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Technology: View from the top
The spam-master
Sunil Paul, CEO of Brightmail, explains what it takes to be a two-time winner in the Internet economy.
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[11/01/99]

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Speech recognition technology promises to transform how we interact with computers -- or turn us all into mindless gibbering automatons.
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[10/29/99]

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William Latham explains why players get to eat their enemies in his new game, Evolva.
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[10/28/99]

Cartoon for coders
"User Friendly" taps the open-source movement's collective funny bone.
By Janelle Brown
[10/27/99]

The information Laundromat
Whispernumber.com is beating the best minds of Wall Street -- but nobody really knows how.
By Mark Gimein
[10/26/99]

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On April 4, a Chicago Tribune article broke the story about the so-called "hidden camera" tapes -- and soon after, two lawyers quoted in the story, Louis Goldstein and Dennis Berkson, were flooded with calls by shocked students. In July, Goldstein and Berkson filed a civil case against the makers and distributors of the tapes on behalf of 28 of the young men.

"You can't get a more heinous violation without physically doing something to somebody," says Berkson. "Our clients have been surreptitiously videotaped while nude, in places and situations where you would think you would have absolute privacy."

"You work out with an athletic team and you don't really think about somebody having an undercover camera in your shower," says "John Doe," a plaintiff who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "People found out about it at our school, so they were pulling up the pages and taking a look. What the hell can we do?... We can't take the images away."

Berkson is confident that both the tape makers and the distributors will be found guilty -- Berkson filed the suit in Illinois, one of a few states with a law against secret videotaping.

"It goes without saying that we believe our clients were absolutely greatly harmed," Berkson states. "There is no legal basis for the distribution of these tapes. There is no question that our clients' likenesses were used without their knowledge or authorization."

But the real pretrial controversy -- the aspect of this case that has made it compelling to legal scholars, techies and media and privacy advocacy groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) -- revolves around the part that is not likely to hold up in court: the complaint against the Internet service providers (ISPs) for hosting Web sites with images and advertisements which "explicitly state and promote the fact that the subject videotapes were taken with hidden cameras."

ISPs enjoy wide legal protection against being held liable for content published on the Web sites that they host -- even content as outrageous as surreptitiously made videotapes of unwitting college students. But the nude athlete taping incident, while extreme, is hardly the only example of how personal privacy is being endangered by the Internet. As it turns out, there is very little privacy protection of any kind mandated by law with regard to the Internet. Maybe nude pictures of you aren't on the Web, but plenty of other information about you could well be, and right now, the government is doing precious little to protect you.

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