“It is absolutely disgusting what has taken place,” Cameron said, speaking in the House of Commons shortly before the debate opened. However, he said any inquiry into the News of the World would have to wait until the police investigation is concluded.

News International, the British linchpin of Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire, was under intense pressure following reports that its tabloid had hacked into the cell phone of missing 13-year-old Milly Dowler in 2002, deleting messages and giving her parents and police false hope that the girl was still alive.

Milly had been abducted and murdered, and the search for her transfixed Britain at the time.

Members of Parliament seized on the case to demand a full debate as pressure rose for the chief executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks, to resign, since she was a former editor of News of the World. Major advertisers — including Ford UK and leading mortgage lender Halifax — pulled their ads from the paper.

U.K. tabloids have a history of harassing royals, sports stars and celebrities, eavesdropping and paying even the most tangential sources for information about stars’ sex lives and drug problems. But the Dowler allegations amounted to interfering in a police investigation to seek tabloid headlines.

The scandal widened further Wednesday with new allegations that Glenn Mulcaire, a private detective employed by News of the World, had obtained telephone numbers of relatives of some of the 52 people killed in the 2005 terrorist attack on London’s transit system. It was unclear whether any of those phone had been hacked.

British media also reported that the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, schoolgirls murdered in a sensational 2002 case, had been informed by police that they were investigating whether the News of the World also hacked their telephones.

Mulcaire and former News of the World reporter Clive Goodman have already served prison sentences for hacking into the phones of royal officials. Mulcaire issued an apology Tuesday to anyone who had been hurt by his actions, but said there was no intention of interfering with a police investigation.

“Working for the News of the World was never easy. There was relentless pressure. There was a constant demand for results,” Mulcaire said.

Graham Foulkes, the father of one of the 2005 terror victims, said police told him he was on a list of names of potential hacking victims.

“I just felt really upset and sad and sickened that some people would go to those extremes given the distress of 52 families at that time,” Foulkes said, but added that police said they had also warned only a few other families.

Foulkes said he wants to meet Murdoch in person about the scandal. Simon Greenberg, News International’s director of corporate affairs, told the BBC that a meeting was “something we would consider.”

The intense attention on the News of the World comes at a sensitive moment for Murdoch, who is seeking British government clearance to launch a full, multibillion-pound takeover of British Sky Broadcasting.

Britain’s Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has insisted he will decide the issue purely on competition grounds, without regard to the behavior of the News of the World. But some members of Parliament are linking the two issues and demanding that Hunt block a takeover.

Cameron on Wednesday again rejected calls to refer — and thus delay — any BSkyB takeover by referring the issue to the Competition Commission. Cameron and his wife are friends with Brooks, the News International chief.

The rapidly expanding phone hacking case is also an embarrassment for London’s Metropolitan Police, who essentially accepted the paper’s claim that Mulcaire and Goodman were simply a couple of rogue employees who did not reflect company policy.

If a high-schooler uses an off-campus computer to create offensive material that relates to his or her school life — writing nasty messages about school administrators or fellow students, for instance — is his or her speech still protected?

On Monday, the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that two students — each of whom had created an unflattering mock MySpace profile for a school official — had been unfairly disciplined by their respective school districts. In both cases, whatever disruption the students’ actions had caused was simply not profound enough to merit school involvement, the court decided. It was a victory for these students, and all others whose online speech is objectionable but not “substantially” disruptive. (For some, of course, the ruling is not so rosy: As Wired notes, the rights of those students who do seriously disrupt school life can still be restricted by administrators).

Expressing the unanimous opinion of the court in Layschock v. Hermitage School District, Chief Judge Theodore A. McKee wrote:

It would be an unseemly and dangerous precedent to allow the state, in the guise of school authorities, to reach into a child’s home and control his/her actions there to the same extent that it can control that child when he/she participates in school-sponsored activities.

