Privacy

The furor over the Stupak amendment banning abortion in the House health bill was already highly charged. Now one conservative commentator has dared touch the third rail in the right-to-choose debate: optional knee surgery.

Republicans and Democrats have been sniping about the USA Patriot Act ever since Congress passed the law in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks to try to forestall another such disaster. But now, it’s the Democrats who are sniping among themselves about it.

After yesterday’s Star Tribune piece on Rep. Keith Ellison’s pilgrimage to Mecca late last year, the 5th District Democrat is firing back, asking the paper for a correction in a letter to the editor today. The Strib article by Kevin Diaz reported that the congressman’s trip was paid for by the Muslim American Society of [...]

A Democratic opposition-research firm has taken up the challenge of answering the 2010 U.S. Census questions that Rep. Michele Bachmann has vowed to leave blank: everything except the number of people living at her house. Third Coast Research tapped public sources to find most of the info, but the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire points [...]

Members of peace groups and labor unions expressed fear this morning over a proposed bill, sponsored by Rep. John Lesch (DFL-St. Paul), that would make it easier for law enforcement to secretly keep and and share information about citizens.

Federal law leads the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil liberties director to believe that neither the IT consultant who found Norm Coleman’s donor database online nor the Web site that leaked it did anything illegal. Fodder for the argument: a similar case in California where authorities decided not to pursue charges when controversial conversations by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s were downloaded by political opponents.

Norm Coleman’s campaign has said it has “a high degree of confidence” that late January’s exposure of an unprotected donor database didn’t result in the loss of sensitive data. This week’s news that Wikileaks.org had obtained the 4.3 gigabyte database casts doubt on that statement — and so does Bruce Schneier, the locally based and internationally renowned security expert who calls the claim “complete and utter bullshit.”

The campaign of former Sen. Norm Coleman has alerted donors that a database containing personal data, including credit card numbers, has been circulating on the Internet.

Minnesota has a number of consumer protection laws that govern the use of personal information, which has raised questions about whether the Coleman campaign has violated state law.

There’s a divide opening in how the media is covering the story of Norm Coleman’s vulnerable donor database: Some outlets blame shoddy security practices by the campaign, others blame “hackers.” The latter group — which includes Politico, MinnPost and right-wing blog Power Line, among others — echoes the campaign’s assertion that the exposure of donors’ [...]

Donors to Norm Coleman responded to news of a campaign data breach with “extreme anger,” worry about their credit card accounts, and suspicion of the Al Franken campaign. Here is a sample of what Coleman campaign contributors are saying.