__Top Five Technology and Civil Liberties Sunshine Requests __Carnivore Documents: In the 1990s, the FBI developed software, dubbed Carnivore, that was installed at internet service providers to track what targeted individuals did online. Though the FBI claimed Carnivore was not an untargeted dragnet, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, pried documents loose from the FBI showing the software was capable of capturing all traffic across a server, and that the software was not as accurate in practice as the FBI claimed. Little is known about successors to Carnivore, but ISPs have been configuring their networks to make them surveillance-friendly.
Airline Data Dumps and No-Fly Lists: EPIC filed a file cabinet full of sunshine requests to learn more about terrorist watch lists and post-9/11 airline data dumps to the government. Highlights included proof that Northwest Airlines turned over data to the government despite public statements to the contrary. Also revealed were no-fly-list mismatches, including a long-running screwup that snagged one of the nation's most high-profile nuns, who was only cleared for flying after her boss called presidential adviser Karl Rove.
Yesterday, while you were getting to the bottom of an American pale ale and shooting bottle rockets at your neighbors, the Freedom of Information Act turned 40 (or 41,depending on what kind of math you subscribe to). To celebrate this landmark law, which presumes that government documents should be open to the people unless a bureaucrat can prove otherwise, Wired News ran this piece of mine about the top 5 tech and civil liberties sunshine requests and the top 5 that are still outstanding.
