Here’s how the research breaks down. The joint paper found that teenagers are sharing more and more personal information online: 91 percent of teenagers post at least one photo of themselves (up from 79 percent in 2006), while 71 percent post their school name (up from 49 percent), 53 percent post their email address (up from 29 percent), and 20 percent post their cell phone number (up from two percent). At the same time, teenagers are more and more cautious as to who sees this information: about 60 percent of teen Facebook users set their profiles to private (friends only), and most report high levels of confidence in their ability to manage their settings, with 56 percent of users noting that it’s “not difficult at all” to set privacy controls (while only eight percent say it’s “somewhat difficult”).

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But that's exactly the argument that was made this week by attorneys in Virginia federal appeals court, where judges are set to revisit the issue of whether or not a Facebook like qualifies as protected speech.

The three-judge panel heard oral arguments and is poised to deliver a ruling on the case of six former employees of the Hampton, Va., sheriff's department who say they were fired for liking their boss's political rival on Facebook during a 2009 campaign. Along with attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union and Facebook itself, the fired employees' lawyers are attempting to reverse a lower court ruling that argued Facebook likes are not substantive enough to be protected by the First Amendment.

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 You'll know when someone with Glass is paying attention to you. If you're looking at Glass, you're looking up... If I'm recording you, I have to stare at you — as a human being. And when someone is staring at you, you have to notice. If you walk into a restroom and someone's just looking at you — I don't know about you but I'm getting the hell out of there.

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Surpassing the challenges of a national LPR database via NVLS, our future roadmap plans an extensive integration between LPR data and public records, a facial recognition platform, and ‘leaps and bounds’ expansion of LEARN which seamlessly ties together all data sources. We are on schedule to provide the most advanced Law Enforcement criminal database loaded with billions of records -- a universal data system with one common goal in mind -- making it easier for Law Enforcement to ‘Catch the Bad Guy’.

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The AP spying scandal must be contextualized (as Kevin Gosztola pointed out): This administration is waging a war on whistle-blowers and First Amendment protections. A creeping surveillance state is being codified, under which the Fourth Amendment is also desecrated and journalists hardly stand alone as objects of surveillance.

As NSA whistle-blower Thomas Drake -- one of a record six individuals to be indicted under the Espionage Act during Obama's presidency -- told me recently, this government's approach to security resembles a "hoarding complex." His point was borne out by comments from CIA’s chief technical officer, Gus Hunt, who recently explained the spy agency’s strategy for a broad surveillance dragnet in a New York speech:

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Bloomberg has responded that the messages were willingly made available to them by clients, but their availability online to the broader public certainly "threatens to unnerve clients," as the FT noted.

The FT reported:

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Via BusinessWeek:

On Tuesday, the company announced that using special forensics software they can now effectively retrieve long-vanished Snapchats from a phone. “This type of information can be very valuable in any investigation, especially one involving exploitation of a minor,” said Richard Hickman, a lead examiner at Decipher Forensics. “This research will help law enforcement officials retrieve what has been believed to be unrecoverable.”

... Right now the service is limited to smartphones running Android software. But, reached by phone on Thursday morning, Hickman says the company is busy working to extend the Snapchat-recovery service to iPhones.

How much does it cost to recover Snapchat photos? Decipher Forensics charges $300 to $500 per phone, says Hickman.

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Facebook posts, Skype calls, Google chats, Apple's iMessage -- under the new plan, every form of Internet communication would have to be accessible to law enforcement wiretapping. Civil libertarians, Internet companies and privacy activists are all understandably unenthused. A blogger at FireDogLake immediately labeled the news proof that Obama intended to support the "end of the 4th Amendment on the Internet."

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Albert Gidari Jr., who represents technology companies on law enforcement matters, told the Times, "We’ll look a lot more like China than America after this." Gidari argued, according to the Times, "that if the United States started imposing fines on foreign Internet firms, it would encourage other countries, some of which may be looking for political dissidents, to penalize American companies if they refused to turn over users’ information."

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At this stage of the game we probably don't need any more reminders that the last thing online services want to see happen is for their users to gain any meaningful control about how their personal information is exploited. Or, for that matter, about how lobbying money routinely skews public policy against the public interest. The new money of Silicon Valley is just the same as the old money of Wall Street or the fossil fuel industry.

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There is currently no way to wiretap some of these communications methods easily, and companies effectively have been able to avoid complying with court orders. While the companies argue that they have no means to facilitate the wiretap, the government, in turn, has no desire to enter into what could be a drawn-out contempt proceeding.

Under the draft proposal, a court could levy a series of escalating fines, starting at tens of thousands of dollars, on firms that fail to comply with wiretap orders, according to persons who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. A company that does not comply with an order within a certain period would face an automatic judicial inquiry, which could lead to fines. After 90 days, fines that remain unpaid would double daily.

... The proposal, however, is likely to encounter resistance, said industry officials and privacy advocates.

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As CNET reported Wednesday, "Senior Obama administration officials have secretly authorized the interception of communications carried on portions of networks operated by AT&T and other Internet service providers, a practice that might otherwise be illegal under federal wiretapping laws." The Justice Department has been granting immunity to service providers through special "2511" letters that absolve carriers in the event that the surveillance is found to run afoul of federal law. As such, the DoJ is secretly enabling AT&T and others to evade wiretapping laws so that the government can conduct surveillance on parts of their networks.

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As noted here Tuesday, a huge amount of special interest funding ($84 million, to be precise) may have helped more than double the number of Democrat representatives willing to vote for CISPA from 42 to 92. However, the bill -- which would allow the private sector to acquire and search sensitive data relating to U.S. citizens -- is going nowhere particularly fast in the Senate. As the AP reported:

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CISPA is designed to create a structure in which private companies can seamlessly share information about their users with the government in cases involving threats to "cybersecurity." The House of Representatives passed the bill on Thursday, but the Obama administration has threatened to veto it in its current form.

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"The best thing would have been a dog," explains Joseph King, professor of terrorism and organized crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former chief of counterterrorism for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. "They don't need to be at a choke point; they can move through the crowd."

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CISPA is designed to make it easier for private companies to share information about "cybersecurity" issues -- hacker attacks, Chinese sabotage, etc. --  with government agencies. Under CISPA companies such as Facebook or Microsoft could freely hand over personal information -- emails, texts, news feed postings -- without having to worry about potential negative consequences, including litigation from outraged users. Naturally, CISPA enjoys wide support from by the tech lobby; IBM sent more than 200 executives to Washington this week to push for its passage. The bill also enjoys bipartisan backing. The House of Representatives is set to vote on the bill either Wednesday or Thursday.

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"We will go to ends of the earth to find those responsible for this despicable crime,'' said FBI special agent Richard Deslauriers at a press conference in Boston on Tuesday morning. But what he really meant was we will leave no digital stone unturned. Every one and zero will be interrogated.

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My guess is that even the original Big Brother, "1984's" all-seeing dictator of Oceania, justified his surveillance as in service of the greater good. So it's not all that reassuring to hear that CourseSmart's product is made to be used with the best of intentions, even if it's entirely understandable that professors might be eager for better data measuring how students are "engaging" with their textbooks. In the context of our current digital lives, in which everything we do is measured and recorded and sliced and diced, CourseSmart seems like just one more brick in the panopticonic wall. One also has to wonder, how do such strategies fit into the larger trends remaking education?

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The regulators announced plans to take legal action Tuesday. But the threat of fines will mean little to the Internet giant. As the Guardian noted, two threatened sets of fines (one up to $500,000, one up to $300,000) amount to the money generated by Google in sales every 10 minutes. Via the Guardian:

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