American Civil Liberties Union

Just this week, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley signed into law the first bill in the nation prohibiting employers from requiring or requesting employees or job applicants to disclose their user names or passwords or any other means of accessing personal internet sites as a condition of employment.

It all started last year when Robert Collins came to the ACLU of Maryland still angry about the invasion of his privacy that he had to endure to get a job.   He had been forced to give his Facebook password to his past employer, the Maryland Department of Corrections, when he reapplied for his job after a leave of absence to deal with a the loss of a family member. While being interviewed, he was forced to turn over the password to his personal social media account and sat mortified as his interviewer logged onto his account and told him that he was looking through all his personal messages, wall postings, and family photos.   ACLU-MD took the case up and tried to resolve the issue with the Department but was not satisfied with the response. Fortunately for Maryland job seekers and employees, they will no longer have to make the difficult decision to choose between their privacy and a job. . 

On Friday the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) formally proposed regulations requiring the placement of “black boxes” in cars. More properly known as “Event Data Recorders,” or EDRs, these are similar to the devices of the same name placed in aircraft, which record data about the vehicle’s operating characteristics in the seconds before a crash.

I recently wrote about how difficult it is to know which technologies on the horizon will turn into genuine privacy nightmares and which remain menacing but distant threats. One group of technologies that we’ve had our eyes on for a while are those that purport to read minds. On Sunday the Washington Post ran an article on a Maryland case where a murder defendant is trying to introduce fMRI “lie detector” evidence in his defense. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) allows researchers to look at neural activity in real-time by using powerful magnets to trace blood-flow changes in the brain.

Washington is in the midst of debating something called “cybersecurity.” But that term actually includes several very separate and distinct problems that call for very different solutions. Not only does conflating them confuse the issue — it also has very distinct political consequences. So let’s unpack the separate meanings of the term.

1. Criminal and malicious online behavior
As every computer owner knows, internet security is a very real problem for individual households and businesses. The open architecture of computers and the internet has led to an explosion of innovation, collaboration, and creativity — but the very openness that has fuelled so much innovation has also made us vulnerable to viruses, spyware, and other forms of malware. These problems are endemic among home computers and among a surprising number of professionally managed institutional machines as well. Much of this is due to the failure to perform basic computer security.