It'd be nice if they could post an actual picture of a backscatter scan instead of a full x-ray, but this is still pretty cool. I personally wouldn't buy one since I'd rather not be scanned at all than try to make a statement after the fact.

Tags: Backscatter X-ray, TSA

I am constantly telling people to lock down their privacy settings because if you keep this stuff visible, this kind of story becomes possible. Apparently there was a debt collector that spammed friends and family of a debtor in order to pressure her to pay.

Melanie Beacham says she fell behind on her car payment after getting sick and taking a medical leave from work. She contacted MarkOne Financial to explain the situation but says the harassing phone calls, as many as 20 per day, kept coming. Then one day she got a call from her sister saying the company contacted her in Georgia. "I was telling her, 'No way, because you're not even a reference,'" said Beacham, who later found out MarkOne contacted her sister and other relatives via Facebook.

Tags: Debt Collectors, Facebook

Check these out

Also a series of current articles and links about the issue here.

And finally a story of a pat down that’s been resurrected from 2002 by Penn of Penn and Teller.

Tags: Backscatter X-ray, Nudie Scanners, Physical Security, TSA

The TSA has constantly said that photos from the nudie scanners wouldn't be stored and therefore all us privacy nuts were just being paranoid.

However, when the government says "trust us" and doesn't provide either visibility or accountability, why are we wrong when we say "NO"?

Case in point: this story of nudie scanners where over 35000 photos were stored. Whoops.

To be fair, this wasn't the TSA, but US Marshalls in an Orlando courthouse, but the technology makes it possible. If the only thing that stops someone from recording a pic is a setting on the machine, I don't feel very safe.

(H/T to The Consumerist for the link) Tags: Backscatter X-ray, Nudie Scanners, Physical Security, TSA

There have been some high profile hacks of Sarah Palin and Grady Sizemore, but the issue here is less about Yahoo security and more about what you do with it.

Just make a Privacy Alias and use it for places that want your personal information, but don't really need it. Of course, if you use an encrypted file to store passwords, you don't have to make an alias at all. You can just store completely new made up challenge answers for each site.

Tags: Account Hijacking, Challenge Questions, Yahoo