Of a dissenting voice in the second case, J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District, Education Week’s Mark Walsh adds:

[Judge Michael D.] Fisher, … noted the ever-growing impact of social-networking sites and mobile communications devices. He questioned whether the “schoolhouse gate” noted in the U.S. Supreme Court’s seminal student speech case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, was defined as a physical barrier anymore.

“The majority embraces a notion that student hostile and offensive online speech directed at school officials will not reach the school,” Judge Fisher said. “But with near-constant student access to social networking sites on and off campus, when offensive and malicious speech is directed at school officials and disseminated online to the student body, it is reasonable to anticipate an impact on the classroom environment.”

Of course, neither of these rulings represents the final word on the issue of student speech; there is still plenty of room for debate, and there will doubtless be further cases. The ruling opinion in Layschock states outright that the “precise parameters” of school authority have yet to be defined:

We need not now define the precise parameters of when the arm of authority can reach beyond the schoolhouse gate because, as we noted earlier, the district court found that Justin’s conduct did not disrupt the school, and the District does not appeal that finding.

You can read the court’s two opinions here and here.

Camera coverage of London is so comprehensive that, in this particular man’s case, we can follow him from a truly cinematic variety of angles — and a full minute and a half — as he wanders further and further from the fancy Savoy Hotel, where he had been attending an awards event.

Just how closely are Brits watched? We’re often told that camera security in the U.K. is intense. A Daily Mail article from 2007 put the number of CCTV cameras in use across the kingdom at 4.2 million — “one for every 14 people and a fifth of the cameras in the entire world” — adding that this meant the U.K. was first globally in terms of the camera-to-person ratio. (“The average Londoner may be monitored by up to 300 [cameras] every day,” the Mail added at the time.) These same figures, gathered by academics a decade ago based on a study of two south London shopping streets, have been cited by the BBC and numerous other news organizations for years. However, “the only large-scale audit of surveillance cameras ever conducted” — described by the Guardian earlier this year — has recently called these numbers into question, claiming there are only about 1.85 million surveillance cameras in the country (one for every 32 residents). According to the Guardian, “the vast majority” of these cameras “are run by private companies.” It has long been said that there are hundreds of thousands of cameras in London alone.

In a useful 2008 explainer, the Independent noted that, although several high-profile cases (such as the murder of James Bulger) have been closed with the help of video footage, ultimately, “fewer than one crime in 30 is solved through CCTV.” And it doesn’t even appear to be much of a deterrent; the Independent goes on to explain:

One company that sells CCTV equipment makes the startling claim that “crime is dramatically reduced by up to 95 per cent where CCTV is installed.” If that were true, the U.K. would be most crime-free country in the world. The cameras are better at preventing low-level opportunist crime like break-ins, but are little deterrent to street violence, and they work better in semi-open spaces like car parks than in streets. Dover council introduced CCTV in 1993. After 12 years, they found that burglary in the areas covered had halved, car crime was down 87 per cent, but public disorder and crimes of violence had almost trebled.

Watch the sun’s viral video — and some other CCTV hits — here:

According to I.T. news site the Register, Facebook responded to Sophos’ warning, admitting:

We should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them. Tag Suggestions are now available in most countries and we’ll post further updates to our blog over time.

Around 100 million photos are tagged on Facebook every day and the more often you are tagged the better the facial recognition technology learns your face. And although privacy settings can be altered to opt out of the Tag Suggestion tool, according to Business Insider, Facebook will still learn your face anyway (it just won’t suggest it to your friends for tagging).

The notion that we may have unwittingly been contributing to a vast database learning to recognize our faces with more and more accuracy feels creepy, but it is worth considering what dangers are actually implied.

Just last week, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed that a facial recognition tool was the one piece of technology Google developed but then stopped short of implementing because it was considered too dangerous. Of course, Street View and Google Goggles (a picture recognition tool) capture faces; the difference is that Google chose not to implement facial recognition as a tool, which algorithmically learns to know your face better and better.

