from Colorado that would have decided whether nonprofit organizations that run issue advertisements during election campaigns can be compelled to disclose the names and addresses of their donors. This was one of several cases making…

Back in the 2004, a brash state senator from Illinois lit a fire at the Democratic National Convention with his soaring rhetoric. One of Barack Obama's goals was to deliver a message of unity during a divisive campaign season, a message that Americans were more alike than they're dissimilar:

The Internet has transformed the world so much over the last 20 years that the only constant is news articles that open by declaring how much the Internet has transformed the world.

Even before the launch of Obamacare, one of the few things that was clear about the program was that the Bush-appointed HHS inspector general, Daniel Levinson, placed self-preservation above his statutory duty to bring public attention to Obamacare’s waste, fraud and abuse. It is a point I have…

Iowans had their cellphones and cameras confiscated before getting to meet the Democratic presidential frontrunner, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is looking for vendors to run its "National Data Warehouse," a database for "capturing, aggregating, and analyzing information" related to beneficiary and customer experiences with Medicare and the federal Obamacare marketplaces. Although the…

A new study from the Cato Institute asks the question many travelers have pondered after a pat-down gone awry: Can’t we replace the TSA? The agency’s embarrassing record of waste and mismanagement makes a compelling case.

Americans are methodically dealing with the Kübler-Ross stages of Obama-care grief, with our national healing process moving briskly through roughly one stage per week: (1) denial upon realizing that the website HealthCare.gov didn’t work; (2) anger at the realization that the technical back-end of…

When Kathleen Sebelius testified at a congressional hearing on Wednesday, she acknowledged the presence of a worrisome statement included in the source code of Healthcare.gov and promised that work was already underway to remove it.  A search of one portion of the code later on Wednesday revealed…

On October 8, THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported that the privacy policy of the Maryland Health Connection (MHC), the state's Obamacare insurance marketplace, included a statement that the marketplace "may share information provided in your application with the appropriate authorities for law enforcement…

The launch of federal government's Obamacare insurance exchange, Healthcare.gov, has been plagued with delays, errors, and poor website design, even prompting USA Today to call it an "inexcusable mess" and a "nightmare".  Now comes another example of why the website's reputation is in tatters.…

Maryland's Health Connection, the state's Obamacare marketplace, has been plagued by delays in the first days of open enrollment.  If users are able to endure long page-loading delays, they are presented with the website's privacy policy, a ubiquitous fine-print feature on websites that often go…

With Obamacare’s massive Patient Data Hub poised to open soon, a sloppy mistake by an Obamacare employee hasn’t exactly inspired confidence that Americans’ private information will be closely guarded by Obamacare’s powers-that-be.  As the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports (and Andrew Johnson…

As the October 1 implementation of parts of Obamacare nears, House Republicans continue to pass legislation aimed at highlighting the health care law's flaws and weaknesses. On Thursday, the House passed a bill to reform an Obamacare verification process that would better stop fraudulent claims to…

As questions remain about the security of the Federal Services Data Hub to be used in conjunction with the Obamacare marketplaces beginning October 1, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has agreed to a settlement with the not-for-profit Affinity Health Plans, Inc., for the company's…

In my recent WEEKLY STANDARD essay, “Privacy Be Damned,” I warned about the operational problems and privacy issues raised by the “health exchanges” that HHS will force tens of millions of Americans to use as of October 1 of this year. In that essay, I noted that “the HHS inspector general and the…

Reuters reports that the federal government is "months behind" its efforts to set up data security measures for the state health insurance exchanges, set to open on October 1, as created by Obamacare:

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper defends the recently revealed metadata mining government intelligence programs:

Throughout Privacy, Garret Keizer’s extended essay on the topic in an increasingly public world, the author confuses and conflates voluntary sharing with forced governmental action. “Does anything say so much about the times we live in as the fact that the word sharing has almost everything to do…

The Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) has succesfully acquired thousands of pages of documents from the Federal Aviation Administration on the use of drones in America. The documents include "extensive details about the specific drone models some entities are flying, where they fly, how frequently…

The Wall Street Journal reports that online music provider Pandora has been subpoenaed in a grand jury investigation of information sharing linked to its smartphone application. This is apparently part of a much larger investigation into the abuse of app capabilities, in which companies are using…