Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 09:39:37 -0400
Subject: You won't believe this!
I saw this on another list: Can you believe this? And they should be worried
about spending $200 on a toilet seat! Or maybe how some idiots get to
Congress? Sheila Anderson-Lewis
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I can't resist this,
How can the maiden name of my greatgreatgrandmother born in the 1790's be a
security threat in the year 2000? Marilyn CT
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Dear Friends:
I thought that maybe it was not possible for a member of Congress to
further amaze
me with his stupidity, but this has managed to make me rethink
that possibility. > > Allan E. Green
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New Privacy Threat: Genealogy?
by Declan McCullagh
3:00 p.m. May. 18, 2000 PDT
Just when you thought there was nothing new to say about the
oft-cited
privacy threats that Americans face, along comes Congress with another
worry:
genealogy.
During a privacy hearing Thursday before a House Judiciary
subcommittee, Rep. Ed Pease (R-Ind.) said the growing number of websites that
allow people to trace their families' history was a threat that called for
legislative action.
"There are some commercial ventures now providing information on
this subject ... oftentimes genealogical information involves a mother's
maiden name, and that is often used by many as a password," Pease said.
Genealogy.com, for instance, says it has 470 million names in its
database. It allows you to search someone's family tree using their full or
partial name.
Clinton administration representatives -- who were planning to
testify before the panel about cookies and industry self-regulation -- were
caught completely off-guard by Pease's comments.
"This is not really anything I've heard about yet,"
replied Andrew
Pincus, general counsel to the U.S. Department of Commerce.>
"We're dealing mainly with commercial sites, and not
these," said
Jodie Bernstein, director of the bureau of consumer protection at
the Federal
Trade Commission.
Pease shot back that "a growing number of commercial
ventures"
provided such potentially troubling information and he'd
"sure appreciate" it
if the FTC would investigate.
To survive a free speech challenge, any legal restrictions Congress
imposes would have to comply with the First Amendment, which limits
government controls on publications and websites.
"Rep. Pease has gotten it all backwards. The inherent insecurity
of
using mother's maiden name as a password means that the practice of doing so
must stop, just as most of us know better than to use our birthdays or first
names as any form of password," said Stanton McCandlish, an amateur genealogy
researcher and spokesman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"Genealogists are neither a new threat, nor any threat at all.
Mothers'
maiden names are available from numerous public sources, while the
security risk of using them for passwords is increasingly well known. (Such a
bill) will not withstand even a cursory First Amendment challenge in court,"
McCandlish said.