Schmidt specifically imagined the possibility of an “evil dictator” or terrorist group abusing the technology, as the Huffington Post reported.

It seems unnecessary to posit an evil dictator, however, when it is amply worrying to think about how a current government could misuse an enriched facial recognition database. Government agencies have used forms of facial recognition technology for a number of years (notably several airports installed systems after the 9/11 attacks). The government does not, however, have access to hundreds of photos of you, as Facebook might. As such, a Facebook tool could be more precise than a current government system.

Heidi Boghosian, the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, a bar association that works on civil rights and activism issues, told Salon:

Corporations have a history of sharing personal information with the government, especially when the administration says the information is vital to advancing national security interests. Facial recognition tracking is yet another tool in the government’s arsenal of data-gathering and data-banking mechanisms that threaten our civil liberties. As with any data collection technology, there is a great margin of error, enormous possibility for government abuse, and little recourse for the countless number of individuals who unwittingly find their privacy invaded.

As it stands, the Facebook Tag Suggestion tool is supposed to function simply as a convenience between friends online. However, the potential for abuses are far too rife for the social network to have implemented this tool as a default setting.

The European Union’s data-protection regulators are already probing Facebook Inc. over its use of facial recognition, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. One such EU watchdog commented that “tags of people on pictures should only happen based on people’s prior consent and it can’t be activated by default.”

For Facebook users who want to now opt out of Tag Suggestion, follow the instructions listed on Sophos’ warning. This won’t, however, remove the information Facebook already has associating your name with your face — that ship may have sailed without your consent.

UPDATE: Politico reported Wednesday afternoon that Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass), who has long concerned himself with Facebook’s privacy standards, released a statement just hours after EU regulators announced their probe. Markey said:

Requiring users to disable this feature after they’ve already been included by Facebook is no substitute for an opt-in process… If this new feature is as useful as Facebook claims, it should be able to stand on its own, without an automatic sign up that changes users’ privacy settings without their permission.

Enter social media. Now, I can easily find anyone from that hometown on Facebook and see all that they are up to. And if I used my real name on Facebook, they could find me too. Silly as this sounds, this chills me to the bone. Looking at Facebook is, for me, like going to a high school reunion every day. (And no, I have not gone to any real reunions.)

I don’t want to be found. I don’t want to reconnect.

I have a new job that is about to force me to change my social media presence to my real name, and my No. 1 concern is that these people from my old hometown will find me and laugh at me.

I mean, there’s a chance I’m missing out on some powerful healing by reconnecting with people. Right? And surely, I don’t want to tell my new boss my rather ridiculous reasons for not wanting to go public with my real name? How can I take a deep breath and just get on it with when I feel so frozen in this area?

Thank you so much,

KJ

Dear KJ,

Why does your company want you to do this? What is the business purpose? Is it to raise your public profile? Is it to show the public what outstanding employees work for the company?

Find out. Then, if you object, you are in a position to propose alternatives.

Your own discomfort is important to me and to you, but it is not a compelling argument to the leaders of your company. If you were a salesperson, you might be asked to return to your hometown to contact some people you’d rather not see. An honest and committed employee would do that if it served a clear business purpose.

So what is the business purpose of this Facebook page?

You don’t have to do everything your company says. In matters of conscience, it is a healthy thing for employees to voice concerns.

But if you object, come up with an improved alternative.

This argument is weak: You shouldn’t have to do it because it makes you uncomfortable. This argument is strong: Here is a better way to meet the same business objective and, incidentally, it will be more popular with employees.

Encounters with your past can bring up feelings of helplessness. So remember: You are not helpless before these people from your past. You are your own person. You don’t need their permission or their approval. If you must interact with them, keep it professional.

In fact, come to think of it, that may be one advantage of having your Facebook page serve a professional purpose: You don’t need to play the role of that young student on it. You can play the role of the adult you are today. That’s probably what the leaders of your company would prefer anyway.

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