LISNews: Librarian News

mdoneil writes "Patricia Dunn the Chairman of HP who orchestrated the spying mission on Board members to uncover a leak of company information to the media is on her way out.
Dunn, who hired private dicks to obtain phone records of Directors ostensibly through pretexting — lying to the telcos — will be replaced by the non-executive president (whatever the heck that means) of HP in January.
So don't worry about your government spying on you, be wary of employers hiring professional liars to get your personal information by lying to the phone company, a practice that they seem to think is legal.
There is no fine line between legal, ethical, moral, and OK in my book. If it does not seem fair don't do it. Dunn is a fine example of corporate morality. She and Ken Lay should have hooked up before he died, they would make quite the couple."

The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and Campaign for Reader Privacy is sponsoring an event on September 28 in Washington DC to honor George Christian, executive director of Connecticut's Library Connection and three board members who fought an FBI subpoena of customer records. The librarians and press corps, some of whom had their phones tapped (such as Brian Ross of ABC) will be present.

On that same subject, the ACLU, who defended the four librarians, is offering all libraries FREE DVD copies of 'Freedom Files', which includes a report on the Library Connection incident. The ten episode series Freedom Files series also includes shows entitled: Women's Rights, Youth Speak, Religious Freedom, Voting Rights, and The Supreme Court, among others.

Anonymous Patron sent over A Washington Post article that reports The Pentagon pays a private company to compile data on teenagers it can recruit to the military. The Homeland Security Department buys consumer information to help screen people at borders and detect immigration fraud.

As federal agencies delve into the vast commercial market for consumer information, such as buying habits and financial records, they are tapping into data that would be difficult for the government to accumulate but that has become a booming business for private companies.

Google Inc. won a partial victory in a battle with the government when a federal judge ruled yesterday that the company didn't have to turn over customer search queries to the U.S. Justice Department.

U.S. District Judge James Ware in San Jose, California, refused to make Google, the most-used Internet search engine, give the agency 5,000 search queries as part of an effort to defend a law aimed at keeping children from accessing Internet pornography. Ware did rule Google had to comply with the U.S. demand for 50,000 Web addresses from its index of Web sites. New from Bloomberg.com and The New York Times.