Privacy Concerns

PUBLISHED BY THE IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY 1540-7993/03/$17.00 © 2003 IEEE IEEE SECURITY & PRIVACY 11 T his past year, the privacy of United States citizens and others has been under discussion—and attack—in the name of everything from antiterrorism and anticontent to software piracy. At the Privacy 2002 Conference last September in Cleveland, most of the content revolved around national security versus privacy and civil liberties, and privacy and security business implementations by financial, government, medical, and general business institutions, according to conference manager Sol Bermann, who also manages operations for the Technology Policy Group at the Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business. “The privacy fights will unfold on two fronts,” says Jon Zittrain, assistant professor at Harvard Law and faculty director of its Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “An offensive one, seeking laws that affirmatively establish privacy rights of various kinds and remedies for their breach, and a defensive one, seeking to make law-enforcement and surveillance powers sensitive to privacy concerns.”